A New Regime (7th Sunday after Epiphany; Luke 7:36-50; February 19, 2017)

A New Regime

7th Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 7:36-50

February 19, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

Since I graduated from seminary some thirty-three years ago, our understanding of the New Testament has deepened immeasurably. Knowledge of the past advances in one of two ways: either we discover new information or we look at the information we already have in new ways. When it comes to the New Testament, barring the discovery of ancient manuscripts that would settle some puzzles about the text, the only way to make a great deal of progress is to use new methods for understanding what we already have. And this is what has happened in the last third of a century or so.

What scholars have done is to use the findings of anthropologists and sociologists. Sometimes these findings have deepened and enriched our view of the Bible by providing a more detailed background. At other times these findings have taken what we thought we knew about the Bible and stood it on its head. Or the result has been a little of both, as with our reading for today.

Social sciences have taught us to pay close attention to what we used to skip right over. For example, Jesus' encounter with the "woman who was a sinner" is set within a dinner party at which Jesus was the invited guest. It was a meal. Meals were incredibly important to ancient society. What seems to us to be the simple act of inviting someone to dinner for an enjoyable evening of conversation and food was loaded with meaning. It was bound up with questions of status, honor, prestige, and power. Think of a dinner party as one episode in a long-range competition for a place in the community.

Normally, to accept an invitation to a dinner was to become indebted to the host. Jesus was in Simon's debt. Among people of equal status this indebtedness wasn't normally a problem. People invited each other. Today's guest would be next week's host. It all worked out in the long run. This social debt was part of the glue that held an ancient community together. Of course this assumes that the players of the game were roughly equal to each other.

If they were not, the game got a little more complicated. Jesus was a wandering wonder-worker and preacher. He didn't have a house. He didn't have any money either. There was no way he could repay Simon's invitation with an invitation of his own. Simon knew that; he wasn't looking for a return invitation. He was looking for something else.

When I was in Suchitoto on sabbatical three years ago, I was invited to go out to dinner by Sister Peggy. It's a rule you might tuck away in case you need it sometime: When a nun invites you out to dinner, you will be picking up the check. But there are other forms of currency than money and I came away from the exchange far richer than I was when I started. Of course, I also learned that while Sister Peggy travels on an American passport, after thirty years in El Salvador she has un estómago salvadoreño, a Salvadoran stomach. And I do not. But, that, really is a story for a different time and place.

Anyway, Jesus could not repay Simon with a return invitation, so what was Simon looking for? Well, the mere fact that Jesus ate in his house as his house-guest added to Simon's prestige and honor in the community and especially among his peers with whom he competed for these things. After all, Jesus was something of a celebrity.

None of these things had to be said to the early readers of Luke. They all understood the game and they understood its rules. They followed the plays like die-hard fans of Manchester United follow a soccer game.

The scene is set when an uninvited guest showed up: a woman, described by the text as "a sinner." She didn't say anything. In fact she is both nameless and voiceless in this story. Instead she came up behind Jesus, wept over his feet, wiped them with her hair, and perfumed them with oil kept in an alabaster jar. Her hair was "down," otherwise she couldn't have used it to dry Jesus' feet. Women with their hair uncovered and down in public advertised their sexual availability. Simon recognized her as a "sinner," in this case, a prostitute, not because he knew her on sight or even by reputation, but because she was wearing the uniform.

Jesus didn't object to what the woman is doing even though Jesus, like Simon, knew what her social status was. Simon was scandalized. "What kind of holy man is this who lets a prostitute touch him?" Simon's shock was written all over his face. Jesus didn't have to be a mind-reader to know exactly what he was thinking.

So Jesus told a story. Since we were paying attention to the setting of the story, we are not at all surprised that it is a story about debt. This time it isn't social debt. Instead it's the monetary kind, the kind with signed loan agreements and credit checks and specified terms of repayment. Debts were all too familiar to the people of Jesus' time and place. A system of revolving credit that had allowed peasants and artisans to smooth out their cash flow problems had been transformed into a predatory loan system designed to extract as much wealth as possible from the people with the least amount of wealth to begin with. Peasants who had borrowed money against the harvest found themselves unable to payoff the whole amount even after the harvest had been gathered. They were on their way to losing their farms altogether to creditors who would then sell the land to landowners who wanted to produce luxury goods like wine and olive oil. Credit systems that had allowed peasant farmers to weather years of drought and blight, now became systems to strip them of their land and status as peasants. If they had no craft or trade, men in peasant families who lost their land faced bad choices: selling themselves into slavery, begging, or banditry. For women the choices were even more stark: selling themselves into slavery or becoming--guess what?--prostitutes.

