A Healing Analyzed (Mark 10:46-52, Proper 25B, October 28, 2012)

A Healing Analyzed

Mark 10:46-52
Proper 25B
October 28, 2012

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

He was a nameless nobody, really, the blind beggar of Jericho.  Bar-Timaeus the townspeople called him, but that wasn’t his name.  Bar-Timaeus only means “son of Timaeus.”  He had his father’s name, but no one knew his name, it seemed, and it had been so long since he had heard it that he had almost forgotten it himself.

He had had a name when he was young, when he was a boy.  He had had his sight then, too.  It was a long time ago, but he remembered.  The sky was sometimes azure, sometimes cerulean.  Sometimes it shimmered in the summer heat.  The sunsets were scarlet sometimes.  During the festival seasons the colors of the pilgrims’ clothing danced in his memories.  The pilgrim’s feet were always a little lighter their pilgrim songs sung a little stronger as they passed on the main road through the village, just a few miles from Jerusalem.

He remembered his parents’ faces, his father’s stern features when he had gotten into some mischief with his friends and the concern in his mother’s eyes whenever he was sick.  He had been sick a lot when he was a child.  He remembered the mahogany and amber eyes of the girl who lived next door and how they sparkled when she teased him.  Sometimes his mother’s eyes looked like that when she gazed at his father and he wondered if perhaps that meant that he and—what was her name?  Rebecca?—had a future together. 

But all of that changed in the winter of his ninth year when he was sick with a fever.  He lay for days, his parents and brothers and sisters hovering around him, anxiety thick in the air.  On the sixth day he woke up hungry, the fever broken.  The fever had returned to him his life, but the price that it had exacted was his sight. 

What future did a nine year old blind boy have in the centuries before the Judeans with Disabilities Act, before sheltered workplaces, before Braille, before Seeing Eye dogs?  What sort of a trade could he learn?  His father was a shepherd and that was simply out of the question.  Perhaps he could have been a potter, but what potter would have taken him as an apprentice when there were plenty of sighted nine year olds?

While his parents lived, they did their best to feed him, but when they had aged he had no choice but to take to the streets and beg his living.  And so he came to be simply Bar-Timaeus, Timaeus’ son, a nameless nobody, a blind beggar of Jericho. 

If he had to beg for his living, there were certainly worse places than Jericho.  On the pilgrim road there were always people going up to the Temple in Jerusalem, or going back down to their homes.  It was an act of righteousness to give alms.  Of course, that was true anytime and anywhere, but it was easy for people to forget when the demands of daily living pressed in on them and however much money they had it was never quite as much as they needed.

But when they were going to or coming from the Temple it was different.  They walked differently.  They sang pilgrimage songs.  And they remembered that it was an act of righteousness to give alms. 

So Bar-Timeaus spent his days sitting cross-legged on his cloak beside the road crying, “Have mercy on me!  Pilgrim, have mercy!”  And the coins fell on his cloak: copper mostly, very rarely silver, and not as many as he would have liked.  But it was enough to keep body and soul together, so it was a win-win for him and for the alms-givers.  When he heard the coins, he would call out, “May the Lord show mercy to you as you have shown mercy to me!”

As the pilgrims passed he overheard their conversations.  Why is it that when people see someone who is blind, they think that they must be deaf as well?  He didn’t know the answer to that question, but he was as well-informed about life in Judea and Galilee as any sighted person in Roman Palestine.

He had heard that there was yet another healer wandering among the Jewish towns and villages, a teacher from Nazareth named Jesus.  It was unusual for a Galilean to be in that line of work.  What was the expression?—Can anything good come out of Galilee?  Unusual or not, he had heard the talk about Jesus.  Some were saying that this Jesus was the Son of David.  It was dangerous talk, but he wasn’t talking, only overhearing.

He had never forgotten, though while plying his trade in his dark world, crying for mercy, blessing his benefactors, and overhearing the gossip and news.  He had never forgotten that there was a world of colors and shapes, a world he had once lived in a long time ago, a world open to him only in his memories and in his dreams.

