A Different God, a Different Liturgy (18th Sunday after Pentecost; Amos 5:18-24; James 2:14-17; October 8, 2017)

A Different God, a Different Liturgy

18th Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 5:18-24
James 2:14-17
October 8, 2017

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

I’ve been thinking about a seminar I had in graduate school with Charles Long.

His theory of religion is centered in exchanges. Whenever a human being exchanges something with another human being (or, I would add, with the surroundings), there is what Long called "a surplus of meaning." That is, there is meaning leftover from what is contained in the exchange itself. For example, if I sell something to one of you, and I take that money and buy something from someone else, so that money and goods are circulating among us, there is not only the money and the things being exchanged. There is also meaning that is being produced by the exchanges. Now, for Long, religion is about this surplus of meaning.

Long was making this case one day and I was thinking about it, looking for an example that would throw him off his stride. "All exchanges produce a religious surplus of meaning?" I thought. "Aren't there exchanges that don't produce anything, let alone meaning? What about war?"

And so I said out loud, "What is the surplus of war?" Apparently, I wasn't the first graduate wise-guy who had thought of that because he didn't hesitate to answer, "Death. The surplus of war is death. War produces the sacred dead."

Death is an exchange that produces a religious surplus of meaning. Where there is death, especially where there is a lot of death, we can expect all the things that we think of as going along with religion. Especially, we can expect the development of ritual.

In the last week we've been enacting the ritual that we use when there is a mass shooting.

When the event is large enough--and the Las Vegas shooting was large by any measure--the entire nation is engaged. The exchange is not limited to a shooter firing hundreds of rounds from semi-automatic weapons; it's not limited to the dead and injured. The exchanges spread like ripples on a pond, or maybe like the storm surge of a hurricane. The families and friends of the victims are caught up. The first responders and the people who made the contacts with next of kin are caught up. city officials are caught up and become part of the exchanges. The media are engaged in exchanges of their own and tens of millions of us become participant-observers of the shooting.

Death produces a surplus of meaning. And death on this scale produces an explosive surplus. So we've been going through our ritual for the observance of a mass shooting, a liturgy, really, since its object is to contain the meaning produced by so much death.

The liturgy begins a little chaotically. Think of the conversations that go on each Sunday morning as we gather for worship, and of the slightly messy way that these conversations cease as a worship leader greets us and calls us to worship. A news announcement interrupts television programming to say that there has been a mass shooting in Las Vegas at a country music festival. A shared story is posted on a social media site. Reports trickle out from the site of the shooting. An unknown shooter has fired hundreds of rounds and dozens are feared dead. More details will follow.

Then, as the media start to arrive and connect with their news centers, details start to emerge, a video recorded on someone's cell phone, a short interview with someone lucky enough to escape with reports of fear, injury, and death.

Perhaps that is followed by an announcement from law enforcement officials, to reassure the public that the scene is secured and the immediate threat contained.

Then we move to the part of the liturgy that when it happens here we call something like the Proclamation of the Word. The media are our liturgists. They are in a very difficult position. Journalism is hard enough on ordinary days. When knowledge is scarce and the situation is changing rapidly and emotionally charged, it's even harder. Journalists do what human beings do. They to tell a story. That's how we make sense of the senseless. We should wait until we have a better picture, but we don't because we can't tolerate much senselessness, and a story--any story--makes sense of the senseless.

Proclamation of the Word in this liturgy as in ours is about myth-making, not in the sense of making up a false story or fake news. A myth, remember (according to me) is a story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. There is nothing wrong with myth-making. It's part of what humans do. But myth-making can be done badly, especially when time is short and pressure is high and we feel the unconscious need to remain ignorant of some things.

The perpetrators of large mass shooting are almost always white and they are always men, but instead of telling a story about the terrible things that white men think they are entitled to do when they are angry and get their hands on massive firepower, we tell a story about a deranged shooter, a lone wolf, a disturbed and troubled (white male) person who was driven by his inner demons to commit an otherwise senseless act. White men are the good guys, so the story we tell about something so horrid must be about an aberration, an exception to the rule.

Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, is really troubling our myth-making. He wasn't insane. He doesn't seem to have harbored paranoid delusions. He was against taxes and didn't like the government. Nothing unusual there. He was a middle class white man.

Paddock, though dead, is resistant to falling in line with our liturgy. But then, as preachers know better than anyone, the sermon doesn't always work.

Other parts of the liturgy are coming together, though. There are stories about the helpful people, people who aided others in finding safety. Some even died while doing it. One man stole a pickup truck and transported several loads of wounded to the nearest hospital. These are stories that fit. Tragedy brings out the good in people. It's helpful to think that we might respond like that, although I wonder how many people have been plunged into a nightmare of shame because all they could think of was their own safety.

The story is coming together and people are reacting in the movement that we might call the Response to the Word. Mourners gather and place flowers, candles, and messages on cards at the scene of the atrocity. They sing sometimes, pray sometimes, or just stand silently, some weeping. It's part of our liturgy.

Then comes a litany, a kind of call and response, a back and forth movement like a congregation saying a responsive reading:

"We need background checks."

"This time of grief is not the time for policy decisions."

"We need to restrict the ownership of assault weapons."

"Now is not the time."

"We need to close the loopholes on selling guns."

"Now is not the time."

