Because They Were Afraid (Easter; Mark 16:1-8; March 27, 2016)

Because They Were Afraid

Easter

Mark 16:1-8
March 27, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

“They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” That’s an odd way to end a book, especially one that began with the words, “The beginning of the good news...” When do we get to the good news? “They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”

It’s actually stronger than that in Greek. In English we don’t like double negatives, but Greek never had that problem. In the original it’s “And to no one nothing they said,” putting the emphasis on the nothing and the no one. We would offend our English teachers and gain no style points with Strunk and White, but we would have to put it something like, “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared."

An unsatisfactory ending for a gospel. So unsatisfactory, in fact, that some old manuscripts— not the best and not the oldest, but some old manuscripts— supplied an ending. Two different endings, actually. A shorter ending has some hifalutin language that sounds very strange coming from Mark’s pen. And it doesn’t show up until the 300’s. The other ending shows up in the middle of the 100’s and says that the disciples won’t be harmed by venomous snakes or poisons. That’s pretty cool, but it seems to be drawn from other gospels and from Acts and we know that Mark was the first gospel written, so that’s backwards.

Some have objected that the ending that we have, “They said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared,” means that in Greek the book ends with the conjunction “because". No other book in Greek ends that way, they argued, until an ancient writing that ended with “because” was found.

No, we’re stuck with it. This is the way Mark ends his “beginning of the good news": “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ‘cause they were scared."

Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome had bought embalming spices, worried about how they would get access to Jesus’ body, discovered the stone already rolled away, and had a brief conversation with “a young man in a white robe.” This young man— was he a human messenger or a heavenly one?— told them that Jesus of Nazareth who had been crucified had been raised. They were to tell the rest of the disciples to meet him in Galilee. They reacted to this news with “terror and dread.” “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared."

What were they afraid of? Were they afraid to tell the other disciples for fear the disciples would make fun of them, accuse them of being fanciful women? Were they afraid that the authorities who had gone to such lengths not only to kill Jesus but to make sure that he stayed dead would find out that they were defiantly spreading the story that the authorities had failed and Jesus was alive? Or was a dead Jesus that needed to be prepared for burial a sad reality they could handle, but a Jesus alive in spite of having been dead was just too much for them to wrap their minds around? Were they scared because the world they had known was gone— a world of living things and dead things, but not with someone who had been dead and was now alive? Were they scared because that world had been replaced with one in which anything was possible?

Any of those reasons or all of them would have provided ample grounds for any reasonable person to be afraid, overcome with terror and dread, and so scared that they said nothin’ to nobody. From the safety of our cushioned pews we might criticize their fear, but we should be careful of that.

After all, we’re scared too. Of different things, but still. When I was ten years old there was a wolf under my bed at night. I lay in dread and terror because I was certain that, if I accidentally let my hand hang over the side of the bed, my fingers would be savaged up to my knuckles, or I would lose my feet if I tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. You may smile because you know that there was nothing at all lurking under my bed, but unless you are ten years old, alone in your bed in the dark, you don’t know anything about it.

Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, I found a copy of Dracula by Bram Stoker. For months after that I was convinced that there were vampires in the hallway outside my room, especially on those nights when moonlight shone in through the window at the top of the stairs. The journey between my bedroom door and the bathroom became the most dreaded four feet in the known universe. And, if by some miracle I managed to make it to the bathroom, there was still the problem of how to get back.

We have a lot of fears, some more realistic than wolves under the bed or vampires in the hallway. And some less realistic. We’re afraid of immigrants. We’re afraid of Muslims. We’re afraid of mental illness and the mentally ill. We’re afraid of gays and lesbians. We’re afraid of African-Americans. We’re afraid of Tea Party Republicans. We’re afraid of global warming. We’re afraid of black helicopters. We’re afraid of the government. We’re afraid of large corporations. We’re afraid of intellectuals. We’re afraid of bats. We’re afraid of our food. We’re afraid of our water. We’re afraid of the future. We’re afraid of our past. We’re afraid that our money will run out before we do. We’re afraid that our lives won’t have mattered. We’re afraid of cancer and dementia. We’re afraid there is no God. We’re afraid there is.

Not all fears are unreasonable. But, reasonable or not, our fears persist. And it is clear that, whatever else it can accomplish, Easter does not usher us into a fear-free life. Otherwise the women would not have greeted the news of the resurrection with terror and dread.

Speaking of the women, there is something else strange here, something not quite right. The women are afraid and though we’re aren’t told why precisely, their fears seem reasonable enough. The women say nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they are scared. That, too, seems reasonable. It seems reasonable, but it cannot possibly be true!

Mark’s gospel was written about forty years after the events that it describes. Someone—we call him Mark for convenience, but we have no idea, really— someone wrote this for the sake of a community of readers whom he hoped to benefit. There was a community of Jesus people; there were traditions about what Jesus had said and done circulating in that and other communities; and, there was a writer pulling it all together and arranging and re-arranging it to tell a story that made sense. After it was done, the community thought it was worth keeping. They made copies of it and shared it with other communities. It was copied and bound with other gospels and other writings from the various groups of Jesus-people.