In the spring as the Passover pilgrim traffic was nearly at its peak, Bar-Timaeus was at his post and the coins were falling onto his cloak and he began to hear the rumors.  This Jesus of Nazareth, the one about whom there was so much talk, this Jesus was himself among the pilgrims!  He had already passed through the center of the village with his followers and was drawing near.  Jesus the healer was approaching!

It was a long shot at very best.  Quite possibly this Jesus would not live up to his reputation.  Quite possibly he would turn out to be a fraud.  God knows there were enough of those.  And even if he were able, would he be willing to heal a nameless nobody, the blind beggar of Jericho?  Who knew?  If he could attract Jesus’ attention and if Jesus was willing and if Jesus was able to heal his blindness—three very large “if’s” indeed!—then maybe, just maybe, that world of shape and color would be open to him once more!  It might have been a long shot, but it was a chance worth taking. 

So the nameless nobody, blind beggar of Jericho, began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!  Son of David, have mercy on me!”  The people around him began to feel uncomfortable.  It was all right for the blind man to beg every other day, but why today?  Why today with a celebrity in town?  They squirmed at the scene that he was making.  So they said to him, “Be still, you worthless beggar!  Can’t you tell that someone important is coming by, someone who has made a name for himself?  Be silent, you nameless nobody!” 

But his voice was all that he had.  He had no skills that he could sell.  He had long since lost his parents and his brothers and sisters had long since distanced themselves from him.  He had no money, except what he needed to buy the day-old bread that kept him alive.  All he had was his voice.  All he could do was cry out, “Mercy!”

He was a nameless nobody, this blind beggar of Jericho, but he was also an Israelite, a Jew, a son of the Torah.  Somewhere in him there was a memory.  It might not have been fully formed.  It might have been nothing more than a vague recollection.  But it was there.  This child of the Torah knew that there is a God who hears those who have nothing but their voices.  There is a God who answers those who cry out.  He knew that long ago, when his people were slaves in Egypt and were mistreated, they had cried out to the universe at large, not really even knowing to whom they should direct their cry.  When they had cried out, improbably, impossibly, and against all expectation, they were answered.  God came to Moses and said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings,  and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.  So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

Would God do for him in the present what God had done for his ancestors so long ago?  For the sake of that question and its possible answer, the blind beggar of Jericho refused to be silent, refused to stop making a scene, and kept crying out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And then the impossible and unexpected thing happened.  Just as God had heard the cry of the Israelites in the distant past, so Jesus heard the cry of the nameless nobody.  Jesus stopped and told the crowd to call the noisy beggar to him.  The crowd that had so recently been yelling at him to tell him to be quiet now began to tell him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”  It was almost as if it were their idea.

Well, he got up.  He sprang up.  Leaving his cloak behind, he came to Jesus.  Was he nervous, so nervous that he forgot his cloak?  Or in his own mind was he so certain of being healed by Jesus that he knew that he could find his way back to it?  We don’t know.

We do know that when he came to Jesus, Jesus did something truly remarkable.  He asked the nameless nobody, “What do you want me to do for you?”  How long had it been since anyone had asked him what he wanted?  “Have mercy,” he cried all day, every day.  People tossed him their alms money, their pocket change, and walked away feeling pretty good about themselves.  But when had anyone stopped to ask, “And what exactly would mercy look like, in your case?”  But Jesus stopped and asked, “What do you want?”

I want to see again!  I want the world back.  I want colors and shapes and the beauty and even the ugliness.  I want sight to be more than a dream or a memory.  I want to see it all again!

And in less time than it takes to tell it, he could see it all again.  And, even though told he could go his way, he decided to go Jesus’ way instead.  And so he did that.

He went from being blind to being able to see once again.  He also went from being a nameless nobody to being one of Jesus’ disciples.  Which of the two transformations do you suppose was for him the more marvelous, the more amazing, and the more splendid?