Eventually the litany fades away into silence. The unspoken decision is that nothing will be done, at least not at a policy level. Those who thought that they were advocating for change were only necessary voices in a liturgy designed to restore the status quo before the shooting.

And so, there is nothing left to do but to "send our thoughts and prayers" to those whose lives have become nightmares of grief or of painful recovery from gunshot wounds.

"Now is not the time."

It's more than a ritual; it's religious ritual, an act of worship, an act of reconciliation as we adjust our expectations to a reality that is sometimes callously deadly and cannot be changed.

It's a religious ritual that contains the surplus of meaning produced by an unbearable numbers of deaths to make them bearable and acceptable.

But I'm not just a student and sometime scholar of religion. I am also a baptized Christian, an elder of the United Methodist Church, and a pastor. As anyone who is any of these is, I am a theologian. This theologian has a question: "If our liturgy on the occasion of a mass murder is a religious ritual, then what religion is it? Because it is not Christian. What god is being worshiped? What divine dream is being enacted and called forth? Because it is not the dream of the God of Jesus."

The popular theologian, Bill O'Reilly, says of the shooting victims in Las Vegas that their deaths are "the price of freedom." In the context of a religious ritual, they are sacrifices, nearly sixty people who thought they were attending a country music festival and found themselves stretched across a blood-soaked altar becoming "the price of [Bill O'Reilly's] freedom." No one asked them. They didn't volunteer. They were conscripted into a deadly sacred rite of human sacrifice, an observance of the importance of our easy access to arms designed for the sole purpose of killing many human beings quickly.

We should at least send an honor guard to the homes of the bereaved and present them with a flag and the thanks of a grateful nation. To imagine that sending our thoughts and prayers is any kind of recompense for their involuntary loss is obscene.

The rites we have been observing have nothing to do with the God whom we worship nor with the Christ whom we follow. Nowhere in our sacred texts are we called to put our trust in our firepower, nor to call freedom the ability to kill or wound five hundred people in the space of eleven minutes. The national liturgy is not our liturgy as Christians. We will support our nation when we can, but only with the recognition that its gods are not our God and its myths are not ours.

Still, we have prayed and will pray for the victims, for their families and friends, and for those who face long recoveries to new normals that may not resemble their previous lives. Amos reminds us of how nauseating God finds our worship if it is divorced from justice. James tells us that it does no good to wish or pray someone well if we do not do them good. So other than "sending our thoughts and prayers" what are we to do?

It's a hard question to answer. Across the nation, even across this congregation, we have vastly differing experiences of guns. You might be surprised to know that as a teenager I was a member of the NRA. On a twenty-five foot range with .22 caliber caps I had an average of 49.7 out of 50. I could fit a five-round shot group under a pencil eraser. In the Army I qualified as an expert with the M-16 and could field strip and reassemble it in less than two minutes, blindfolded. I enjoyed target shooting. Lots of people do.

Others enjoy hunting and, since we've killed off all the top predators, some of us must hunt game animals. It would be too hard to do it with a knife, so we use rifles and shotguns.

Law enforcement officers need handguns both to protect themselves and as the last resort in keeping the peace.

For these folks and others, firearms are recreational equipment or occupational tools. There are other legitimate reasons to have and use guns, too. While Christians have warnings from Jesus not to take up the sword, we have never argued that people do not have a right to self- and other-defense.

But guns have become objects of nearly magical power in popular thinking. We imagine that having a gun will make us safer, when the one thing that we do know about guns is that the more of them there are, the more people are killed. People who live with a handgun in their home are far more likely to be killed or injured by it than they are to stop a home invasion. But it isn't so much the reality of gun ownership or their use for protection that concern me here as it is the emotional attachment that our nation has to guns, the visceral engagement, the, dare I say, worship that we give them. For some of us they are little gods that we have fashioned and to which we pray, "Save us from our enemies." And that makes our relationship to them idolatrous.

So what do we do? I'm not terribly optimistic about the chances for real change in our national policies. I believe that serious gun debate ended in early 2013 when as a nation the United States decided that twenty first-grade children were not too high a price to pay for Bill O'Reilly's freedom.

But that doesn't mean that there is nothing we can do. We can begin with taking a hard look at our personal relationship with guns. Are we willing to allow that relationship to be swayed by reality or do we insist on denying facts that threaten that relationship? Have we put our trust in them? Are we willing to put our own lives and the lives of those whom we love at risk for the sake of holding an illusion.

Some of us who own guns for what are legitimate reasons may decide that we can give them up. We could consider doing that for the sake of our neighbors and friends. So many people respond to a mass shooting by buying a gun that the stock of gun manufacturers increased in value last Monday. We hear news of a shooting and on some level we think that we can be safer with a gun. What if there were people who said, "Guns make the world a more dangerous place. I've had mine destroyed." That's not for everybody, I know, but it might be for some.

Those of us who own guns and have them in our homes can take great pains to insure that they are secured under multiple layers of protection. If you have your guns locked in a gun cabinet and your keys are in your dresser drawer, your seven year old grandson has access to your guns. Experiments show that a five year old who finds a gun will not only pick it up, but will point it at a friend and pull the trigger.

On a slightly bigger scale, we as a congregation can decide that it is our intention that this building be a gun-free space, that guns are not welcome here, and that anyone except for law enforcement officers and others whose jobs require them to bear a weapon who is unwilling to leave their firearm outside the building is welcome to be somewhere else. We could post notices to this effect at the entrances to our building so that there is no confusion over our commitment.