So, with the woman who had most certainly not grown up dreaming of becoming a sex worker bathing his feet in tears and perfumed oil and his host looking on in disdain and blaming the woman for the disaster that had befallen her, Jesus told a story about two debtors. One of them owed about $3000 dollars 4and the other about $30,000. Neither, Jesus tells us, were able to repay the loan. The banker decided to write off the loans. He marked them as "paid in full" and returned the loan documents to the borrowers. Jesus didn't say why the lender decided to do that. I'd venture to say that this behavior would have been as unusual then as it is now. Bankers just don't do that.

Asked to draw a conclusion about which of the debtors would love the banker more, Simon answered that it would be the debtor who had had the larger loan forgiven. And Jesus agreed.

The began with social debt. Then Jesus told a story about financial debt. And, finally, he turned from financial debt to another kind of debt.

Anyway, Jesus reminded Simon that the invitation to dinner had not been based on gratitude. Simon invited Jesus to dinner but had failed to show him the respect suitable to a guest who was a social equal. Simon had not greeted Jesus with a kiss. Simon had not provided water so that Jesus could wash his feet. But the woman who was "a sinner" had been kissing his feet and washing them with her tears since Jesus had entered the house.

Now there is a traditional way of reading this story. Within that reading there is a traditional way of reading the woman's tears: they are tears of sorrow, tears of contrition, tears of repentance. The woman is aware of how much her life and behavior differ from what they should be. She is overwhelmed with grief, overwhelmed with sorrow at the choices that she has made and what it has cost her in her relationship with God and with her community. She longs for forgiveness and restoration and perhaps grieves because she does not believe that it is possible.

Jesus responds to her sorrow and shame by telling her that her sins have been forgiven. Her tears touch Jesus' heart with pity and in pity he grants her the restoration she is looking for.

Other versions of this story and ones like it have been joined together in traditional imagination so that this woman's story doesn't end here. In fact, says the tradition, the woman is none other than Mary of Magdala, Mary Magdalene, who became a follower of Jesus, was present with him at his death, and was one of the first witnesses to the resurrection.

That's the traditional reading. Unfortunately for the tradition, that is not what the story says. Jesus tells a story about debt forgiveness. The amount of the debt that is forgiven is reflected in the love and gratitude of the two debtors. "The one who is forgiven little loves little," he says. He's talking about Simon. But "her many sins have been forgiven; so she has shown great love" is what he says about this child of God at his feet. Notice the past tense: "have been forgiven." She was not forgiven when he said, "Your sins are forgiven." Her sins had been forgiven before she arrived at Simon's house. They were forgiven before she picked up the alabaster jar of perfumed oil. Her tears were not tears of sorrow or contrition; they were tears of gratitude and joy. She was not weeping because she hoped for forgiveness; she was weeping because she had been forgiven.

What had the woman heard that brought her to this conclusion? Had she heard something in Jesus' preaching? Was it something that he had said? Possibly. After all, Jesus had begun his public ministry by announcing Jubilee, which is a program of debt forgiveness. Jubilee is connected to the Sabbath. There is a weekly Sabbath from work. On the seventh day of the week--Sabbath means "seven"--work ceases. All work. No one works. Not even slaves. Not even animals. Every seven years the land itself rests. Whatever grows by itself is for the poor, but nothing is to be planted. The land rests.

Jubilee comes in a Sabbath of Sabbath years. Every fifty years, not only does the land rest, but any land that has been mortgaged is released from debt. It returns to the seller. If someone has had to be sold into slavery and their families have been unable to buy their freedom, in the year of Jubilee they are released and may return to their families.

This is what is said in the Torah. There are lots of questions about the Jubilee. Among the really good questions is whether the Jubilee was ever actually observed. In some ways it doesn't matter if it was. The idea of Jubilee is a powerful image and it worked in Israel's imagination of what covenant life should look like. Jubilee was an image that could be adapted. In Isaiah in the portion that Jesus quoted in his inaugural sermon the Jubilee could include the release of captives, the return of exiles, the healing of the blind, and good news for the poor. Incidentally, a part of Isaiah 40:18 is forged into a famously flawed bell housed in Philadelphia. Jesus invoked all of that and more in his ministry.

Only, if I read his gospel rightly, Jesus' notion of Jubilee is not an event that happens twice a century, but a permanent way of life. For Luke's Jesus Jubilee is an image of God's dream and the way of life into which he has called us.

If Jubilee means debt relief, then permanent Jubilee means the abolition of the debt system altogether. We can hardly imagine what that would mean in actual practice, but it would certainly be good news for the poor!

