Unpreached: Proper 6 (Third Sunday After Pentecost)
Tuesday, 15 June 2010 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cjbanningI'm without a computer right now, so I'm not really upset about these not getting written; it's just the way things are. But for some reason this Sunday's took a hold of me, so here it is. As Elizabeth would say, written as if preached on the day (June 13).
Proper 6
Proper 6
1 Kings 21:1-21a
Psalm 5:1-8
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3
The Church is a community of plurality, billions of people--many races, many genders, many sexualities, many nations, many ideologies and political viewpoints, many denominations and theologies--who are united, through the sacrament of their baptism, into a single Body, the mystical Body of Christ, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The God we worship is a God of plurality, three in One, three Persons in one Being: Adonai, Messiah, and Chokmah. Jesus is a man of plurality, fully God and fully human. The paschal meal which we share today is a meal of plurality: to all outward appearances mere bread and mere wine, but in its most fundamental being it contains the Real Presence of Christ Jesus.
It is appropriate, then, and perhaps shouldn't be too surprising, that our Scripture is a book of plurality: many books, written by many authors from many different times and historical contexts, testifying to many different understandings and experiences of the divine, uniting into one canon, the book, la biblia, the Bible. Any single viewpoint would be far too limited to be able to contain the multi-splendored nature of God; the multitude of inconsistencies and incoherencies which run througout Scripture, from the two competing accounts of Creation onwards, give necessary testimony that no collection of words could ever contain the fullness of the divine. This richness is sadly lost to those who would approach Scripture as a single discrete text by a single divine author, using the various prophets and evangelists merely as secretaries taking dictation.
Our Lectionary exploits this truth about Scripture by juxtaposing these various voices within the context of the praise, worship, and study which is the Liturgy of the Word, typically--as in this week--a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, a reading specifically from the Psalter, a reading from the Epistles, and a reading from the Gospels, but modified sometimes so as to fit the needs of various points in the church year. (For example, during Easter season we read from the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation of St. John the Divine.) Sometimes, we walk away from this juxtaposition struck by the unity of the message running like a thread through disparate portions of Scripture; sometimes, the passages stand in critique and challenge to each other.
This week we see in our Lectionary passages several distinct perspectives on the moral order of the universe, perspectives which speak to different moments in Jewish thought, each which their own historical context which it is important for us to understand. While many of the psalms in the Psalter are attributed to King David within the text itself, modern scholars tend to see them as the product of many different authors--a microcosm of the Bible as a whole, so to speak--most of them probably written some time after the Exile, for liturgical uses. The Books of Kings was probably compiled around the same time, sometime in the sixth century B.C.E., from earlier historical material. It is not surprising, then, that to a great degree the two works share a common worldview as to the nature of good and evil in the world.
Central to understanding the moral order operative in the Psalter and in the Books of Kings is realizing that our notion of an afterlife as punishment or reward for a life ill- or well-lived did not yet exist in the times in which they were written. Sheol for these Jews was a shadowy half-existence more akin to oblivion than to our notions of Heaven or of Hell; indeed, there is some evidence of the Jews thinking of the soul as being utterly consumed and obliterated within it. The Hebrews thus looked to the more-or-less direct intervention of God, working through prophets like Elijah, through nature, and through history, to upkeep the moral order, to punish the wicked and reward the righteous, within the confines of an earthly lifespan.
Throughout the Psalter runs the faithful conviction, held both in good times and in bad, that righteousness will be rewarded and wickedness will be punished. Psalms of celebration exalt the way in which those rewards are enjoyed today; psalms of lamentation nonetheless are firm in their insistence that it will come tomorrow. Note that a critical element of this moral order is the destruction of one's enemies; not only will those who are faithful to God be raised up and exalted, but those who persecute God's faithfull will be laid low. God "hates all those who work wickedness," abhors "the bloodthirsty and deceitful," and "destroys those who speak lies"--and the Psalms positively relish in that destruction, unapologetically revelling in the misfortune of others and viewing it as evidence of a just god at work in the world. "Love your enemies" is not a message which one finds in the Psalter, at least not on the surface, nor is the unconditional love of God for all people and races.