But positively and above all, we can be serious about learning more deeply a better way to live together than the mutual assured destruction
of a gun- and violence-saturated culture. That means understanding ourselves more deeply. It means learning the skills of conflict management. It means learning to meet strangers with acceptance. It means learning to deal respectfully even with our enemies.

These are little acts, all done on a very local scale. But the local is part of a wider system and systems can be changed from anywhere with purposeful, sustained, courageous, and intelligent action. It is late for us, but not too late. It will be hard, but we can do hard things. It will take all that we have, but we have all it takes to midwife God’s dream into reality.

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.

A God with No Name (17th Sunday after Pentecost; World Communion Sunday; Exodus 2:23-25; 3:10-15; 4:10-17; October 1, 2017)

A God with No Name

17th Sunday after Pentecost
World Communion Sunday
Exodus 2:23-25; 3:10-15; 4:10-17
October 1, 2017

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

The Hebrew Bible is a large collection of books and, even after you take out the prophets and other poetic texts, the wisdom literature, and the laws and regulations, it is still a long story. The folks who put together the Narrative Lectionary that I've been using have set themselves the task of covering the story from Creation to Pentecost each year using different texts. They decided that they had to get to the New Testament by Christmas. I can't say that I blame them.

But that means covering the Old Testament in three and half months. And that in turn means that it moves very quickly when we might want to slow down and linger a little. The story of the Call of Moses, our story for this Sunday, takes up three chapters in Exodus, but we have only these few snippets. But the snippets are pretty good, so I'm going to stop complaining now.

The part about the bush that was on fire but never burned up is missing, but I promised not to complain, so this isn't a complaint. It's just an observation. So we have to picture Moses barefoot before a bush that burns without burning up. Moses is in "dialogue" with God, which in this case means that Moses is allowed to say whatever he needs to say, but it makes no difference.

The conversation fits the common pattern of call stories: God summons a person to service. The person offers up one or more excuses as to why this would be a really bad idea. God tells the person to "stop with the excuses already"; they can do what they are called to do because God is going to help them. The person says, Well, then, okay, I guess.

Moses, Jeremiah, even Jesus. Remember how it went in the garden when Jesus prayed, "I don't want to do this. Do I have to? Well, okay."

Only one call story breaks this mold, the story of the call of Isaiah, in which God summons Isaiah and Isaiah says, "Here I am. Send me!" That's the way we imagine that a call story should go. There are no hymns that start, "Okay, I'm here but couldn't you please send someone else?"

Why do we think, in spite of the evidence, that being called is fun? And yet, somehow we think that. And then when we find out what it's really like, we feel resentful. And maybe that resentment comes out sideways. My sister Jody, a librarian at Drew University, notices that the largest number of missing books, books that have mysteriously disappeared from the stacks without having been checked out, the largest number of missing books are from the religion sections. She puts it bluntly, "Never trust anyone who says they are called."

Being called is dangerous. People who are called can start to think they are privileged. People who are called can start to think they can cut corners, cheat a little for the sake of God's dream. People who are called can become dangerous to the people around them, but also to themselves when they start to justify and rationalize what they are doing. Being called is dangerous.

It's very much like being a "chosen" people, since being a chosen people is just like being called only on a larger scale. Chosen people are tempted to believe that their lives are more important than the lives of their neighbors. Chosen people can start to think that international law doesn't apply to them. They can get to thinking that because they are a "city on a hill" and a "beacon of light" everything they do must be right and good and true just because they are the ones doing it. Chosen people are tempted to stop listening even to their friends when they have gone deeply astray. Chosen people sometimes start to wear the disapproval of others as a badge of pride.

A special relationship with God is very tricky. Isaiah was too young to know any better. Maybe why he was so eager: "Ooo! Ooo! Pick me! Pick me!" Moses was a little older, a little more experienced, a little wiser: "Who am I to go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? You know how much I hate public speaking. I've never been any good at it. Please, my Lord, just send someone else."

Moses was smart.

An advantage of having our reading come as bits and pieces from three different chapters is that different bits are next to pieces we're not used to seeing them next to. Maybe that's why I noticed something I hadn't seen before. When Moses is called, he says something strange. He says, "If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' they are going to ask me, ‘What's this God's name?' What am I supposed to say to them?"

Moses was smart.

Names are important. Names are powerful.

In Thailand, for example, people have two names. One name is their true name, but it is a secret, never uttered without taking precautions to make sure that it is not overheard. The other name is their public name, deliberately chosen to sound like an insult. This is so that invisible powers will be unable to use their real name in a curse.

When a story is told about Jesus casting out a spirit, he often forces the spirit to tell him its name. Knowing the spirit's name makes it easier to overpower it. The spirits know this and usually refuse to say their names. Jesus' forcing a spirit to tell its name is itself an impressive demonstration of power.

Everyone knows that if you happen to meet a dragon never let them learn your name. Your name gives them power over you.

If we think that any of this is silly, I ask, then why is it that people are so relieved when they are able to give a name to a bundle of symptoms, even if the disorder that is named is both incurable and fatal? Names give us a sense of power over things.

This might be true for gods as well, as ancient magical texts attest. These spells are full of the names of various gods on the assumptions that (1) knowing the names of gods gives you some leverage over them and (2) the more gods the better.