And it was good news for the poor woman who was "a sinner." If sin is a sort of debt owed to God, then permanent Jubilee means that we are always already forgiven. Repentance then means, not the sorrow and regret that come before forgiveness, but the joy, gratitude, and transformed outlook that come after forgiveness.

We are always already forgiven. Simon was always already forgiven. He felt little joy and gratitude because he had experienced little forgiveness. Maybe it's because he had so few sins. More likely it's because he thought that forgiveness was something he had to earn and deserve and, while he tried his best, he wasn't getting very far. The woman on the other hand has experienced the full force of the always already forgiveness that comes along with Jubilee.

We are accustomed to saying that Jesus paid the debt for our sins, but the image of Jubilee as Jesus seems to be using it suggests that we are forgiven for the simple reason that God has decided to forgive us. And, so that we are not misled into thinking that there is some sort of religion that can serve as a technology of forgiveness and--just as importantly--of the denial of forgiveness to those who don't meet our qualifications, forgiveness--debt freedom--is given to all of us simply because God loves us and wants us to be freed for joyful gratitude and a transformed outlook. We are forgiven, set free from this most awful of debts, and given new life without price, without the possibility of payment, as a pure gift simply because God loves us. Yes, God loves us, and there is nothing we can do about it. Amen.

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.

Shrine Builders, Inc. (Festival of the Transfiguration; Luke 9:28-36; February 26, 2017)

Shrine Builders, Inc.

Festival of the Transfiguration

Luke 9:28-36

February 26, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

I like Peter. He was the sort of fellow who never knows what he's going to say until after he's said it. He speaks before he thinks; he leaps before he looks. He can be counted on to give his opinion unfiltered, unvarnished, sometimes even unsolicited.

This time he unasked opinion is a doozy. Not only didn't he know what he was going to say before he said it, but I'm not sure he knew what he had said after he had said it. "It's good that we're here. We should construct three shrines."

Really? Three shrines? Why? Just before Peter blurted this out, our text says that Moses and Elijah who had appeared with Jesus "were about to leave." Is Peter suggesting that building shrines is a way of keeping them from leaving?

Our translation calls them shrines, but the word refers to a tent or temporary shelter. The same word is used to describe the large tent that served as a portable temple. It's also used to describe a sukkah, the shelter that Jews make from leafy branches to celebrate the Festival of Booths that remembers Israel's wandering in the desert.

So Peter proposes to build shelters or pitch tents so that Moses and Elijah will stay and this experience can be prolonged. That is one of the things that shrines do. We build shrines not only mark a place but also to preserve something, a presence or a memory.

The shrines I see most often take the form of roadside crosses, often with flowers and sometimes a plaque that names the spot as the place where someone loved had remembered lost their life in a needless and violent tragedy. As long as the shrine is there and there are people who remember when they see it, a kind of presence persists and the abyss of grief does not seem so deep.

So maybe that's what Peter means. Three shrines even if not permanently occupied will point to the three brilliant figures that the disciples saw. As long as the shelter/shrines are there, a little of that overwhelming experience will remain as well. To see the shelters, perhaps even to sit in them, is to place oneself within this event once again. So, in a sense, Peter wants this to go on and on, to be with Jesus and Moses and Elijah up on the mountaintop.

But the mountain reminds us that the presence of God in Israel's experience is not a simple delight. God is more than a bit overwhelming. Read the mountaintop experiences in Israel's story and we find that these events were important, but we don't find any great desire to repeat them.

The shelters/shrines/tents that Peter wants to build also take us back to the mountain in the desert when Moses met God in the cloud and came down with the covenant etched in stone and carved on his heart. The people were to fashion a tabernacle, a tent that would serve as a place for God to stay when the people were encamped during their wilderness wandering. But this tent was less for God's comfort and convenience than for Israel's safety. The living God is not an object that can be handled or kept, like a sheep or goat that can be domesticated and bent to Israel's use. God has a tent in the wilderness for the same reason that transformer sub-stations in the power grid have high fences around them and signs that warn: "Keep out! Danger of death from electrocution!" In Israel's witness God is loving, yes, and compassionate, but also dangerous to human carelessness.

Maybe Peter wants to build shrines so that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah--with their frighteningly changed faces--can be safely tucked away where no one especially Peter, John, and James will be exposed to so much holiness and divine glory.