Around the second century B.C.E., however, a new paradigm began to emerge in Jewish thought, in response to the Maccabean exile and a growing frustration with God's tendency to side with those with the larger armies, and a belief in the resurrection of the dead, that the faithful--defined as those who upheld God's law by keeping the Jewish purity laws--would be rewarded in a future, messianic age in which our bodies would be restored to life and made immortal. One of the sects which held this were the Pharisees, in contrast to the Sadducees, the temple priests, who denied the resurrection. Acts 23:8 reminds us that “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three." The Sadducees were religious conservatives who interpreted the Torah literally; the Pharisees were religious liberals who democratized Judaism by transferring authority from the priests to the people. While the Pharisees are attacked throughout the Gospels for their legalism, they were in fact less legalistic in most ways than the other Jewish sects in favor during the time of the life of Christ.
Jesus was, of course, Christself a Pharisee, at least insofar as Jesus' thought and teachings can be situated within the context of any particular school of Jewish thought. Perhaps this is why Jesus' spends so much time criticizing them, holding them to a higher standard because they have already glimpsed some small glimmer of the truth.
In our Gospel passage today, Jesus eats at the home of another Pharisee, Simon. Simon, like Jesus, believes in the resurrection of the body; he recognizes the hope of a resurrected life. This is a point they agree on, a common starting point in their paradigmatic understandings of the universal moral order which unites them as they break bread with each other, Simon eager to learn from Jesus as Teacher. Yet Jesus nonetheless presents a fundamental challenge and correction to Simon's understanding.
Simon's belief in the resurrection only pushes the earlier Jewish understanding of God rewarding good and punishing evil onto a future afterlife; it is still, essentially, a bribe for being good, a celestial equivalent to a mother telling her children she'll buy them ice cream if they behave at Grandma's. The fundamental system of accounting, so to speak, which we see operative in the Psalter and in Kings has not been changed. But when Jesus forgives the sins of the woman kissing his feet, Jesus explodes this calculus, turning Simon's world upside down in the process.
Jesus presents instead a vision of a world where we do good and act justly not because we hope to earn some type of reward, whether in this life or in heaven--what craven people we must be to need to be bribed to do the right thing! Jesus shows us a world where we do not avoid evil because we are afraid of a Hell where we will be mercilessly punished forever for our sins. Jesus shows Simon the possibility of a still third moral order, one in which we act lovingly not in hope of some reward but because we are filled with love, because that is our authentic response as Christians to Jesus' redemptive Presence. Broken free from the calculus of reward-and-punish, we sing praise to God not to incur divine favor, but because our mouths cannot bear to be silent; we pray to God because our hearts will not be still; we do the work of God because our hands cannot bear to be idle.
May it ever be so for all of us.
Amen.
It is appropriate, then, and perhaps shouldn't be too surprising, that our Scripture is a book of plurality: many books, written by many authors from many different times and historical contexts, testifying to many different understandings and experiences of the divine, uniting into one canon, the book, la biblia, the Bible. Any single viewpoint would be far too limited to be able to contain the multi-splendored nature of God; the multitude of inconsistencies and incoherencies which run througout Scripture, from the two competing accounts of Creation onwards, give necessary testimony that no collection of words could ever contain the fullness of the divine. This richness is sadly lost to those who would approach Scripture as a single discrete text by a single divine author, using the various prophets and evangelists merely as secretaries taking dictation.
Our Lectionary exploits this truth about Scripture by juxtaposing these various voices within the context of the praise, worship, and study which is the Liturgy of the Word, typically--as in this week--a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, a reading specifically from the Psalter, a reading from the Epistles, and a reading from the Gospels, but modified sometimes so as to fit the needs of various points in the church year. (For example, during Easter season we read from the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation of St. John the Divine.) Sometimes, we walk away from this juxtaposition struck by the unity of the message running like a thread through disparate portions of Scripture; sometimes, the passages stand in critique and challenge to each other.
This week we see in our Lectionary passages several distinct perspectives on the moral order of the universe, perspectives which speak to different moments in Jewish thought, each which their own historical context which it is important for us to understand. While many of the psalms in the Psalter are attributed to King David within the text itself, modern scholars tend to see them as the product of many different authors--a microcosm of the Bible as a whole, so to speak--most of them probably written some time after the Exile, for liturgical uses. The Books of Kings was probably compiled around the same time, sometime in the sixth century B.C.E., from earlier historical material. It is not surprising, then, that to a great degree the two works share a common worldview as to the nature of good and evil in the world.
