Sermon Ponderings

Readings for November 15, 2009

What are we waiting for? What kind of world is God bringing to birth?

We always read about the end of the world in November – the Lectionary has us focus on texts like these just before we start the year afresh with Advent 1. It’s a time to think about God’s dream for the world – what we’re moving towards, and what stands in the way.

The popular notions of apocalyptic that make so much noise in popular culture are not comforting – at least not to me. I don’t find the idea of a “rapture” to be good news; I can’t imagine the world God made in such chaos when all the “good” people are removed from it. It’s also not the only way of understanding apocalyptic texts. It has nothing to do with the way the original authors understood them! But since everybody except the conservatives avoids these texts like the plague it may be the only way that people really think about them. Jesus’ warning in this passage should be taken very seriously – we should not be led astray by people who claim to know about the “when” or the “how” or the “signs” of the end … we have more important things to think about!

Maybe if we take this out of the religious context it’s easier to understand what’s going on in these sorts of texts. After all, there are lots of contemporary end-time stories that have nothing to do with religion. End-of-the-world visions are the stuff of horror movies; of science fiction writing. They’re often warnings (like Atwood’s After the Flood) or dreams of a better society (like Star Wars). They’re ways to comment on the world of now by putting it into a larger perspective … to ask questions of meaning, purpose, direction … ultimate significance. “Watch out because our morality is not keeping up with our technology.” “What would the world be like if we could create a truly egalitarian society?” And fundamentally … “how do the possible (or predicted) ends make us think differently about now?”

Surely the same has to be true for 1^st century end-time writing as it is for 21^st century. Rather than pretend that these authors had more insight into future events than Margaret Atwood or George Lucas, we should try to take seriously what they were saying about human nature; about the human condition; about where God is taking the world; about what we can hope in even when everything seems crazy. If even the huge stones of the Jerusalem Temple, one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, are not permanent, what is? And – more to the point for Mark – if the world seems more filled with fear than with joy, what can we hope in?

Readings for November 8, 2009

The story of the widow’s mite never made sense to me. How could it be that Jesus would praise anyone who gave away her last means of support, even to the Temple? Sure it makes sense to say that her gift cost her more than anybody else’s … but so what? That’s a true if somewhat banal statement. We would never, today, expect people to give everything they have to organized religion; we would consider it a terrible travesty if people did that. Why would Jesus think any different?

Addison G Wright has written an article which turns the interpretation of this familiar passage on its head he says:

• The story of the widow’s mites is immediately preceded in Mark and Luke by a unit that warns: “Beware of the scribes who like to go about in long robes and have salutations in the market place and the best seats in the synagogues and the place of honor at feasts, who devour widow’s houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation” (Mark 12:38-40; Luke 20:46-47). … In both Gospels, Jesus condemns those scribes who devour the houses of widows, and then follows immediately the story of a widow whose house has beyond doubt just been devoured. … If, indeed, Jesus is opposed to the devouring of widows’ houses, how could he possibly be pleased with what he sees here?

Wright’s conclusion:

• The story …  provides a further illustration of the ills of official devotion. Jesus’ saying is not a penetrating insight on the measuring of gifts; it is a lament, “Amen, I tell you, she gave more than all the others.” Or, as we would say: “One could easily fail to notice it, but there is a tragedy of the day—she put in her whole living.” She had been taught and encouraged by religious leaders to donate as she does, and Jesus condemns the value system that motivates her action, and he condemns the people who conditioned her to do it.

Read this way, the story is consistent with Jesus’ message that rules need a human face, and that the Sabbath was made for people. It is consistent with the Jesus who healed, and the Jesus who wept at the death of Lazarus. And it’s a challenge to all institutions that call for enormous sacrifice from those least able to give.

Lest we descend into a kind of knee-jerk anti-Jewish rant … let’s be clear that Wright is not saying that Jesus is condemning Judaism, or Jewish values, or the Jewish religion. Wright thinks Jesus is condemning a kind of abusive practice by Temple authorities – and there were lots of Jews other than Jesus who did that too. This same Jesus who criticized the scribes also saw the Temple as an appropriate place to teach, to pray, to worship.

Readings for October 25, 2009

We’ve just spent a couple of weeks wrestling with Job, and now we get a story about Jesus healing a blind beggar. It sort of feels like we’re moving from theory to practice.

It takes an awful lot of things to go wrong before one becomes a beggar – either in our world or in Jesus’. Certainly not every blind person Jesus ever encountered was a beggar; most of them would have been cared for by their families (no doubt with varying levels of cheerfulness!). Being a beggar, in that world and in ours, is pretty much the lowest you can get. It’s a life of being ignored, passed by, told not even to ask for help beyond the kind of dregs of handouts that a few generous souls are willing to offer.