That's how shrines work. They both preserve an experience, and protect the shrine-builders from a too-direct exposure. The roadside shrine does both of these things: it preserves the sacred memory of someone loved and lost and substitutes a cross and flowers for the ugliness of an accident scene. This is not a criticism, by the way. Who could tolerate a relentless exposure to the scene of a fatal crash? So we build a shrine to do the work of substitution.

A shrine represents an encounter with God, the sight of a transfigured Jesus, a person much-loved but now no longer with us. There is nothing wrong with representing. It's what we do. But we have to remember the double nature of representation. The first side is the representation re-presents something, makes something present again, connects us with the reality it points us to. The bread and wine of the Lord's Table re-present the body and blood of Christ--they present it again.

But there is another side of representation. It re-presents something by presenting something else. We must remember this whenever someone offers to be our representative. They may be interested in our opinions or they may do their best to avoid getting our opinions, but in any event they will be in Washington or Des Moines and we will not.

While at the Lord's Table the bread and wine re-present the body of Christ, make the body of Christ present again, but all the same they are bread and wine, not human flesh and blood.

This is obvious in a way, but we forget it nonetheless. Perhaps you have seen the painting by René Magritte. It's entitled "The Treachery of Images." It features a very realistic image of a drop-stem pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," that is, "This is not a pipe." My first reaction is always, "That's absurd! Of course it's a pipe!" But then, I remember, "Ah, it isn't a pipe, is it? It's a painted image of a pipe." Magritte's painting reminds us that the treachery of images is that they make a subtle claim to be what they represent.

Of course, we know that we can't stuff a painting of a pipe with tobacco and smoke it, anymore than we can live in the house in a pre-schooler's drawing.

But shrines are, if anything, even more treacherous than images. How many people who quickly get Magritte's joke nonetheless believe that God lives in a church or who react with visceral horror when the Annual Conference announces the closing of a church camp. "But I met Jesus there!" they sputter, mistaking a painting of a pipe for the pipe itself.

It's not that we haven't built some mighty fine shrines, including this one. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I've been trying to tease apart what Peter meant when he offered to go into the shrine-building business, forced into it in part because Peter himself didn't know what he meant. I'd almost forgotten that, if Peter didn't know what he was saying and offered no commentary, the same cannot be said of God.

A cloud covered the hilltop and a voice spoke from the cloud: "This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!" And there was Jesus alone, the cloud vanished, the voice silent. It was as if it had never happened. And so Jesus and his disciples walked back down the hill. They left behind no shrines but this text which is dangerous enough. Shrines don't have to be made of leafy branches or bricks and mortar. Texts can be shrines and so can ideas, traditional practices, and religious systems.

We can imagine an alternative ending in which Peter, John, and James built the shrines. When they were done, they were proud of their work and of the finished products. The shrines were in fact both beautiful and functional. Peter looked at his shrine and said, "I think I'll call it Christianity." John looked at his shrine and said, "I'll call mine Judaism." Not to be outdone, James said, "And I'll call mine Islam." Out of jealousy they began to find fault with each other's shrines. They made bigger and bigger claims for their own.

But how did God respond? God wept and said, "This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!" Awakening as if from a dream, Peter, James, and John left behind their shrines on the hilltop and walked back down the hill as brothers.

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.

Are You the One? (6th Sunday after Epiphany; Luke 7:15-38; February 12, 2017)

Are You the One?

6th Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 7:15-38

February 12, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

"Are you the one?" John wanted to know. He was in prison, waiting for the disposition of his case. He had preached a message of repentance and he had the audacity to think that a general call to repentance should apply to all of the Torah's children, even the king. The king disagreed. So John was in prison, waiting for the disposition of his case. Forced to do nothing, his mind wandered. Maybe he wondered if his ministry had amounted to anything, if it had done any good, if any part of it would survive or bear fruit. Maybe he thought that if Jesus were the one John and his disciples had been waiting for he would be able to face his own future knowing that his life and work had mattered. We can imagine these things even if the text doesn't tell us.

So John sent two of his disciples to put the question to Jesus: "Are you the one?" For John, a lot rode on the answer to that question. We make that question carry a lot of weight, too.

How many times have we heard some variation of the question in a movie or television romance? In the wake of a relationship disaster, someone says through tears, "I thought she was the one." People buy self-help books to find out why they haven't met "the one" and to change the odds in their favor. They join match-making websites hoping that an algorithm and a database will find “the one” for them.

We cherish this notion that each of us has a "one" for whom we are "the one" and that the universe will unfold in such a way that events will bring us together. Falling in love feels so big, so overwhelming, that we find it easy to believe that there is something cosmic at work, that our love is written in the stars. No wonder then, that people read their horoscopes only half in jest to test whether their current lover qualifies as "the one."