Moses wanted to know God's name. Moses was smart. God was smarter.

Here's what God said to Moses: "I Am Who I Am." You know if I had a nickel for every bottle of ink that has been wasted trying to figure out what God meant, I'd be rich. Theologians have zeroed in on what seems to them to be the self-existence of God. God isn't one example of a class of things, like I am an example of the class of things called human beings. God just is.

Which is true enough, but I think the context can take us deeper. Moses asked for God's name. And God, in effect, refuses to give it: "I Am Who I Am. Tell Israel "I Am" sent you." I think that what God is saying is that God is about to liberate the Israelites from slavery, not out of any sense of compulsion, nor because someone has gained power over God, but simply because God has decided to do it. Neither Moses nor the Israelites need to know God's name, so God says, in effect: "None of your business what my name is."

But then the text immediately goes on to name God anyway. "God continued," it says, as if God had stopped and then started again. "Say to the Israelites, 'Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, Abraham's God, Isaac's God, and Jacob's God, has sent me to you.' This is my name forever."

It is as if the text were uncomfortable with God as radically other, unnamed, uncontrolled, answering to no one, and who, because of that, is over all things and all people, a God who is beyond anyone's ability to know or to name, certainly a God who is impossible to own. So the text went on to bind God to a particular name for a particular God who has been part of the particular history of a particular people.

The Israelites cannot know God this radically other, unnamed One. The Israelites can only know Yahweh who hears their cries, sees their misery, and comes down to deliver them from their distress. In a sense, Yahweh is the one through whom the Israelites come to know God-who-has-no-name. Their temptation will lie in one of two directions. In ancient times they often felt that they could not rely on Yahweh, that there must be some God left over that they might be able to get a grip on by relying on other gods in addition to Yahweh. This is the temptation to which they gave in time and time again through the Hebrew Bible.

The other temptation is, if anything, even more dangerous: to imagine that having the name of Yahweh, the God of their ancestors, meant that they had a handle on God, that their particular way of knowing God was the only possible true way, and that God was available to them to grant them their own desires, even at the expense of other peoples. This is the temptation into which Israel has fallen today.

Words fail me, I'm afraid. I don't know how to say what I think I'm seeing in this story. Wouldn't I have to say that for us Christians this means that, on the one hand, God is unnamed and unnameable, but on the other hand, we see Jesus who shows us what God is like so that we know God's character? Through history we have fallen into the temptation of acting as if Jesus were the only way to know anything about God and to believe that we are therefore required to impose our notion of Jesus on our fellow-citizens and our world neighbors. And we have fallen into the temptation of believing that we own God somehow because we see and follow Jesus. Shouldn't we be both more grateful for what we know of God in Jesus and more humble about how little we know and can know of the God who cannot be named? Shouldn't we be taking off our shoes?

This being called stuff is tricky. It's no wonder Moses reacted the way he did. I know how he felt. "Please, my Lord, just send someone else. Well, okay, if I have to. I guess."

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.

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Merciless Widow (14th Sunday after Pentecost; Luke 18:1-8; September 10, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Merciless Widow

14th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 18:1-8
September 10, 2017

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

Here's the story that Jesus told:

In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him, asking, ‘Give me justice in this case against my adversary.’ 4 For a while he refused but finally said to himself, I don’t fear God or respect people, 5 but I will give this widow justice because she keeps bothering me. Otherwise, there will be no end to her coming here and embarrassing me.

It's simple enough story, a story about a confrontation between a widow and a judge, a judge we are told who neither fears God nor has any respect for people. It cannot be said often enough that widows were among the most vulnerable people in the ancient world. This was true because they were unconnected. A widow began her life in one family. At some point her father or brother saw an advantage in marrying her off in exchange for a bride price.

This was in the days not so long ago when a marriage was an agreement between two men that involved the exchange of property and a woman. Traces of this can be found in our old wedding liturgy. "Who gives this woman?" "To have and to hold." Both of these phrases have to do with property.

A wife's responsibilities included insuring that her husband had heirs and managing his household. A husband's responsibility was to provide a household to manage and to protect her from other men. That is not to say that love was never involved, nor even, failing that, that there was never a state of mutual respect or even affection. It's that traditional marriage wasn't about love; it was about property and inheritance and maintaining or advancing the position of an extended family within a community. Traditional marriage was about economics and influence first and only after that (and not necessarily at all) was it about any emotional connection between husband and wife.

So the woman in our story was married. Some goods or money had gone to her family. Some had gone with her into the marriage where they became her husband's property unless he divorced her. Her husband brought property into the marriage which remained his. That is, unless he died before she did. Now if there were sons from their marriage, they would inherit the property and they would be obligated to provide for her and their sisters. But, if her husband died without any other heirs, she would inherit the property that he had brought to the marriage.

This created a crisis for her husband's family. The whole point of marriage was to make the extended family stronger. If their son's property went to a widow instead of to their son's sons that would take property away from the family. So they would often make every effort to get her property away from her. They would try to find any legal excuse to seize her property. Widows were vulnerable and weak to a far greater extent than they are today. We don't know--because the story doesn't tell us--but it is likely that it was this sort of situation that gave rise to the widow's need for justice. And it made sense that she would have a hard time getting it.