The existence of this ending, “They said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared,” contradicts what it says. If they said nothin’ to nobody, how did the story end up in this book? Somebody said something to somebody, or there would have been no Mark, no community, no New Testament, no Church, no Easter, no us gathered this morning talking about these things. Somebody said something to somebody. Somebody summoned the courage so that— scared or not— they— and I suspect it was the women— told what had happened to them at the tomb. Being afraid didn’t keep them from telling the story.

We know that Mark’s community was afraid. They lived in fearful times when the world that they knew was coming apart. Perhaps they had allowed their fears to silence them. I don’t know. I do know that Mark’s good news for them is that being afraid doesn’t have to keep them from telling the story. We live in fearful times, too. We are beset with fears, both founded and unfounded. But we do not have to allow those fears to keep us from telling the story. We do not have to allow those fears to keep us from living the good news that we have received from Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Frightened, nervous, unsure of themselves, but sure of what they had seen and heard, they did tell the disciples in their hiding place that the tomb could not hold Jesus. Emboldened by the women, the men were perhaps a little better prepared when Jesus met them. They might have been trembling with fear, their knees may have been shaking, but these women and men turned the world upside down. The Empire that had killed Jesus proved unable to keep him dead and unable to stop his message. And they were the proof.

And now it is our turn. The powers that be seek to crucify Jesus once again. They kill him daily, but they can no more keep him dead now than they could in ancient Roman Palestine. We now are the bearers of this story. We now are the ones called to live into it. We are the ones who bear witness to Jesus’ dream of a better world. It has become our dream, too, that cannot be killed and cannot be silenced. So we will proclaim a world in which no one goes hungry and no one goes unloved, a world in which terror is met with love and justice, and violence with love and peace. We will tell this story and we will stand up for this dream, whether we are afraid or not. We ourselves, the followers of the risen Christ, will supply the missing ending of Mark. And it will not be, “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were afraid.”

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You Always Have the Poor with You (Palm Sunday; Mark 11:1-11; 14:3-9; March 20, 2016)

You Always Have the Poor with You

Palm Sunday

Mark 11:1-11; 14:3-9

March 20, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

When I was in seminary the mainline churches-- or at least the seminaries of the mainline churches-- were in the throws of what we called the Liturgical Renewal Movement. We brought a renewed focus on worship. We revived and re-imagined old liturgical practices. We urged more frequent celebration of communion. We smeared actual ashes on Ash Wednesday, just like Catholics! Gasp! We promoted the use of the revised common lectionary. And we did lots of other things, some of which stuck and some of which have, mercifully, faded into oblivion. It was a good thing on the whole, but some things it simply got wrong.

For example, we invented a thing called "Passion Sunday." The problem, we said, was that most people did not go to church on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. In effect they went from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the triumphal rising from the grave on Easter, and so skipped the whole of Jesus' suffering and his death. So we shoved Palm Sunday into the first part of today's service, making it into an entrance rite and then we proposed that the rest of today's service be given to the passion readings from the gospel of that lectionary year. Readers and congregations got off lightly in Year B when the gospel was Mark, not so much in Years A and C.

It was a sort of liturgical "bait and switch." People came for palms and got the passion instead. Some years ago, I, an enthusiastic participant in the Liturgical Renewal Movement, rebelled. I dumped Passion Sunday and restored Palm Sunday. No more bait and switch. And no more unending readings of the Passion narrative. I don't know if you are grateful, but I'm pretty sure that the readers are.

But the false advertising isn't the only thing that's bothering me about the Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday mosh. The other thing is that I think this is based on a false understanding of Palm Sunday.

So, the traditional understanding goes, it's Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week! There is triumph in the air! Jesus enters Jerusalem as if he were a conquering general come to claim the allegiance of the citizens of the city that he has defeated in war. Ancient praise shouts are revived. Palm branches are waved. Jesus and his steed, his warhorse, aren't even permitted to touch the ground; it is lined with cloaks and palms. The crowds, longing for any hint of deliverance, are all stirred up and eager for Jesus to be their king. "Glory! Hosanna!"

Except that Jesus isn't a general. He is not making a bid for the throne. There has been no war. The city's forces have not been defeated. Jesus' "warhorse" is a donkey, and that's just silly. He wears no polished armor. He carries no bloodied sword. This parade is obviously anything but the triumphal entry it pretends to be.

The conventional wisdom is that the people of Jerusalem are looking for a war-like messiah and when Jesus shows up and does his bit of street theater they mistakenly assume that he must be it. When nothing much actually happens in the next few days, conventional wisdom says that the fickle crowd-- they are Jews, after all-- deserts and abandons Jesus. Remember that conventional wisdom over the centuries has had no problem at all with antisemitism.

But my question is this: Did anyone think that Jesus was taking up the mantle of the warrior messiah by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey? Did anyone participating in that day's events believe that Jesus was a king? I find no evidence for that outside the account of the street drama itself.