Central to understanding the moral order operative in the Psalter and in the Books of Kings is realizing that our notion of an afterlife as punishment or reward for a life ill- or well-lived did not yet exist in the times in which they were written. Sheol for these Jews was a shadowy half-existence more akin to oblivion than to our notions of Heaven or of Hell; indeed, there is some evidence of the Jews thinking of the soul as being utterly consumed and obliterated within it. The Hebrews thus looked to the more-or-less direct intervention of God, working through prophets like Elijah, through nature, and through history, to upkeep the moral order, to punish the wicked and reward the righteous, within the confines of an earthly lifespan.
Throughout the Psalter runs the faithful conviction, held both in good times and in bad, that righteousness will be rewarded and wickedness will be punished. Psalms of celebration exalt the way in which those rewards are enjoyed today; psalms of lamentation nonetheless are firm in their insistence that it will come tomorrow. Note that a critical element of this moral order is the destruction of one's enemies; not only will those who are faithful to God be raised up and exalted, but those who persecute God's faithfull will be laid low. God "hates all those who work wickedness," abhors "the bloodthirsty and deceitful," and "destroys those who speak lies"--and the Psalms positively relish in that destruction, unapologetically revelling in the misfortune of others and viewing it as evidence of a just god at work in the world. "Love your enemies" is not a message which one finds in the Psalter, at least not on the surface, nor is the unconditional love of God for all people and races.
Around the second century B.C.E., however, a new paradigm began to emerge in Jewish thought, in response to the Maccabean exile and a growing frustration with God's tendency to side with those with the larger armies, and a belief in the resurrection of the dead, that the faithful--defined as those who upheld God's law by keeping the Jewish purity laws--would be rewarded in a future, messianic age in which our bodies would be restored to life and made immortal. One of the sects which held this were the Pharisees, in contrast to the Sadducees, the temple priests, who denied the resurrection. Acts 23:8 reminds us that “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three." The Sadducees were religious conservatives who interpreted the Torah literally; the Pharisees were religious liberals who democratized Judaism by transferring authority from the priests to the people. While the Pharisees are attacked throughout the Gospels for their legalism, they were in fact less legalistic in most ways than the other Jewish sects in favor during the time of the life of Christ.
Jesus was, of course, Christself a Pharisee, at least insofar as Jesus' thought and teachings can be situated within the context of any particular school of Jewish thought. Perhaps this is why Jesus' spends so much time criticizing them, holding them to a higher standard because they have already glimpsed some small glimmer of the truth.
In our Gospel passage today, Jesus eats at the home of another Pharisee, Simon. Simon, like Jesus, believes in the resurrection of the body; he recognizes the hope of a resurrected life. This is a point they agree on, a common starting point in their paradigmatic understandings of the universal moral order which unites them as they break bread with each other, Simon eager to learn from Jesus as Teacher. Yet Jesus nonetheless presents a fundamental challenge and correction to Simon's understanding.
Simon's belief in the resurrection only pushes the earlier Jewish understanding of God rewarding good and punishing evil onto a future afterlife; it is still, essentially, a bribe for being good, a celestial equivalent to a mother telling her children she'll buy them ice cream if they behave at Grandma's. The fundamental system of accounting, so to speak, which we see operative in the Psalter and in Kings has not been changed. But when Jesus forgives the sins of the woman kissing his feet, Jesus explodes this calculus, turning Simon's world upside down in the process.
Jesus presents instead a vision of a world where we do good and act justly not because we hope to earn some type of reward, whether in this life or in heaven--what craven people we must be to need to be bribed to do the right thing! Jesus shows us a world where we do not avoid evil because we are afraid of a Hell where we will be mercilessly punished forever for our sins. Jesus shows Simon the possibility of a still third moral order, one in which we act lovingly not in hope of some reward but because we are filled with love, because that is our authentic response as Christians to Jesus' redemptive Presence. Broken free from the calculus of reward-and-punish, we sing praise to God not to incur divine favor, but because our mouths cannot bear to be silent; we pray to God because our hearts will not be still; we do the work of God because our hands cannot bear to be idle.
May it ever be so for all of us.
Amen.