To whom could she turn for help? Not to her in-laws: they were her "enemies." Not to her original family. They stood to gain nothing. She was alone and had very few resources. She couldn't even appeal to the better angels of the judge's nature: he didn't have any. She couldn't appeal to the Torah demands for justice, especially for justice for widows, orphans, and immigrants. He didn't care what God wanted. She couldn't appeal to his desire to protect his reputation. He didn't care what people thought of him.

He did, however, have one weakness. He liked to live in peace. He appreciated quiet. He coveted calm. So this widow decided that she would take those things away from him. She demanded justice. She applied through the proper channels. When the judge tried to ignore her, she became more insistent. She waited for him outside his office door. Whenever he came out she would begin to shout her demands for justice. She followed him around, crying out. He couldn't have a conversation with a business associate without her making a scene. He couldn't take a bribe from a plaintiff without her announcing the fact to the whole town. It didn't even stop when he went home. She would stand outside his gate, still shouting out her need for justice against her enemies. Day and night and night and day. She was merciless.

She was merciless until he broke. No, he didn't care what God wanted. No, he didn't care about public opinion. But the comfortable quiet of his life had been shattered and he wanted it back. So for that reason alone, he agreed to give the widow justice.

Now that's the story. And it's a good story. Folklore is filled with stories like this of powerful people who were outwitted or outmaneuvered by the poor and powerless. There are lots of stories about plucky widows.

But that still leaves the question of why Jesus told the story?

Of course, Luke has included a frame around the story that is an answer to that question. The frame tells us that Jesus told the story "about their need to pray continuously and not to be discouraged." Then after the story the frame goes on to make the point that if the widow can get justice from a judge who neither fears God nor respects people, how much more can those who pray get justice from God.

This is a a classic rhetorical device known as ad maiorem, and it comes in the form, "If even..., then how much more...!" Most kids in a family with more than one child have probably heard an ad maiorem arguement: "If even your little sister can keep her room clean, how much more should you be able to do it." Shame is almost always at work in the argument.

So, if even an unjust judge will yield eventually to the nagging of the merciless widow, then how much more will God yield to the nagging--uh, I mean, prayers--of God's people!

If you are content with that reading, I'll not disturb it beyond that.

But, if that reading doesn't quite ring true, let me offer another way to approach the story, one that might make more sense in the series of parables that we have heard and puzzled over through the summer.

Let's suppose that this story about a widow who wants justice and a judge who cannot be bothered to give it to her is actually a story about a widow who wants justice and a judge who cannot be bothered to give it to her.

Legal systems are generally designed by the powerful and the rich. It's no surprise that they tend to favor the folks who designed them.

Sometimes there are safeguards built into legal systems, such as providing defense attorneys for criminal defendants who cannot afford their own attorneys, but that hardly levels the playing field. In ancient systems kings often had the authority to overrule the judges. A Roman citizen could appeal to Caesar and that appeal would be heard. In ancient Judah, an appeal could be made to the king. That is why kings were often charged with making sure that they gave good justice even to those who were not in a position to repay the king some favor. Over and over the prophets demand of kings that they give justice to the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. This shows two things. First, justice for these folks was important to the God of the prophets. Second, justice for these folks was generally not high on the list of priorities for kings. Mostly, the people with power get a better shake from the justice system. And then you have a case like the one in our story.

The widow needs justice. The system will not give it to her. Where do you suppose God stands? I suppose that the emphatic demand in Deuteronomy 16, where the writer says "Tzédek, tzédek, tirdôf! Justice, only justice, you shall seek!" might give us a clue. God's dream is justice for everyone, especially for those who cannot get it.

But how do those who cannot get justice get justice? How can they get the system to respond when they are stuck in a place from which there is no access to justice?

Last week we heard of one strategy. The powerless can take up arms and violently resist the system. There is something satisfying about this path. We've been shaped by our culture into channeling our anger and frustration into violence. If you don't think so, pay close attention to precisely what it is that the fans around you are shouting during a football game.

But as our story last week shows, violence against the regime doesn't work. The regime knows all about violence. Regimes are good at violence. If we take up violence we play right into the regime's hands. Violent revolution leads to more violence. Nothing really changes. God's dream is for a revolution in human living that sticks, not for more of the same.

So if violence isn't the answer, what is? I think Jesus told this story to give us a hint about what does work. In the strategy of the merciless widow I see God's dream at work. She knows that she can't oppose strength with strength and win justice for herself. But she is clever enough to discover that the system has a weakness, a vulnerability, where she can bring her own strength to bear. When she is denied justice, she decides to wear the judge down, to wear him out, to keep repeating her demand no matter how long it takes, to make his life miserable until he yields. And he will yield. He values his comfort more than any principle. She pits her strength against his weakness and wins. Just like Gandhi never said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."¹

The challenge that God's dream offers us goes beyond learning to see it in the corners and obscure places where it is emerging, it goes beyond the requirement to resist the forces that block its emergence. The challenge of God's dream calls us to ways of acting on behalf of God's dream that actually work, that actually bring justice to where it is needed. The challenge this offers is that there isn't one method that works everywhere and all the time. The challenge is finding our own strength and pitting it against the particular weakness of an unjust system. The merciless widow did that. In the struggle of the poor to earn a real living, in the struggle of black folks to live free of the fear of being killed by systemic racism, in the struggle of young adults brought to this country as children to remain in the only home they know, in the struggle to get everyone access to decent health care, it is our turn to find the weaknesses in an unjust system, to find our own strength, and to outlast the reactions of the system until God's dream wins.