We bring this notion with us into our national political life. It doesn't seem to be enough to examine candidates, weigh their proposals, and decide who has the better ideas and the better chance of putting them into practice. We expect to fall in love with a candidate. We expect a candidate to be "the one," the one who can arrest a slide into some abyss, the one who will turn our national story into a fairy tale, the one with whom we can live happily ever after.

This isn't a partisan issue. Republicans and Democrats alike look for someone to be "the one" and turn their own candidate into a messiah and the candidate of the other party into an anti-Christ. And how disappointed some are to discover after one is elected and the other is not, that upon taking office the candidate turns out to be merely human! Disillusionment sets in and we cast our longing eyes about in search of someone else who could be "the one." It seldom occurs to us that we have been projecting our own hopes and fears onto the political screen and that our thoughts and feelings about the figures on the screen are less about them than they are about us.

Anyway, Jesus did something interesting when the messengers from John arrived and they asked him John's question: "Are you the one?" Or, rather, he didn't do something and that is interesting. He didn't answer the question. Instead, he launched into a frenzy of ministerial activity. He healed many people from "their diseases, illnesses, and evil spirits." Then he told John's disciples to tell John what they had witnessed, that is, what they had seen and heard. And, just in case they had missed that, Jesus told them what they have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, people with skin diseases have been cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have heard good news.

The one thing John's messengers did not see or hear was Jesus giving them an answer to John's question. "Are you the one?" Jesus doesn't say.

We could say, "Well, fine! He didn't say it in so many words, but he did act it out." Fair enough, but before I yield the point let me say that Jesus' description of what John's disciples had seen and heard sounds a little familiar. It's not an exact quotation, but it seems clear enough that Jesus has referred us back to his inaugural address just three chapters ago:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because the Lord has anointed me

and has sent me to preach good news to the poor,

to proclaim release to the prisoners

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to liberate the oppressed...

First he said it; then he did it. The blind see again. The poor have good news announced to them. And, true enough, it is because the Spirit of the Lord is on him, but even more because it is time. God has declared a Jubilee, "the year of the Lord's favor": Debts are canceled, slaves are freed, exiles come home, prisoners are set free, the blind see, the lame walk, the poor hear the announcement of freedom. It is nothing less than the Jubilee in the service of which Martin Luther King, Jr., preached and lived and died and proclaimed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he repeated the lyrics of the old spiritual: "Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last!"

Was this an answer to the question, "Are you the one?"? Maybe. But to me it sounds as if Jesus is saying, "That's the wrong question. The question is not about who. The question is about when. And the answer to the question is, 'Now!' God's dream is come and it's here and it's there and it's everywhere. A blind woman sees and that's God's dream. A lame man walks and that's God's dream. A sick child gets out of bed and that's God's dream. A refugee far from home hears the ringing of a far off bell and knows that it's time to go home and that's God's dream. A man cut off from human touch because of a skin disease brought about by the malnutrition and stress of oppression has the skin of a baby and may give and get the hugs that we all need each day to live and that's God's dream. A woman whose mind broke under the weight of the burden the Empire had placed on her is now in her right mind and her children no longer fear her and that's God's dream. God's dream is busting out all over; there is no stopping it; its time is come; it's everywhere. It's even in your prison cell, John. Am I the one? Does it matter?" To me it sounds as if that is what Jesus is saying.

We keep looking for "the one." And we keep getting disappointed. The ones who seem to be "the one" turn out not to be "the one." And so our search goes on. Like Neil Young we're still searching for a heart of gold. And again, like him, we are getting old.

"Are you the one who is coming, or should we look for someone else?" John asked. A voice from our own time answers, "We are the ones we have been waiting for."¹ But really that's another answer that says that "who?" is the wrong question. The question is "when?" and the answer is, "Now." We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the ones who are coming. There is no need to wait for anyone else. God's dream is bursting forth like a germinating seed. God's dream is breaking in like a Russian computer hacker.

When people with homes stand up for those who have fled their homes in terror, that's God's dream. When people with clean water to drink stand up for those whose faucets yield poison, that's God's dream. When people with good food on the table and more in the refrigerator stand up for those who live in the food deserts of our cities, that's God's dream. When people who speak English stand up for those who speak Spanish or Arabic or Norwegian, that's God's dream. When straight people stand up for LGBTQ people, that's God's dream. When white people stand up for people of color who live with and die from the everyday racism that slips below the radar, that's God's dream. When men stand up for the women who face indignities and worse each day, that's God's dream. And, maybe most of all, when white folks and straight folks and menfolk and able-bodied folks stand up and cheer when folks of color and LGBTQ folks and womenfolk and folks with handicapping conditions speak up for themselves to claim their dignity as God's children, that's God's dream. God’s dream is here and it's there and it's everywhere. God's dream is come. It's chanting in the street. It’s singing on the courthouse steps. It's knocking at the door. God's dream is come. Here is the place. Now is the time. We are the ones.

