October 26, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
I do not mean “deny” the story. It happened. Jesus came. Jesus acted. Jesus was executed. But the question is how that makes sense for us? How does that have meaning for us in our world? We don’t interpret life through an Isaiah 53 lens, nor through and Abraham and Isaac lens. That’s why civil religion is more powerful for us than Christianity. That’s why Disney is more powerful for us than Christianity. That’s why Capitalism is more powerful for us than Christianity. It’s not Christianity’s fault – the problems lies with any and all generations that do not reinterpret Jesus through its own powerful lenses. Experience is the lens and we must reinterpret Jesus, and therefore Christianity itself, through the lens of our own common experience. We can’t take religious history, or the history of Christian theology, and suck it like a straw from the past and consume it as if it will somehow feed us all these years later.
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Sermons @ Trinity
October 18, 2009
“Same story, different meaning”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Good morning.
Happy little readings we have this morning, eh?
Just so you know,
I don’t pick the Biblical readings –
they are the same ones read in every mainline Protestant Church and most Roman Catholic Churches
all around the world.
It is a nice idea symbolizing Christian unity,
but given the differences in how they will be treated
all over the world,
the symbol is greater than the reality.
I pick the middle reading
and you can blame me for that one.
As I keep saying,
the editorial perspective of the different gospel-writers
and their peculiar historical and social context,
has everything to do with what they tell us
and how they tell it.
Today is a great example.
If you look at the story we just heard from Mark
as it is told in Matthew
a critical difference comes to light.
In Matthew it is not the Zebedee boys
who try to elbow their way to the front of the line,
it is their mother!
Their mom asks Jesus to make her boys
princes in the organization…
leading Jesus to later refer to the Zebedee boys as
“the sons of thunder.”
The reason for that difference is
that Mark is a Gentile,
speaking to Gentile audiences of Roman citizens
and he is trying to convince them to care about Jesus.
Matthew is a Jew speaking to Jews
and trying to convince Jews
that Jesus is the new Moses.
Mark, throughout his gospel,
paints the disciples and close associates of Jesus
as nincompoops and bumbling idiots,
thus distancing the story from its Jewishness
which his audience would appreciate.
Matthew takes every opportunity to dust off
one of Mark’s stories
and make the disciples look a little better,
and in this case inserting Mrs. Zebedee
as the cause of the brouhaha.
None of that, however,
ameliorates the tough talk coming from Jesus.
We can notice that this is clearly a post-resurrection story in that it uses Last Supper symbolism
to refer to sacrifices that will be made:
“The cup that I drink you will drink.”
That is a reference to their last meal together
when in fact all the disciples do drink together
from the same cup.
It is a dark reference to torture,
crucifixion
and an ignoble death –
and it is made long before it actually happens.
Leading us to suppose
that this story is a later reflection by Mark
to make sense of Jesus’ death.
So what we have in this story might be
some words of Jesus that were remembered
and passed on by oral tradition
before they were written down,
but when Mark put them in story form,
he had to decide what context Jesus said them in.
The nub of the actual Jesus-saying
is likely around the idea
that the Gentiles judge greatness by coercive power…
but Jesus’ students are to judge greatness
by the excellence and steadfastness of servanthood.
I knew a guy when I lived in Columbus, Ohio
who was the Superintendant of Schools for one of the largest and best suburban school systems there.
Whenever any employee of the school system,
from the boiler room to the class room,
was hospitalized,
and even if their spouse was hospitalized,
he was there visiting their hospital room.
They loved that man.
Of course his own family paid a dear price for that,
and we have to ask where the balance is?
Servanthood, on the face of it, is important
but like everything else,
it has to be managed and balanced.
Gandhi neglected his own family horribly,
even immorally.
Often great servant leaders
serve the way they do
at the expense of other core responsibilities
and that is something that today
we can evaluate more clearly
when we strip the mythology away.
But be that as it may, my Superintendant friend would say that he tried to lead horizontally rather than vertically…and it showed.
The first generation of Jesus followers,
who were left holding the bag
and wondering how their Messiah
could have been arrested, tortured and executed
like any ordinary revolutionary or bandit,
really did perform an act of interpretive genius.
They were likely expecting to ride Jesus’
coat-tails to greatness and glory –
preferring the vertical to the horizontal.
They stared at the cross,
metaphorically I mean,
and pondered how Jesus could have been
what they thought, the Messiah,
and still ended up as just a grease spot
on the sole of Roman sandals.
I can’t over-emphasize the demoralizing effect,
not to mention grief,
that public torture and execution would have had.
And by the way,
that was the intent of crucifixion.
Jesus was stripped naked,
no loin cloth as is depicted on those wonderfully
artistic crucifixes and paintings
in which Jesus has no armpit hair either.
Public nudity was especially humiliating to Jews
because they had a prohibition against it.
In addition, it was a public torture –
a flogging with a whip of leather strips
knotted with small pieces of clay bead.
And it was a public execution,
not in a forensic cell hidden within a prison
with an observation box from which select people
could watch – which is the way we execute people.
It took place at the most public highway,
at the most public intersection,
where no one could avoid seeing,
hearing or smelling death.
Unprotected from crows, vultures and flying insects that picked at open wounds prior to death,
and dogs prowling below
waiting for scraps,
crucifixion was one of the most effective and efficient
Roman inventions for population control.
Now I don’t tell you all this just to be gross
or to get into that strange kind of piety
that loves to focus on the suffering of Jesus.
I think that’s just weird –
a kind of spirituality of sadomasochism.
I mention it,
and describe it in detail,
so that we may understand what that first generation
of Jesus followers went through;
and the interpretive genius
that found a lens through which to understand
Jesus’ humiliating arrest, torture and execution
when he was supposed to be ‘the greatest’ –
as Mohammad Ali used to call himself.