In my reading the procession with palms is satire directed at the Romans who were masters of propaganda, who knew how to send a message with the clever use of symbols, who knew how to make an impressive entrance. Jesus, on the other hand, knew how to mock the Romans, their propaganda, and their clever manipulation of special effects.

The beauty of satire is that it invites watchers and listeners to join in the fun of saying something forbidden with acts and speech that are, on the surface, unobjectionable. Satire depends on its listeners and watchers getting the joke before the authorities realize that the joke is on them, in time to watch their faces as they slowly get it that they are being ridiculed. Making fun of the elite is one of the few free pleasures of the underclass.

Jesus went to Jerusalem to pick a fight with the powers that be. The palm processional was his way of thumbing his nose at them and saying "Nyah-nah-na-nah-nah!" The palm processional was not a triumphal entry; it was the first round of the passion. Jesus intends to make a public mockery of the Romans and their brown-nosing Jewish collaborators to provoke them into responding with the brutal violence that their rule rested on. In this way he stripped the regime bare of its claim to love justice and peace. By the time Jesus was done with them (that is, by the time they had strung him up and killed him) they would be de-legitimated, stripped of any moral authority. The whole of the passion, in short, is contained in the palm procession.

Guy Nave likes to ask his Introduction to New Testament students, "Why was Jesus killed?" They usually answer as they were taught in Confirmation (remember, these are mostly nice Lutheran kids), "To save us from our sins." Not an entirely bad answer to a different question. No, why was Jesus killed? What was it that motivated the people who put the killing machine of Roman so-called justice into motion? This is a question that doesn't just belong in an academic classroom; it belongs in a Sunday School classroom and even in a sanctuary on Palm Sunday. And here is my answer (Guy's answer, too): "Jesus was killed because he threated the power of the powers that be."

And he did it not by trying to become more powerful, not by staging a coup. Opposing violence with violence was a simple enough game to play, but the powers that be understood that game. And they were very good at it. And even if the coup had succeeded, it would have changed nothing except to put Jesus on top of the same oppressive arrangement.

Opposing violence with violence was not Jesus' strategy. He acted more radically than that. Jesus stripped violence of its authority. The powers still had the ability to be brutal, but they could no longer claim that their brutality was in the service of justice. It was revealed to be brutality for the sake of maintaining power. To that brutal power Jesus opposed a strategy of non-violent resistance that focused on symbols and undercut the believability of the regime's press releases.

But a strategy of non-violent resistance in the service of what, exactly? We had a hint of that two Sundays ago when Jesus attacked the Temple's abuse of a poor widow's piety. And we have another nudge in the rest of today's reading.

While Jesus and his followers were resting in the home of Simon, the Simon with the skin disease. Skin disease would have made Simon permanently unclean. Simon is a marginalized character. That's the first thing to notice. While they were eating, a unnamed woman came in with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume. She broke the jar open, spilling the perfume on Jesus' head, a gesture of anointing. The disciples were aghast: "Think of how much good this could have done if we sold it and gave the money to the Food Pantry!"

Jesus rebuked them, saying that she had done a good thing, a thing that would always be remembered, a thing that would be told wherever and whenever the good news was told. The second thing to notice is that, while we have remembered her deed, we have forgotten her name. She was to be a famous person who did a famous deed, but the church could not be bothered to remember her name. But, of course, she was a woman and therefore unimportant. Conventional wisdom cares as little for women as it cares for Jews.

The woman anointed his head as a prophetic act that foresaw his approaching death. It is a good thing to do.

And besides, Jesus said, "You always have the poor with you; and whenever you want, you can do something good for them." Oh, how this saying of Jesus has suffered at the hands of conventional wisdom! "There isn't any point in trying to do something for the poor," it says. "No matter what you do you will not change the fact of poverty. Poverty is a fact of nature. Poverty is the will of God. We would be wrong even to try to get rid of poverty."

That is not what Jesus meant at all. No, he assumed that the people of God would always make their home among the poor. Of course the poor would be with us; we would be with the poor. The notion never dawned on him that his followers would ever choose to be anywhere else. He never imagined a church of people with property and means who would blame the poor for their poverty. He never imagined a church that aligned itself with the interests of the rich. He never imagined a church that turned its back on the poor. We would always have the poor with us. We would never try to distance ourselves from them.

So, of course, any time we wanted to help the poor, all we would have to do would be to go next door or across the street.

So now we know why Jesus acted the way he did. Jesus enacted a strategy of non-violent resistance in the service of the poor. He did it in the events that we remember today as a protest march, a parody, a parade. And he invites all of us to join the party. Everyone is welcome: the hospitable unclean, wasteful women, extravagant widows. Everyone is invited and welcome. But before we accept, we should consider that he does this for the poor, for the oppressed, for the despised, for the unwanted. If we join his movement, his people become our people. If we join his protest, we will threaten the same people whom Jesus threatened and they will hate us for it. If we join his parade, we will make our way forward with him and, come Friday, we will discover our own crosses to bear and to die upon. We will discover our own graves. We will be barricaded behind our own stones. And then, as surely as these things are true, we will be made alive once again come Easter.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Stay Awake (5th Sunday in Lent; Mark 13:1-8, 24-37; March 13, 2016)

Stay Awake

5th Sunday in Lent
Mark 13:1-8, 24-37
March 13, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

In the far southwest corner of Cornwall, west of Plymouth, west of the Penzance of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, is a headland called Land's End. Popular with hikers and rock-climbers now, it is more a tourist destination than a place to live.