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.

1 "First They Ignore You, Then They Vote for You?" Snopes http://www.snopes.com/first-they-ignore-you/ September 9, 2017. "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." Nicholas Klein in "Fourth Session," chapter in Proceedings of the Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, [1919], p 53.

Reading Parables Otherwise: Tenant Farmers' Revolt (13th Sunday after Pentecost; Mark 12:1-9; September 3, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: Tenant Farmers' Revolt

13th Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 12:1-9
September 3, 2017

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

Roman Palestine was a powder keg with a fuse set. It featured an Empire determined to make the provinces there profitable. It featured a conquered people with a long memory of being the people of God's choice. The Romans were firmly convinced that it was the will of the gods that they rule the Mediterranean Sea basin and then some. Many of the conquered Jews were just as firmly convinced that it was the will of God that they rule themselves and that the rest of the world recognize their special status as those who bore the Torah--the way, the wisdom--of God. The Romans and their local collaborators were determined that the economy be converted to one based on the production of luxury goods. In pursuit of this goal they were forcing peasants off their small holdings and consolidating the little farming plots into plantations for the production of wine, olive oil, and dates, goods that fetched good prices in the major cities of the Empire. The ordinary folk were trying everything they could think of to stop this ancient version of neo-liberal globalization, with very little success.

The stage was set for a catastrophic collision, a slow-motion apocalypse, between the immovable object of a way of life that had persisted for centuries and the irresistible force of Roman military and economic might. The Jewish side of this confrontation was split among several parties.

On one end were the Herodians who had hitched their star to Herod's wagon and sought to be a part of the Romanization of Palestine. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" might have been their slogan.

More or less aligned with them were the Sadducees whose concerns revolved around the ritual life of the Jerusalem Temple. There was room for the Romans as long as the festivals could be kept and the sacrifices offered. And, of course, as long as they got a tenth of everything produced.

Toward the other end from the Herodians but toward the center were the Pharisees who put their emphasis on the assembly of the synagogue and on Jewish practice as the careful observance of the Torah to which they added the pursuit of justice as preached by the prophets. If there were an observant people among the remnant of Judah, God would safeguard them and eventually fulfill the promises of a land of their own and the restoration of David's kingdom.

I would say that Jesus' teaching suggests that he might have been found on the far end of the Pharisee movement.

Zealots were on the far end. They were convinced that God could be prompted to intervene if the people rose up and threw the Romans and their collaborators out of Judea. At least some of them could be compared to ISIS today. Far from fearing an apocalypse, they set out to provoke it.

Either as a part of the zealot movement or a separate movement were the sicarii, assassins who targeted collaborators and anyone else they didn't like.

Into this mix were stirred figures like John the Baptist and others who even styled themselves as messiahs, anointed by God to free God's people and lead them to new glory.

As the Romans built their empire they experienced a string of successes so complete that they had come to think of themselves as specially favored by the gods. Romans, after all, were the ones who had brought peace to the whole world. Who would not want to live under Roman governance?

When it turned out that many Jews did not want that, the Romans were confused and their attempts to pacify Palestine left them frustrated. They were frustrated and Jews were sullen and resentful. Every time Jews got agitated and unrest broke out, the Romans responded with military violence. Their use of clumsy violence based on their general ignorance of Judean culture and their invincible self-regard guaranteed that the people would continue to get agitated and restless more and more frequently.

Keeping a legion in Judea was expensive and the Romans were determined that Jews would pay for it. That meant higher taxes at precisely the time that ordinary people had fewer resources to pay those taxes.

It doesn't take much imagination to suppose that the people were ready to rebel. Add to that their conviction that God was on their side, and the many stories in their tradition of the weak overcoming the strong even in battle, and it is not hard to see that it would not take much to set off an explosive confrontation.

So Jesus told a story about a man who built a vineyard. Well, he didn't actually build it; his people built it. They built a fence around it, dug a wine pit to set up a press for the grapes, and constructed a tower. The landowner turned the management of the vineyard over to tenants and moved to Rome, Alexandria by Egypt, Antioch of Syria, Londinium, or maybe Chicago.

Here are familiar features: land that had been used for subsistence farming, to grow barley and wheat for peasant families, had been cleared of these less-profitable crops and consolidated into a vineyard to grow the strong, sweet wines the region was known for. Displaced peasants, no longer farming their own land, had become the care-takers for the land of a large land-owner, share-croppers. It was this sort of thing that made people's blood boil.

After the vines had been tended, the grapes picked and crushed, and the wine fermented, clarified, bottled, and sold--all by the tenants--the landowner sent a servant to collect his share. For whatever reason, the tenants decided that they could flout the landowner's demands. They roughed up the servant and sent him packing. The next servant they not only beat up, but insulted by striking him in the head. And so on until the landowner sent his own son. In reality I doubt it would have this far. The landowner would have written to the governor and the governor would have sent a detachment of legionaries and that would have been the end of the matter.

But the story says the landowner imagined that, while the tenants clearly despised and hated him, they would respect his son. Not so. They saw the son coming and they said to each other, "Here comes the heir. If we kill him, we'll be the heirs." These tenants were not too bright.