As they pondered his demise
and what it all meant for them
and the future,
a very significant image appeared before them.
Now back away from 1st century Palestine for a moment and think about the United States of America.
We have some images
that go along with our nationalistic civil religion.
Think of George Washington
at the bow of a row boat crossing the Delaware
at Christmas Day in blinding snow.
Think about the American flag,
shrapnel-torn and waving in the wind
with the fireworks of the rocket’s red glare behind it.
Think Iwo Jima
and US soldiers leaning together to hoist the flag
over a blood-drenched battlefield
on an island we would otherwise never have heard of.
These are images burned into the public imagination.
No words are necessary
in order to conjure up the planks of civil religion
we call Patriotism.
Just flash the image
and all that is associated with Patriotism is right there.
It’s pretty neat how it works.
Every country
and every ethnic group has such common images.
They are archetypal icons
etched into the memory of every child
who is raised with an ethnic,
racial or national identity.
So look back at Isaiah 53
and you will see the silhouette of just such an icon.
The suffering servant,
as we call it today,
is etched by four poems in Isaiah
that describe the people Israel
as the suffering servants of God.
When that first generation of Jesus-followers
stared long enough at the image of their dead Messiah,
the suffering servant came into focus.
Jesus, his followers thought, was yet another example
of Israel’s suffering in the mysterious servanthood
of a God that always gets the last word.
Indeed,
there was meaning to Israel’s suffering
and there must be meaning to the suffering of Jesus,
who was God’s messianic servant.
The meaning didn’t come to them right away,
it built over time
and with the help of later thinkers,
but it was the image of Isaiah 53 that first appeared.
What better, starker contrast than between
the Suffering Servant and the Roman Emperor?
It made perfect sense to them.
It was a profound and deeply moving interpretation.
It recalled an even older story
of Abraham sacrificing his only son
until God intervened to save him.
But this time,
God’s only son was not saved
and that was a measure of how much God
loved Israel.
Given those deeply etched stories
in the ethnic and religious identity of those people,
it made utterly perfect sense.
But it does not make much sense for us.
Therein lies our problem in 2009.
We must, we must,
we have to…
reinterpret this story in order for it
to make any sense to us.
I do not mean “deny” the story.
It happened.
Jesus came.
Jesus acted.
Jesus was executed.
But the question is how that makes sense for us?
How does that have meaning for us in our world?
We don’t interpret life through an Isaiah 53 lens,
nor through and Abraham and Isaac lens.
That’s why civil religion is more powerful for us
than Christianity.
That’s why Disney is more powerful for us
than Christianity.
That’s why Capitalism is more powerful for us
than Christianity.
It’s not Christianity’s fault –
the problems lies with any and all generations
that do not reinterpret Jesus
through its own powerful lenses.
Experience is the lens
and we must reinterpret Jesus,
and therefore Christianity itself,
through the lens of our own common experience.
We can’t take religious history,
or the history of Christian theology,
and suck it like a straw
from the past
and consume it
as if it will somehow feed us all these years later.
Some things are enduring of course.
Some things cross time as if in a bottle
and arrive on our shore
ready to strengthen, deepen and enlighten.
As someone just said to me the other day,
Jesus’ words from the cross –
“Abba, forgive them” –
is almost too powerful to behold.
Jesus-stories like the Prodigal Son
and the Good Samaritan
and the Gerasenne Demoniac
can be told and understood just like they are
in any day, year or century.
But the meaning of Jesus dying on the cross
does not travel so well.
Now what I am talking about here
is a major undertaking in many ways,
but let me give you a hint…a little taste…
of what I mean.
We can say,
as Christians have said,
that God planned a pre-meditated murder of Jesus,
setting the whole thing up
and staging it down to the last detail,
all so that Jesus could suffer horribly,
and in so doing
take away all human wrong-doing and sin
even thousands of years into the future.
That was how Christian theology shook out finally.
Or, we can say, as some Christians are today,
that Jesus got caught
against his will,
by the military forces of occupation
that controlled his country,
and that he was executed as a
rebel
or trouble-maker
or revolutionary
or terrorist
in the same way that powerless and marginalized
people have always been snuffed out
by the human lust for power.
We could say, as some do today,
that instead of dying for us
he died because of us.
We could say, as some do today,
that Jesus suffered the same fate as the millions
before and after him,
have suffered when they challenged
those with power and wealth to act differently.
We could say, as some do today,
that it was not God who caused Jesus to suffer and die
but that it was human beings
motivated by their special interests
and acting out of their self-interests.
We could say, as some do today,
that Jesus did not die to save us from our sins
but that Jesus died because of our sins;
and that he is an eternal example
of the capacity for evil
by ordinary people like you and me…
But that if we did learn from his death
we would be saved…
we would save ourselves and our world.
You see, the basic story doesn’t change
but how we interpret changes.
If we do not interpret it
so that it makes sense for reasonable people
who live lives like we do, then it becomes a fairytale.
If it becomes a fairytale it dies,
as it is dying in so many places
and for so many people all around us.
So, and here’s the punch line:
you certainly don’t have to share my take on the story,
but in order for it to be powerful in your life,
it is a story that needs your attention.
It is a story that beckons you to look deeply
and listen well.
It is a story that calls out for you to
make your own story
by interpreting it through your actual experience,
rather than just going along
with what someone told you it means.
Part of naming your place at the table
is naming the meaning of the story,
both for the world in which we live
and for your very own life as you live it.
And now,
I invite you to come forward,
carrying your own name
and placing it on the table –
that table right there
that appears in an ancient form
in the heart of that story –
and to make it your own.
And then…light a candle in thanksgiving
for our place in the story of Jesus.