I've often wondered what it would have been like to live in sight of a place called Land's End in the days when it was thought that there was nothing to the west but ocean and possibly dragons and the edge of the earth. Only the very brave or the very foolish or more likely a combination of the two would venture over the western horizon from there. When they sang with the Psalmist "Let the king rule from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth," they might not have know what "the river" was, but they knew the "ends of the earth." They could see it: Land's End.

I wonder how that knowledge, the knowledge that they lived at the end of the world, shaped their thoughts. Did it make them feel more secure or less? Did it limit the world of their imagination, or focus it? I don't think we'll ever really know how, say, a peasant from the thirteenth century thought about living near the end of the earth or if she thought about it all.

I do know that we think about the end of the earth a lot, although we think about it in time rather than in space. Just in the last year or so there have been twelve movies released that feature either the end of the world or at least the end of the world as we know it. Some, like the zombie movie Maggie, were completely forgettable; others, like Insurgent, part of the Divergent Series and Mockingjay, Part 2, the latest release in the Hunger Games series, are worth serious attention. There are a couple of simple formulas for end of the world movies. Either the movie begins with the world altered beyond recognition and the heroes must create an opening in this world for the recovery of goodness and freedom. Or the movie begins with the world as it is but with a threat that the heroes must somehow turn aside or defeat.

One requirement of the end-of-the-world genre is that human beings must either be able to save the world from impending doom or to survive it in such as way as to be able to repair the damage and return the world to its pre-disaster condition, more or less. An end-of-the-world movie that ends with the end of the world will be a box-office disaster (pardon the pun!). We want a story with a happy ending or at very least a happy enough ending, not an ending that is the end.

By long habit--and by disposition-- we want to look on the bright side of things, even when, or especially when the situation looks the most grim. We regard optimism as a virtue. And it often is. But there are times when optimism is a delusion that prevents us from responding to real threats that cannot simply be ignored until they go away.

The end of the world can come in a variety of sizes from the very personal to the global. The end of the world can come in a meeting with our oncologist when we find out that, while others’ lives will go on, ours will not. The end of the world can come, as it did for a friend of mine, when her husband announced on Christmas Eve that their marriage was over. The end of the world can come when you discover that you cannot pass a flight physical and your dream of being an astronaut will never become a reality. The end of the world can come when the factory you've worked in all your life is closing, leaving you at sixty years of age with a mortgage, three kids who want to go to college, and a retirement savings that will evaporate all too quickly. Or the end of the world can happen when we discover that an average of just 360 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will threaten to make vast densely populated parts of the earth uninhabitable and that we're already poking above 400 ppm at times.

For Mark's readers the end of the world came in a form so awful that they could hardly think about it except in images and symbols. They were Galilean peasants under the heel of the Roman occupation force. They had been harassed, oppressed, stripped of their dignity, squeezed off their own land. They watched their children go hungry. They watched their younger brothers and sisters sold into slavery. They watched their friends become beggars or bandits. Galilee and Judea were both ready to explode.

When they did in 66 people hoped that their rebellion against the pagan Romans would prompt God to intervene and give them a supernatural advantage. It looked at first as if God had enlisted on the Jewish side as the rebels crushed two legions even capturing one legion's eagle standard. But the future emperor Vespasian arrived with four legions in 67 and terrorized the countryside leaving Jerusalem and the rebel forces there alone. In 69 Vespasian went to Rome to become emperor and his son and second-in-command Titus laid siege to Jerusalem. Seven months later the defenders were starving and the city fell. The Temple was looted, all of Jerusalem was burned, and its residents either killed or sold into slavery. It was the end of the world.

Nothing that Mark’s little band of Jesus-followers could have done would have made any difference at all. So what were they supposed to do? "It is as if someone took a trip, left the household behind, and put the servants in charge, giving each one a job to do, and told the doorkeeper to stay alert." When faced with the end of the world they are to do the work that is before them, the work they were called to do, the work their master had given them to do. And what was that work? It was to love God and to love their neighbors, even their enemies, as they loved themselves. It was to return blessings for curses, to turn the left cheek when struck on the right, to carry a Roman legionary’s gear two miles when he demanded one. It was to open up a space in their lives and in their relationships for God's dream to come in and be made real.

Could they stop their compatriots from poking at the Roman eagle with a stick? Probably not. Could they stop the Roman response, ruthless, implacable, and cruel? No. What could they do? They could be faithful to their calling.

I think there's some comfort there. They don't have to succeed by winning; they can succeed by faithfulness.