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.

The Eye of a Needle (Mark 10:17-31, Proper 23B, October 14, 2012)

The Eye of a Needle

Mark 10:17-31
Proper 23B
October 14, 2012

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

“Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor….It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom.”  Ouch.

As the noted theologian Samuel Clemens put it, “It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” 

Put in a rather more sophisticated way Soren Kierkegaard who, even if he was Danish, was an important philosopher and theologian,

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand….We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?”[i]

So, in the interests protecting ourselves from being ruined by the Bible, let’s see if some our “priceless scholarship” can’t come to our rescue.

Jesus and his disciples were walking along a road, headed generally toward Jerusalem and Jesus’ coming showdown with the authorities when a rich man came up to him and fell to his knees.  We don’t know that he is rich, unless we’ve read this story before, but Jesus can tell—probably because of the Armani suit.  The man greets him and asks him a question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to obtain eternal life?”

The man is kneeling—soiling, perhaps even ruining his beautiful suit.  It’s a sign of submission to Jesus’ authority, of respect for Jesus.  His greeting is unusual.  It’s over the top.  It’s flattery.  According to the rules of the game that the man is playing, his self-humiliation and flattery is supposed to put Jesus in his debt and calls for flattery in return.

It’s notable—and it’s puzzled the commentators—that Jesus turns the flattery aside and so refuses to play the game: “Why do you call me good?  No one is good except the one God.”

Having brushed aside the rich man’s game, Jesus moves on to his question: “You know the commandments: Don’t commit murder.  Don’t commit adultery.  Don’t steal.  Don’t give false testimony. Don’t cheat. Honor your father and your mother.”

Wait a minute.  Jesus’ has slipped something extra into his summary of the commandments.  There is no commandment “Don’t cheat.”  Jesus is making that up, but, apparently the rich man doesn’t notice this.  “Teacher—just “teacher,” no “good teacher,” he won’t make that mistake again—Teacher, I’ve kept all of these things since I was a boy.”

Well, then, if he’s a faithful Torah-observer, why is he asking the question?  He already knows the answer.  What is it that he wants?  Is there something nagging at his conscience, something that doesn’t seem to be covered by the commandments?  Is this even a good faith question, an honest question looking for an honest answer?  Or does the rich man’s question betray his bad faith? Is he merely looking for a comforting and flattering response?

Then Jesus did something that we hardly ever do when we’re locked in a contest.  Jesus looked at him carefully.  And saw through all the man’s strategies, even, I suspect, his defenses against the Bible, constructed and maintained by habit for so long that the man didn’t even know he had them.  “You are lacking one thing”—that is, there is one thing you don’t own: “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.  Then you will have treasure in heaven.  And come, follow me”—that is, become penniless yourself and then you will be qualified to join my band of penniless followers.

But the rich man couldn’t get that close to the Bible.  The rich man couldn’t give up his riches.  Like too many people, I suppose, he no longer owned his possessions; his possessions owned him.

And here is where the story gets interesting—and uncomfortable.  “It will be very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom!  It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom.”  The disciples were shocked.  This ran counter to everything they had been taught.  The rich were blessed by God, marked as those whom God had favored, rewarded by God.  But Jesus is saying that the rich don’t have the inside track with God, that their wealth is not a blessing from God, even that wealth is an obstacle, an impediment to living as a part of God’s kingdom.

Sounds like it’s time for a little of the Christian scholarship that Kierkegaard talked about!

Let’s start by looking more closely at the rich man.  If we can discover how Jesus’ words only apply to him or to his class, then we’ll be in the clear!

It’s true that the ancients thought about wealth and class differently than we do.  We have three classes.  First there are the rich, who are basically anyone who makes more money than I do.  No, I think I can do better than that.  The rich are those who income is derived primarily from their investments and who in the long run can watch their investments grow even as they are living on that income.  Retirement complicates things a little since that is a time when many people who are not rich are living off the income from their investments.  Still, a forty-year-old who’s living off the income from investments is rich by any account, so I’ll stand by my definition.