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. June Jordan, "Poem for South African Women", Passion, 1980

1 June Jordan, "Poem for South African Women", Passion, 1980

New Life for the Dead...and Almost Dead (5th Sunday after Epiphany; Luke 7:1-17; February 5, 2017)

New Life for the Dead...and Almost Dead

5th Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 7:1-17

February 5, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

There are fourteen healing stories in Luke's gospel by my count, not including the episodes that involve casting out demons. Healing was such an important part of Jesus' ministry, that we really can't do justice to his life's work without recognizing that people came to him because he offered the possibility of healing. Healing was hard to come by.

But the point of all these stories can hardly be the simple fact of the healings themselves. Otherwise we have thirteen cases of, "Look! There's another one!" We have to go past the fact of the two healings in our reading for today. We can ask how the two stories are related. We can do what is called close reading.

We'll take them one at a time. We'll start with the second.

In this story, Jesus and his followers happen on a funeral procession. A widow's son had died. His body was being carried out of the town of Nain to the local cemetery. Burials did not wait for the out-of-town relatives to arrive. The body needed to be buried quickly. Jesus stopped as the procession was coming out of the town gate, told the grieving mother to stop crying, and touching the stretcher on which her son's body was being carried told him to rise. Immediately, the young man sat up and started talking. The woman had her son back and the crowd was astounded. We would be, too.

The story is clear that it was not simply any woman whose son had died, but a widow who had only one son. Those are important details. A woman whose husband had died was not only grieving but was also in a precarious position in her community, especially if she had no grown sons. In any legal dispute she was likely to have to stand alone. Her own family would have no interest in defending her: they had nothing to gain by it. Her husband's family actually had an interest in challenging her right to inherit his property, lest it be permanently lost to them. She would have no one to defend her.

But, of course, this woman was not alone. She and her late husband had a son, a grown son, his father's heir. This son was their 401K, their retirement plan. When they were too old to support themselves, he would care for them. Perhaps they would have preferred to have had more than one son, but at least they had him. When her husband died, her son stepped into the role of head of the family. He was part of his father's family, so they would not be angling for their land and property. But then the disaster fell and the young man died too.

Jesus came on the scene just as the funeral procession was passing through the town gates. I thought at first that the "large crowd from the city" meant that she was well-regarded. On further reflection I wonder if the crowd may have been made up at least partly of the human vultures who--now that the widow was undefended--gathered around to pick bare the bones of her estate.

If so, they were frustrated in their designs by Jesus who restored the young man to life and rescued his mother. He acted that day in obedience to the demand of the Torah to protect the widow and other vulnerable people. What better way to protect her than to raise her son from the dead?

We now know what Jesus is up to in his healing ministry. It was not just a matter of hanging out his shingle and healing whoever showed up. In this story we see a special case of Jesus' commitment to liberate the downtrodden from oppression and to secure the well-being of people who had little power in his culture. Jesus, in a favorite phrase of liberation theology, has a preferential option for the poor and the marginalized.

That's the second story. Now for the first that concerns a Roman centurion who lived in (or near) Capernaum. As you might imagine, a centurion was a commander of a unit called a century composed, surprisingly, of 80 soldiers. Centurions were usually appointed from the ranks of soldiers and it was possible for that advancement to continue. The top centurion was called the "first spear" and was well-paid.

A centurion who managed to advance and who was careful with his pay could muster out after ten or twenty years of military service with quite a little nest egg, enough to buy land. Land was always the goal for the upwardly mobile. With land a man (and I do mean a man) could be rich in the sense that he would no longer have to work. The centurion of our story had apparently reached this lofty and elusive goal even before retiring.

To be rich was to also to attract a circle of people looking for a patron. They were people who were placed lower on the social scale who looked to a rich person to provide money or influence to get things done for them. A patron got prestige and honor according to the number and quality of his clients. Our centurion had not only gathered the money needed, but had also gathered clients from the leadership of the Jewish community.

So Jesus and his disciples were met going into Capernaum by some lay leaders from the synagogue. Think the Board of Trustees, rather than rabbis. These clients of our about-to-retire centurion came as messengers with a request that Jesus come and heal a valued servant. They praised their patron as a lover of the Jewish people who had even built their synagogue for them. Consider that the centurion was a officer in the occupation force, and this was high praise indeed. Even so, this was just the sort of thing that a patron would expect from his clients.