And there is something more. The events that Jesus lays out, the events that lie in the future tense for his disciples, that are in the present tense for Mark's readers, these things are not random events. They are the way that God's dream will work itself out in their midst. History is not out of control. God is not absent. No, God is in the midst of the events of their day, even the terrible events that bring their world to an end. Jesus' hearers are not responsible for the outcome of history.

It is much the same with us. When a doctor tells us that the cancer cannot be cured, only delayed, this is news that our world has ended, that our life as we knew it is over. I don't want to minimize the impact of that kind of news, but in a strange way the most important things do not change.

Yes, what was unknown becomes known. What was murky and unclear gains a kind of crystal clarity that is itself painful. This, incidentally, is what the word "apocalypse" means: an uncovering of what was hidden, a lifting of the veil, an emergence into clear sight.

But whatever apocalyptic news we might get, we are still who we are. Instead of knowing that we will die from something someday, we have the clarity of knowing the probably cause and perhaps something of a time-line. But what does that clarity really change? Will we stop loving our spouses, our children, our grandchildren? Will we be suddenly unbaptized? Will we no longer feel the morning sunshine on our faces or feel dwarfed by the march of the stars through the heavens? No, these things will go on for as long as we do. We will still be called to be who we are, still called to do the work that is before us, still called to be faithful even if we will not complete all that we thought we might.

What the clarity of apocalyptic news brings is clarity of purpose and a recalled sense of what we are here to do. Our plans may change. Our routines will change, most certainly. But our deepest values will emerge with renewed urgency. At least that is what Jesus believed apocalyptic news would bring to his followers. "Keep watch," he says. But that is what they were supposed to be doing anyway!

In the higher levels of the United Methodist Church there is a good deal of anxiety about our future. Our global church has reached an impasse. On the surface the issue seems to be about the place of gay, lesbian, trans-gender, bisexual and queer people among us. In reality there are even deeper divisions that underlie this conflict, divisions over the nature of the Bible and of authority, about the purposes of God and the work of the people of God. In May our General Conference will meet and no one knows what will happen. The guesses range all the way from nothing at all to a split in the United Methodist Church and the formation of new denominations to take its place. What that would mean is anyone's guess.

What if some prophet could tell us what will actually happen? What if the hidden could be uncovered? What if the veil could be lifted? What if murky possibilities could emerge into plain sight? What if we knew that a split will happen?

I would grieve the death of the church that I have lived my life in, that I have given my sweat and tears, if not my blood. I would mourn the losses that would come with that death.
But fundamentally, it would change nothing. I would still be baptized. I would still be called to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. I would still be Jesus' follower. I would still be called to take up the work in front of me.

Will I still use what meager power is in my hands to prevent the worst of the possible damage? Of course. But finally these events are not in my hands and somehow, quite without our knowing just how, God is in the midst of them. The United Methodist Church, after all, belongs to God, not to us.
What would you say if I dared to say the same thing about First United Methodist Church? Since 1851 we have been God's people in the Methodist style in Decorah. We worry about our future. The church that we were a half century ago is gone, if not forgotten. The strategies that "worked" even a quarter century ago now seem as antiquated as rotary phones or manual gear shifts mounted on steering columns.

The great quest now seems to be to find new strategies that will yield the results that we remember from our youth. A significant number of the books being issued by Cokesbury and other denominational publishing houses have to do with what we can do to make our churches to “succeed” again. by which they mean to grow in numbers. But all the books don't allay our anxiety.

What if some apocalyptic author would tell us our future? What if the picture that emerged did not include First United Methodist Church? What if some soothsayer told us that this church were destined to close in twenty, thirty or fifty years?

Some would be shocked. Some would take themselves somewhere else, although I must say that we are not unique in our struggles, that they are common to nearly all mainline congregations. Many folks would grieve the church that has been the cradle and incubator of their faith over the years and the vehicle by with their following Jesus has been lived out.

But what, really, would the certain news of our congregation's demise change? Perhaps it would make our values and commitments clearer. Perhaps we would see more clearly what the work before us really is and set ourselves to doing it. The things that we would do would be the things that we should be doing anyway.

We would tell our stories to anyone who will listen, to our children most especially, and tell them in such a way that they would be able to tell their children. We would speak the truth to each other and to all who shape our common life in this community. We would stand with those who live at the edges of our shared life, and say "Amen!" to their cries of pain and outrage and to their demands for justice. We would cherish and care for the good earth that God has placed in our hands so that it may be a home for our great grandchildren as it was for our great grandparents. We will would the unlovely. We will would the hungry. We will would absolution to the ashamed. We will would up a space in our lives and in our relationships for God's dream to come in and be made real. The result would not be in our hands. First United Methodist Church of Decorah doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to God. Like Mark’s little band of Jesus-followers, we will not succeed by winning or by growing; we will succeed by being faithful.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Ripping Off Widows (Fourth Sunday in Lent; Mark 12:28-44; March 6, 2016)

Ripping Off Widows

Fourth Sunday in Lent
Mark 12:28-44
March 6, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Jesus talked about a lot of things. He talked about anger and conflict. He talked about love, but not the romantic kind. He talked a great deal about politics, not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of power, and who has it and how they use it. He talked about sex hardly at all, which you would never know to listen to some people tell it. He talked about family life and mostly he was against it.