How will this work out for them? Will they end up with their own vineyard? Of course not! Will the landowner ignore this challenge to his power and authority? Of course not. He will either bring a legionary detachment or his own band of hired thugs. He will more than kill the tenants; he will "destroy" them. And he will make other arrangements for his vineyard. In other words, the violent resistance of the tenants will come to nothing.

And here, I think, is the point of the parable that Jesus told. However much we long for the fulfillment of God's dream, however much we can see the damage that is done when God's dream is delayed, however angry we can get when we see people and even the world hurt by those who oppose God's dream, violent resistance is not the solution.

Jesus, it seems was a pacifist. He may have been a pacifist on principle, but he was certainly what I'll call a strategic pacifist. He was a pacifist because violence doesn't work. It doesn't deliver what it promises.

When the tenants opt for violence, they play the Empire's game. The Romans knew all about violence. They reveled in it. They were good at it. They could deliver extraordinary, overwhelming amounts of applied violence anywhere in the Empire in a matter of days. To imagine that taking up arms against the Empire could lead to any end but defeat and death was as stupid as tenants imagining that they would inherit a vineyard if they killed the landowner's son.

As Jesus' followers our mission is to see God's dream as it emerges in the small places in our world and to open ample space in our own lives for its eruption in our hearts, minds, and actions. When it comes to nudging it along in our world, from this parable we learn that violence will not make it happen. "What will nudge God dream along?" you ask. I'm glad you asked that question. Next Sunday one of Jesus' parables will answer it as we consider the Parable of the Merciless Widow.

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.

Reading Parables Otherwise: Whistle-Blower (12th Sunday after Pentecost; Matthew 25:14-30; August 27, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: Whistle-Blower

12th Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 25:14-30
August 27, 2017

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

It's been a while since we've a crack at a parable, hasn't it? I came back from two week’s vacation ready to dive into this Parable of the Whistle-Blower, as I call it, when I realized that last Sunday would feature the Vacation Bible School celebration. Even if there were time, it would have been pretty jarring to go from VBS to "valuable coins" in the same service, especially since I always read the parables strangely.

But here we are, back on track. Next week we'll have the Parable of the Peasant Revolt and we'll finish the series on September 10th with the Parable of the Merciless Widow. The parables give us glimpses into God's Dream, what the Bible otherwise calls the Kingdom or Reign of God. I like "God's Dream" better because it doesn't distract us with all that talk about kings and kingdoms which are not part of our experience.

So let’s see what we have today.

The Parable of the Whistle-blower, as I call it, begins with a social situation that was certainly not unheard-of: A man wishes to go on a trip. He will be unable to supervise his own wealth while away from home and so he entrusts it to three servants--slaves, literally. In point of fact the rich seldom handled money themselves: it was unseemly. The whole point of being rich was not to have to work. Even at home, a rich person's wealth was managed for them by a slave or employee.

The wealth involved was large. A talent, you may remember (and if you do, you have a better memory than I do) was worth 6,000 denarii, the denarius in turn being the coin that was used to pay a day laborer for a day's work. If we figured this at the current minimum wage, a denarius would be worth about $58 and a talent about $348,000. Call it $350,000.

So the rich man entrusted one slave with $1,750,000, a second slave with $700,000, and the third slave with $350,000. These are unusually large amounts of money, especially when we consider that the wealth of the wealthy was typically invested in land rather than held as cash or even in the kind of investments we take for granted in our day.

But a master tasking a servant or slave with overseeing an investment was not unusual. Nor was it rare for a servant to ask for that investment in exchange for a share of the profits of a side business that the servant would run.

So far, there is nothing really strange about the arrangements.

The rich man left home; the servants invested their master's money. The first two doubled his investment. How they did this, the parable does not say, but we can make a pretty good guess. Increasing wealth was usually done in one of two ways: it was loaned at interest (a violation of the Torah) and/or used to buy out the small holdings of peasants (also a violation of the Torah). The most common and easiest way was to combine the two: lending money to peasants and then, when they are unable to pay, foreclosing on them and taking their land. This is most likely how the first two servants doubled their master's investment and most likely how the master had acquired this investment capital in the first place.

For whatever reason, the third servant opted for an investment strategy virtually guaranteed at least not to lose any money: he buried it in the ground.

The rich man was gone for a long time. When he came back, he called his slaves together and demanded an accounting. The first two servants reported that they had doubled his money. He was pleased and promised them promotions.

It didn't go so well with the third slave who had to confess that he had simply buried the talent and was only able to return the original money, but it was safe and sound and fully accounted for. The master was furious, took the third man's talent, gave it to the first servant, and threw the lazy slave out of the household.

In the traditional reading the master is taken as referring to God who has entrusted his servants--us, that is--with various resources. God seems to be absent but nonetheless expects us to put those resources to good use so that when God returns, we will be able to give a good accounting of what we have done with them. For most of us through history these resources have not been financial. But all of us, no matter how poor, have resources in the form of abilities that we can develop and use faithfully. In fact, the English word "talent" that comes directly from the Greek of this parable is the word that we use to name these resources. We must not bury our abilities, our talents, but make full use of them. Otherwise it’s the "outer darkness" for us.

This, then, in the traditional reading, is a stewardship text. I've used it myself that way, sometimes on Consecration Sunday itself.

But in the last few years, I must confess, I have come to have my doubts.