Jesus went with the centurion's client-emissaries. But before he had arrived at the centurion's house, friends--presumably gentile friends--of the centurion met the parade to say that it wasn't necessary to come all the way to the house. The centurion understood that entering a gentile house would complicate Jesus' life. And besides it wasn't necessary. The centurion understood a chain of command. All that was needed was for Jesus to give the order and his servant would be well. According to Jesus, the centurion understood something about living into God's dream that no one else even in Judah understood. So Jesus granted the request of this rich and powerful foreigner.

These two healing stories, placed together, pose an urgent and difficult question: What happened to Jesus' preferential option for the poor?

Some may say, "Jesus has no interest in class relations or in political economy. Jesus is only interested in people as individuals. He doesn't care whether you're rich or poor, powerful or weak, an insider or an outsider." I think that conclusion will run aground on the New Testament as a whole and certainly on the prophets, but a good case could be made. And you may, of course, choose to make that case.

I suspect something else, though. I think that these are stories about two people who are both outsiders, each in their own way. The widow who is about to bury her son is an outsider despite the fact that she is well-known and, presumably, well-respected in her community. She is an outsider because her son's death has stripped her of her ability to defend herself and to hang on to the property she will need to support herself in her remaining years. People will say, "Isn't that a shame about poor Mrs. Rosenberg," but what they say will not prevent her from being crushed by the political economy. Only having her son alive will do that.

The centurion is also an outsider, although a rich and powerful one. Part of the occupation force in Roman Palestine he is not a part of the people of God and he wants to be. He has come as close as he can without being circumcised: he has built a synagogue and in other ways acted the part of the good patron. His Jewish clients praise him, but he is still not one of them. Now, Jesus has brought him within the circle where the Jewish God acts by healing the centurion's servant. The centurion has been witness to one of God's saving acts in history.

The centurion and the widow are both parts of a system that distributes power and wealth. The centurion is rich; the widow is poor. But they are both stuck in the system. The stakes are different for them, of course: the centurion is rich. The rich always have choices and options not available to the poor. But there is a cost to those choices, a cost to being the beneficiary to an unjust system.

God's dream is for all of us, without exception, to have enough to eat, to live in well-built houses that are warm in the winter, to be free of curable or preventable diseases, and above all to enjoy the wealth of human community. Any system that yields haves and have-nots is a system that deprives some of what they need in order to live and the others of the possibility of living in genuine human communities. The widow is threatened with impoverishment. The centurion is wealthy. But they are both trapped in a system that strips them of their humanity and forecloses on God's dream. So of course the one who came to embody God's dream among us offers healing to both of them.

God has a preferential option for the poor. That's good news. But that good news does not mean that the rich are outside of God's love or Jesus' healing ministry. That's good news, too. And the bottom line is, as always, God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.

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.

Sabbath Complications (4th Sunday after Epiphany; Luke 6:1-16; January 29, 2017)

Sabbath Complications

4th Sunday after Epiphany
Luke 6:1-16
January 29, 2017

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

In our reading are two awkward stories about Jesus and Sabbath-keeping, the practice of observing a day of rest on the seventh day of the week. They are awkward because they appear to validate our modern collective decision to do away with sabbath-keeping altogether.

In the first story, Jesus and his friends are walking through wheat fields. His disciples are hungry, so they pluck grains of wheat as they walk along, remove the husks by rubbing the grains between their hands, and eat it. I can't imagine that it was a very satisfying snack. It can't have been an efficient way to harvest and process grain. Besides, raw wheat isn't easy to digest. But maybe it was better than nothing.

But it was on the Sabbath. Crops could not be harvested on the Sabbath. Harvesting was work. There are six days for work. The sabbath isn't one of them.

Jesus' critics pointed out all of this out to the disciples. As an answer, Jesus reminded them that David had once stolen the bread from the Temple altar to feed his personal troops. Of course, David did a lot of things that are never outright condemned in the Bible. I'm not sure we should take that as permission.

The other Sabbath story concerns Jesus healing a man with a withered hand, literally a "dry" hand. Jesus was attending synagogue. The man with a useless hand was also there. Knowing that Jesus made a habit of healing on the Sabbath, his critics watched him closely. He did not disappoint them. Jesus had the man stand up, said some words about the purpose of the Sabbath, and healed the man's hand.

But, of course, healing was among the activities prohibited on the Sabbath. Jesus' critics can add another charge to his indictment.