He talked about a lot of things, but one of his favorite subjects was money. This comes as an unpleasant surprise to some folks. Most of us think that a once-a-year sermon on money at stewardship campaign time is more than enough. Folks who complain about how often we talk about money don't know the half of it. Of the many failings of modern preaching one of the most prominent is that we preachers talk far less about money than Jesus did.

And when we do talk about money we almost always do it in the context of what we call "stewardship." We say stewardship when mostly we mean fund-raising, a necessary but different thing. But when Jesus talked about money, he never meant fund-raising, ever. In Jesus' day our movement didn't have buildings and paid staff and the only time in the New Testament that fund-raising is mentioned it was for famine relief in Jerusalem so that Paul could prove that Gentile Christians were just as good as Jewish Christians.

When we've needed to preach a fund-raising sermon, we press stories about other things into service instead. Take this chestnut of a text, a story called "The Widow's Mite." "The widows might what?" No, the widow's mite. The smallest coin in circulation in ancient Palestine was the copper lepton. Two lepta were worth a Roman quadrans which was the least valuable Roman coin. And since a "myte" was the smallest coin in England when King James commissioned a new translation of the Bible, that word was pressed into service as a translation for lepton. The point is that the "mite" was worth very little.

Jesus and his disciples were hanging out in the Temple courtyard in Jerusalem. Jesus was watching people put their offerings into the Temple treasury collection box when a "poor widow" put in two of those little copper coins, two leptra. Jesus pointed her out to his disciples. The rich had put in some of their "walking around" money, but the poor widow had turned over her whole living. She had counter-signed her Social Security check and put it in the offering box. They gave what they could easily spare out of their abundance and she gave everything she had. So by Jesus' mathematics— which is not taught in accounting schools— she had given more than they had.

So we preachers have seized on this story and we bring it out every fall as a way of saying that every little counts to those who can't afford much. We don't say so, you know, but we know very well that reading the story this way shames those who could give more so maybe they will give more.

But it's not stewardship campaign time. I'm not under any instruction to raise funds with this particular sermon, though as a rule we do accept donations.

So I'm free to tell you that, although this is a story about fund-raising, it is not a fund-raising story. I'm also free to go where the story sends me. And I'm free to notice the context, the parts that come before and after the story of the widow. I'm free to stand where the story invites me to stand and see what the story invites me to see.

What I see first of all is that before we get to the story, Jesus has been in a long dispute with the Temple worthies. They try to trap him with questions, but he slips through their nets. He finishes the series by going on the offensive. Jesus attacks the scribes for their large egos. They like to be treated with respect in public; they say long prayers to look good; and they expect places of honor when the synagogue meets or they are invited to a dinner party.

They also exploit widows. Widows, as you remember, along with orphans and foreign workers, are the groups that ancient Israel considered to be especially vulnerable. Widows, orphans, and guest workers were isolated in a world where being alone was the next step from death, not just socially, but often quite literally. It was for this reason that God takes their treatment seriously and personally.

I know I hate it when I hear of some new scam that exploits the vulnerable. It's still too often the older folks among us, too often literally widows who are taken advantage of in this way. A Bernie Madoff builds a Ponzi scheme on retirement investments, or roofing companies take down payments and then skip town, or people posing as IRS agents offer to settle a tax debt for pennies on the dollar. All they need is your checking account number. They all get my blood boiling. If it were up to me I would smear them with honey and stake them out on a hill of fire ants. So it's probably a good thing it isn't up to me.

And here, according to Jesus' accusation, we have people who make their living telling people what the Covenant of Yahweh means— the covenant that demands the protection of widows, orphans, and guest workers— who are themselves the exploiters of the vulnerable, widows included. They figure out ways to separate widows from their precarious livings and then parade their own piety on the street corners.

This widow is a case in point!

While it is true that, if generosity is measured by what we give in comparison to what we can afford to give, the widow has a virtue few if any of us can match. But Jesus pointed her out, not as an illustration of generosity, but as an illustration of the hypocrisy of the scribes and an example of their flagrant disregard for justice and the covenant's demands. I don't think Jesus pointed her out because he admired her, although he may well have. I think Jesus pointed her out because he was disgusted by the way the Temple was abusing her piety and taking advantage of her.

Anyway, he seems to have had enough for the day. He and the disciples left the Temple. As they were going out, the disciples like a bunch of tourists were gaping at the architecture. That was the frosting on the cake. Wouldn't the Temple be more beautiful if it were a place where widows were protected and orphans were cared for and guest workers were treated fairly? Wouldn't that more than compensate for the slight loss of income and the slightly reduced operating budget for the Temple?

"You see these great buildings?" Jesus asked his disciples. "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." The Temple will be destroyed for the crimes that were committed there and the pride and hypocrisy of its leaders. Maybe honey and fire ants are in order, after all.

Fund-seeking preachers have turned this into a story about the wonderful piety of the poor widow when they should have noticed that Jesus underscored her actions as an indictment of the fund-raising efforts of the Temple and of the system of which it was the symbolic center. If anything, they should have been giving her money, not the other way around.