I understand the part about using our God-given abilities. There are certainly those who do and those who don't. But what am I to make of the part where the master tells the third slave that he should have turned his coin over to the bankers so that he could get it back with interest? How do I turn over a gift for languages to the bankers? How does that work with anything other than money?

That's one question. Another is how do I explain the description of the master that the third slave utters: "You are a hard man. You let other people do all the work and you take the profits"? Does he say this because he is an "evil and lazy servant"? Or is this charge--unanswered in the parable--basically true?

And in what way can we say that the power figure in the parable, the rich man, resembles what we know of God? Is it fair to say that we know God to be "hard"? Is it fair to say that God contributes nothing to the production of wealth but keeps it all? Isn't it just the opposite? Hasn't God placed the world in our hands, sustaining and upholding it, while we--humanity as a whole, that is--enjoy the result not only of our work but of God's? And doesn't God have a tendency to forgive a little too easily for our tastes?

Once again, I have been forced to read this parable about a rich man who turned over various sums of money to his slaves as a story about a rich man who turned over sums of money to his slaves. The parable is about money, money in motion, specifically. The parable is about economics, about how money moves, about who controls its movements,
and about who benefits from that motion.

In Jesus' world and in ours the fact that there is a rich man seems natural enough. No one questions how he became rich; he is just rich. He takes some of his money and turns it over to three servants for them to invest and oversee. This, too, seems natural. It's his money; he can do whatever he wants with it. It seems natural, too, for someone with money to seek to become even richer. The first two slaves invest the money. That, too, seems quite natural.

But this is the weak point in every economy, a place where people must see what is not there and fail to see what plainly is. Economies are human constructions but they have to appear to be natural. Arrangements of power and wealth have to appear natural. They have to appear right. If someone is rich, people must look at them and say that this is right and proper. If someone is poor, people must also see that as right and proper. People have to be seen to have what they deserve. When things in an economy seem strange or even unfair, people must respond with, "Well, that's just how it is." They cannot be allowed to imagine that it is only arbitrarily what it is and could just as easily be something else. If an economy does not appear to be a fact of nature, like gravity or the rotation of the earth, then the losers in the economy will stop thinking of themselves as losers and start thinking of themselves as oppressed and aggrieved victims. They will stop thinking of that economy's winners as deserving their reward and start thinking of them as exploiters who have rigged the system.

What keeps the rich and powerful awake at night is the knowledge that they are vastly outnumbered. Their greatest fear is that the poor and powerless will figure this out. They devote a great deal of effort to keeping this from happening. They dangle promises of promotion. They distract with entertainments. They shift the blame to convenient scapegoats. They maintain careful control over the the pageantry of power. They use monuments and memorials--propaganda in marble and concrete--to celebrate the naturalness of their power. And they hope no one sees through it all.

And along comes our third servant, the one who refused to invest the coin. When the time for an accounting came, he turned the tables on his master. He, the slave, rendered judgment on his rich master: "You are a hard man. You don't do the work, but you take the wealth." You give your work to other people and you take the profits they make as your own. You are lazy and yet you are rich. Here is your money, safe and sound.

The rich man did what anyone does who is caught out with no defense. He made a counter-accusation. He accused his servant of being lazy and wicked. The rich always accuse the poor of being lazy. If anything they are the ones guilty of this, but they say this to restore the naturalness of the economy from which they benefit. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," they insist.

The third slave has unmasked the system. He has shown it for the unjust arrangement that it is. He told the truth. He blew the whistle. He was afraid, of course. He knew that his master could destroy him. And in the end that is what happened. But he told the truth anyway.

So what is God's dream like? Jesus tells us it is like this parable. Now we could certainly say that the parable teaches us that it is a bad idea to tell the truth about powerful people. They have ways of making our lives miserable and do not take kindly to being called out. We could say that the parable teaches us that smart people go along to get along and that bucking the system is no way to get ahead.

Certainly the greatest rewards seem to go to the people who are willing to turn a blind eye to the Torah demands of justice and look for the biggest profits they can find. On the basis of what I know about the God of the covenant, the God of the Torah, the God of Jesus, I don't think that this everyone-for-themselves pursuit of profit is God's dream for us. That rules out the behavior rich man and the actions of the first two servants.

That leaves us with the third servant. He shook in his sandals, but he told the truth and he refused to go along. So that must be God's dream.

An economy like the economy of Roman Palestine or an economy like ours, where those who produce the real wealth share less and less of it and the powerful use their power to become rich and their wealth to become more powerful, can come to seem like a fact of nature that can be neither questioned nor challenged. An economy can come to feel like an "iron cage" with no way out and no hope of a more humane life. But God's dream is still at work, still "at hand" as Mark's Jesus has it. A third servant sees through the lies, sees the man behind the curtain in spite of all the distraction. A third servant refuses to do what he is supposed to do. A third servant tells the truth. And the spell is broken.

And when we awaken from the spell we will discover that the master's house was in fact a kind of prison. The "outer darkness" we feared so much only seemed to be dark because of the spell we were under. It isn't dark at all and it is filled with good people like our friend the third servant and other whistle-blowers: the prophets who saw and spoke the truth and Jesus the most notorious whistle-blower of them all. And best of all, this place at the margins, outside of the good graces of the rich and powerful of this world, is the place where God has made a home and we are welcome there.

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.