Is there a pun in Bartimaeus’ name? “Bar” is the Jewish prefix meaning “son of;” “Timaeus” sounds an awful lot like the Greek word “Timaes” which means “valuable.” And Mark here doesn’t just call him Bartimaeus; he tells us that Bartimeaus is “son of Timaeus.”  Is Mark trying to tell us that part of the gospel here is how Jesus sees value in those that the rest of us pass by? Is he challenging us to see with new eyes; lift the blinkers from our own perception?

Furthermore, this story about Bartimaeus’ healing is the last incident in Mark’s description of Jesus’ earthly ministry. The very next chapter begins the Passion Narrative – the Palm Sunday story, the final week in Jerusalem, and Jesus’ trial and execution. According to Mark, healing Bartimaeus is the last “ordinary” thing Jesus does. Well, every good story-teller knows that the ‘bookends’ to one’s story are what people are most likely to remember. We remember what comes first and what comes last … and incidents in between if they’re somehow striking. Any good storyteller (or journalist) puts the most memorable or characteristic incidents into the bookends of a description. Given that, it’s probably significant that Mark’s description of Jesus’ ministry begins with him casting out a demon, and ends with him helping a beggar to see. In a nutshell, this is what Jesus’ ministry is all about.

Readings for Sunday September 20, 2009

There’s a lot of fiddle-faddle written about the place of children in 1st century Palestine and Judaism – I’ve been wading through some of it while I read through what the scholars are saying about Jesus’ aphorism, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Various different authors seem to feel the need to set up either the Romans or the Jews as a foil for what Jesus has to say – and their prejudices are showing through. The general opinion seems to be that children didn’t matter much in the first century. For example:

• William Willimon says, “As helpless, dependent, nonproductive burdens, children were, at best, second-class citizens in the eyes of both classical Roman gentiles and ancient believing Jews.”
• Judith Gundry-Volf says, “In a Greco-Roman milieu, children were the least-valued members of society; they were considered not yet fully human. According to the institution oí patria potestas, children had no legal rights. A father had the right brutally to punish, sell, pawn, expose, and even kill his own child. Newborns could be exposed—abandoned in a public place—where they would generally either die or be picked up by strangers and raised for profit as slaves, prostitutes, or beggars. Baby girls were especially vulnerable to this fate. In one ancient letter a husband writes to his pregnant wife, “If by chance you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it be, if it is a girl, cast it out” (POxy IV 744, cited by J. L. White, Light from Ancient Letters [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986] 111-12). The status and treatment of children in a Jewish milieu was more positive. Children were considered a blessing from God. Exposure and infanticide were prohibited. Nevertheless, the disciples’ rebuke of those who were bringing little children to Jesus (Mark 10:13-16) shows that within Judaism too children could be deprecated as socially or religiously insignificant.”

The trouble with this kind of comparison is that it just encourages us to point fingers: “What stupid people they were, that they needed Jesus to correct them. Thank God we don’t act in such barbaric ways!” It’s insulting to our 1st century forebears, and it robs Jesus’ actions and saying of a lot of its meaning.

But if you stop to unravel this a bit … the prevailing attitudes towards children are not really all that different from the attitudes that Wilemon and Gundry-Volf vilify – children in our society aren’t allowed to work; aren’t allowed to vote; and are treated differently in law. The reason we have child labour laws, and laws against human trafficking, is because people are tempted (usually by desperation) to do unspeakable things to children. There are undeniable differences between children and adults – frequently in our society as well as in the first century we turn those differences into reasons to justify a power hierarchy. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t love, value and delight in our children – and it doesn’t mean that they didn’t love, value and delight in theirs either.

It’s not necessary to de-humanize our 1st century forebears in order to exalt what Jesus is saying!

What if part of what Jesus is reminding us is how much of a tragedy it is when children aren’t valued? What if part of what Jesus is appealing to is the deep sense of caring and delight in children that we all feel? And that our 1st century forebears surely felt too?

Is part of what Jesus is saying simply that we have a place in the Kingdom in the same way that children have a place in the family – not because we earn it; not because we are “productive,” not because we deserve citizenship … but simply because we were born. Period. Plain and simple.

Put this saying beside the Parable of the Welcoming Father (aka Prodigal Son), and you get a wonderful metaphor for grace which skewers our works-oriented hierarchical social structures just as mightily as attitudes from previous generations.