The whole of this text makes clear what generations of Consecration Sunday sermons have not: A society that requires that the poor become poorer so the rich can become richer lives on borrowed time and under the shadow of an impending doom. Any society founded on injustice builds fine monuments to its own glory upon a fault line so deep, so severe, so unstable, that not one stone will be left upon another.

Justice is a finer ornament than any amount of gold leaf. Mercy makes for better architecture than towers of glass and steel. Protecting the vulnerable from the rapacious rich provides better security than any amount of electronic surveillance. It is not too late to turn ourselves and to begin to turn the world toward these things.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

It Just Doesn’t Work (3rd Sunday in Lent; Mark 12:1-12; February 28, 2016)

It Just Doesn’t Work

3rd Sunday in Lent 
Mark 12:1-12 
February 28, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD 
First United Methodist Church 
Decorah, Iowa

Some of the kids in the after-school program have talked about what they are giving up for Lent. A common choice seems to be to give up candy.

Good for them. Good for us. Better yet, we might give up something in a way that does good for someone else. Maybe we could take the money that we would have spent on the candy that we've given up and donate it to a good cause instead. Maybe we could find a program that provides free dental care to those who can't afford it.

Doing ourselves good by giving up a bad habit is challenging. Changing our patterns of behavior to do someone else good is more challenging.

But deep change, the kind that qualifies as repentance, as a change of inner orientation, may be the hardest kind of all. Deep change involves changing our ways of thinking about the world and our place in it. Often, when we set out to do that, we discover that our old ways of thinking, our old ways of understanding the world, our old ways of living in the world, are structured by the myths that we hold. Or more accurately by the myths that hold us.

There are of course many myths that are a part of the shared wisdom of humankind. But when I think of myths I mean something a little different. A myth, you have heard me say, is a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. We do the telling. We do the listening. The story is about us. We are the ones who need explaining. And we are the ones we are trying to satisfy with our explanation. A myth is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves.

American life is dominated by a few myths, but the one that we tell the most is what Walter Wink calls "The Myth of Redemptive Violence." The Myth of Redemptive Violence tells us that the world is divided between good people (that's us) and bad people. The bad people do bad things. In the course of the unfolding plot of the story the good people will have to use violence against the bad people. That violence is good because it redeems and restores the world. The violence that bad people use is bad, but the violence that good people use is good, redemptive, and holy.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence supplies the plot line for much of our entertainment. A very example of the Myth is the criminal investigation drama. A body is discovered, and it turns out that someone has been murdered. The good people investigate and discover who the bad person or persons are who committed the crime. The bad people are killed or defeated with violence. With that the social world of the drama is restored and redeemed.

If entertainment were only entertainment that wouldn't be so bad, but entertainment is never just entertainment. And the Myth doesn't stop there. It invades and colonizes real life. It has a million variations. It is endlessly fascinating.

Our nation is currently in the grip of this myth. You can see this clearly in our entertainment, our criminal justice system, our foreign policy, and our debates over gun control. When a nation is possessed by this myth, as we now are, its thinking becomes rigid, ethics becomes nearly impossible, and body counts rise. War crimes like carpet bombing and torture seem reasonable, prudent, and even heroic.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence is powerful. In fact it's so powerful that it has the power to take over other stories and force them to tell its story instead. In the Scripture lesson for today I see a place where this has happened with deadly results both because of what the story should have been and the deaths that would have been prevented and because of what the story has become and the deaths it has caused.

The story is a parable.  Parables are stories drawn from ordinary life, from situations or actions that would have been familiar to Jesus' listeners, with an odd element introduced that would have encouraged his listeners to see the world in a new way.

I disagree with the traditional interpretations of parables. I do not believe that they are allegories. That is, when a parable says that "A man planted a vineyard", the parable is about a man who planted a vineyard. I believe that trying to understand the parable by assuming that the man is really God and the vineyard is really the promise of the covenant is not only wrong intellectually but also wrong morally.

Those are strong words and some of you may balk. You may do that. I will hear you out after the service. All I ask is that you hear me out now.

The parable as I said, is about a man who planted a vineyard. He did all of the things the vineyards needed to be productive. It is clear from the story that he never intended to run the vineyard himself. Instead, he leased the vineyard to tenants who would pay him a percentage share of the harvest.

Parables are drawn from situations in ordinary life. The situation in this parable was common enough in the Galilee of Jesus' day. Galilee was a client kingdom in the Roman Empire. The Romans were not interested in Galilee for its own sake but for the profit that it could generate. During Jesus' lifetime the Galilean landscape was changing. In the past peasants had had small land holdings on which they grazed a few sheep or goats, produced grain, and grew some olives and grapes, enough for their own use, plus a little to sell to buy the things they could not produce. More and more peasants were being forced to borrow money to pay taxes, more money than they could hope to repay by selling their surpluses. Peasants were being forced off their land and their land was being bought up by estate owners. Fields were joined together, unprofitable grain and livestock production were being replaced with cash crops like olives and grapes.