So what is Jesus up to? And how do we read this text so that it leads to the saving of lives rather than their destruction?

Perhaps what Jesus is doing is loosening the Sabbath rules, making room for the demands of life and recognizing reality. You shouldn't harvest on the Sabbath. But what if you're really hungry and you don't have any food and you're walking through a wheat fields and the grain is ripe? Okay, well then you may pluck and eat a few hands full of grain.

But what if it's the Sabbath and you learn that tomorrow there will be a severe storm with possible hail and high winds that would flatten the stalks and ruin the harvest? Wouldn't it be best to get the crop in today? But isn't that a bit of a slippery slope? Doesn't that end with no Sabbath at all?

When Jesus met the man with the withered hand, instead of just healing him, he could have said, Come by my office tomorrow and I'll heal you then. But maybe healing is an “essential function.”

Even the days of Sunday "blue laws" we recognized that certain jobs are essential, Sabbath or not. Doctors, nurses, firefighters, and the police are examples. Farmers who keep dairy cattle can hardly say, "Sorry, ladies. I can't milk you until tomorrow, because it's the Sabbath."

But there is that slippery slope again. Where do the exemptions for essential services stop?

Maybe nowhere. After all, Jesus said that "the Human One is Lord of the Sabbath." Maybe Jesus intent was to do away with the Sabbath altogether. Maybe it should be the Nine Commandments, not Ten.

But Jesus seems to think that there is a reason for the Sabbath that might override some conventional ways of keeping Sabbath depending on the circumstances. The question that he throws at the critics whose Sabbath wish is to have some violation of the rules to pin on Jesus implies that the Sabbath is about saving life and doing good.

The Sabbath in the Hebrew Bible is more than one thing. In the first creation story in Genesis the Sabbath is God's last creative act, the culmination of creation. It is the rest that follows and rewards accomplishment. In Deuteronomy the Sabbath is placed with the Sabbath year for cultivated fields, orchards, and vineyards. They are taken out of production once every seven years. It is also placed with the Jubilee, the law that decreed that every seven times seven years slaves were freed and houses and fields would be returned to their original owners. This Sabbath returns a person or a thing to its original status; it makes things pristine once again; it's the button on your cell phone that resets it to the condition it was in when it left the factory.

It seems that this second notion of Sabbath is Jesus' motivation for healing--the man with the "dry" hand is re-created and returned to being an unblemished image of God. In this understanding, healing on the Sabbath is not only permitted but mandated. But where does that leave health care professionals?

At this point several approaches to (or avoidances of) Sabbath-keeping are on the table and frankly I find it pretty confusing. What rule are we supposed to follow, anyway?

Well, in the Methodist tradition the standard we judge by is whether an idea or a rule increases love for God and neighbor. When thinking about love I've found if helpful to sit for a little while at the feet of the medieval monk and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux. And, yes, this is the one for whom the St. Bernard breed of dog was named.

Bernard said that there are four kinds of love arranged in stages from lower to higher. In the first stage of love we love ourselves for our own sake. That is, we do whatever we want. In the second stage we love God for our sake. As Bernard frames it, we love God in order to seek heaven and avoid hell. In the third stage we love God for God's sake. I would have said that's about as high as we can hope to go, but Bernard's real contribution is to add the fourth stage in which we love ourselves for God's sake. That it, we love and cherish ourselves because we are precious to God and are unwilling to cause God harm or pain by self-neglect or self-damage.

Now I'm not sure if Bernard would authorize this next step, but I'm going to give a try.

In the first stage we do as we please about Sabbath-keeping. Of course, in practice, "doing what we please" generally translates into doing the things that are favored by our culture which is making an ideal out of the inhuman demand that life be lived 24/7. While we may ache for rest, we resent the notion that we should be rested.

In the second stage we love and keep the Sabbath for our own sake. It might be because keeping the Sabbath is a rule that we dare not break or because a doctor has told us that unless we get regular rest our next heart attack will be our last. In the second stage we worry a lot about the rules. And we get lost in worrying about what is and is not allowed on the Sabbath.

In the third stage we love and keep the Sabbath for its sake, because Sabbath is a delight. Concern for the rules fades. We don't have to be told that anxiously checking Facebook or Twitter is incompatible with Sabbath, because we know it won't work as soon as we try.

In the fourth stage we love and keep ourselves and our neighbor for Sabbath's sake. The restoration and redemption at the heart of the Sabbath require that we be redeemed and restored. The Sabbath is about healing, so healing is appropriate, healing for each other and healing for ourselves.

Does that work? I think it might. I'm not sure. You tell me.

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.