The peasants who had been forced off their land either moved into the less fertile, less productive uplands, or they were hired as workers or even tenant farmers on the very land which they had lost. I suspect how they felt about the situation. Instead of being landed peasants on farms they had worked for generations, they were now disposable laborers or contractors. They had no security, no dignity, and very few rights. They had come down in the world and they had come down hard. There were enough of these folks that it would be fair to say that resentment simmered just below the surface everywhere in Galilee and that resentment was focused on the wealthy and absent landowners.

So here was the situation when it came to the people in the parable. The landowner who had not in fact done any of the actual work the parable describes was living in a villa somewhere, hanging out with other rich people, complaining about how hard it was to get good help, and drinking the wine that was produced by the hard work of the displaced peasants who had become contract farmers. The landowner's only involvement was to collect his share of the wine.

So he sent agents. How do you suppose the contract farmers felt about the agents and their demands for rent? Now, unlike in real life where they knew better, the contract farmers in this story imagined that if they refused to pay the rents and beat up the agent they would get to keep the whole harvest. It doesn't work that way, but they acted as if it did. They beat up the agent. They refused to pay.

The landowner sent another agent who was treated in a similar way, and another, and another. The parable says that the man finally decided to send his son "whom he loved dearly." In reality the son might well have been sent on his father's behalf. The son's first stop would have been the governor's office. There he would have presented his case against the contract farmers. The governor would have detached a unit of legionaries to the son who would have showed up at gates of the estates prepared to do whatever needed to be done to restore his father's property rights.

But Jesus is using the parable to play with us. In the

ble the son shows up alone, his father having decided that good will would be enough to win the day. The contract operators see the son and say to each other, "This is the heir. Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours."

This was the part of the story that stopped Jesus' hearers short. That is not how inheritance laws worked. Killing an heir does not make the murderer the new heir! No one would have been so stupid as to imagine that, if they killed the landlord's son, they would inherit the vineyard!

What then is Jesus trying to say? Well, given the resentment against the Romans, it would have been tempting to imagine that killing the agents of the Empire would somehow set them free and restore their land. In other words, the Myth of Redemptive Violence was singing its siren song. How easy to give in to their anger, to let their rage loose against their enemy and its agents! How strong they would feel, how in control of their own fate, how free!

But Jesus knew that strength, control, and freedom cannot be found in rebellious violence. In fact, as we understand perfectly well, rebellion would lead only to disaster. Remember, within two months, the Romans could have fifteen thousand legionaries anywhere in Galilee. "What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others."

That, I believe, is what the parable meant to those who heard it first. The parable was an argument against the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Violence would not redeem; it would simply be answered by even more destructive violence and nothing would change, except that those who had suffered most would suffer even more. There is no redemption through violence. It just doesn't work.

Now, this is not the parable as it has come to us. As it has come to us it has been set into the context of a dispute between Jesus and the of the Jewish people. As it has come to us, the story about the impossibility of violent opposition to the unjust system under which Galilee suffered has instead become an allegory about the destruction of Jerusalem. The rich landowner has become God. The tenants have become the Jewish leaders. The vineyard itself has become the covenant promise. In the allegorized parable the Jewish leaders have been destroyed by God (using the armies of Rome) and the covenant promise has been given to "others." Who are these others? It doesn't say, but Mark's readers would have understood that the vineyard is now being operated for God by Christians. The "bad" Jewish leaders have been destroyed by purifying, redeeming violence, the promises given to the non-Jewish followers of Jesus, and the world has been cleansed and restored.

A parable told by Jesus in order to lay bare the lie of the Myth of Redemptive Violence has become, in Mark's telling just a generation later a story that is structured by the very myth it originally opposed.

It's not just a story in the Bible. This parable in its present re-mythed form had a role in one of the worst on-going atrocities in human history. In its present setting, the parable says that Jews are the problem in the world and violence that removes them is not only justified but righteous and holy. Year after year in Christian Europe as they heard this and stories like it read during Lent, Christians went home from church and butchered their Jewish neighbors. There is a straight line between this parable of the Wicked--that is to say, Jewish--Tenants and the Holocaust. That is why I say that this way of reading the parable is not simply intellectually wrong, but is morally wrong as well.

What then, shall we do? We who have allowed our good news to be hijacked by the Myth of Redemptive Violence? We who all too often have believed it and acted on it ourselves?

After our history, after our repeated invocation of holy violence, I believe there is only one thing we can do. For the world's sake and for our own, we must renounce the Myth of Redemptive Violence, not just for Lent but forever. It is time for the Christian Church to say once again, as it did long ago, that violence does not redeem or cleanse, that there is no use of violence that makes the world better or safer. It is time for us and for all Christians to say, as the Christians closest in time to Jesus said, No matter how great the temptation, no matter what it costs us, we Christians will not kill. We will not kill each other. We will not kill Muslims or any other supposed enemies. We will not kill anyone. Killing does not redeem. Killing does not purify or cleanse. We will not kill. Not again. Not ever. It just doesn’t work.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.