Below the investor class comes the middle class, people who are earning a living wage primarily from their job or the business that they own.  The people who are not making a living wage are the poor.

Now, in ancient times things were defined a little differently.  At the top were the rich.  They were about one or two percent of the population.  They were major land owners.  Land was the form of wealth that people sought.  The rich had enough of it that they could live well off the income from the land without having to work the land themselves.  The rich were, by definition, idle.  They could devote themselves to cultivating the good life and, for the rich who were Jewish, that could well mean that they gave themselves to keeping the commandments, like the rich man in the story.

The other ninety-nine or ninety-eight percent were the “poor,” meaning that they had to work for a living.  The poor were divided into two groups: those who were simply poor, and the destitute who had neither land nor skills that they could sell and were forced to sell their bodies as day laborers or prostitutes or, when life and strength were nearly gone, those who forced to become beggars.

Since land was the primary form of what we would call capital, we are not so far from the ancient idea as it seems at first.  The rich man in our story also lived off the income from his investments.  It’s just that his investment was in land, not in stocks, bonds or derivatives.

So, it seems that we are off the hook, since we are not rich and Jesus’ warnings are to the rich.  Instead of having to hear what Jesus is saying we can merely overhear it and feel sorry for those poor rich people.

As long as we only look at this text and as long as we deploy “Christian scholarship” carefully, we can get away with that.  The trouble is, this isn’t the only time that the Bible mentions wealth.  It’s an important theme in the Hebrew prophets.  It’s the single most common topic of Jesus’ teaching.  It’s not just the rich who come in for harsh words; it’s wealth itself.

Or rather, the Bible has two views of wealth.  Our culture has adopted one view and pushed it to its limits, while this morning’s text represents the other view.

It is true that the Bible views prosperity as a blessing.  The picture of the good life in the prophet Micah shows this well:

³ God shall judge between many peoples,

and shall arbitrate between strong nations

far away;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more; 

⁴ but they shall all sit under their own vines

and under their own fig trees,

and no one shall make them afraid;

for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken. [ii]

Figs, wine, olive oil, a good barley harvest, flocks of fat and healthy sheep and goats—these are the signs of God’s care for God’s people.  These are the blessings of peace that comes from God’s good governance of the nations.  This is the prosperity that is viewed as a blessing from God.

But of wealth, I’m afraid, the Bible has little good to say.  Isaiah of Jerusalem represents this tradition well:

⁸ Ah, you who join house to house,

who add field to field,

until there is room for no one but you,

and you are left to live alone

in the midst of the land![iii]

To sit in peace under our own fig tree and our own vines is a blessing.  To want to own our neighbor’s vine in addition to our own or to corner the market on fig futures earns the swift condemnation of both Moses and the prophets: “Do not crave your neighbor’s house, field, male or female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.”[iv]  Accumulated wealth is invariably viewed as an offense against the community. 

The good life of the blessed community that Micah described needs more than equality of opportunity; there must be some reasonable equivalence of outcome as well.  That is why the Torah requires that every seven years all who have been forced to sell themselves or their family members into slavery be set free and their debt cancelled.  That is why the Torah requires that all land that has been sold must be returned to its original family each fifty years.  Permanent wealth and permanent poverty threatened the existence of Micah’s blessed community, so the Torah puts into place ways of keeping that from happening.  To try to get around the Torah’s intention is to cheat by definition. 

The disciples grew up on a line of thinking that saw prosperity as a blessing and concluded that more wealth meant more blessing with no upper limit.  Jesus stood in the long line of the Hebrew prophets who denounced this view: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation[v]….No one can serve two masters…You cannot serve God and wealth.[vi]”  When he included a commandment not found among the Ten Commandments—“Do not cheat”—he was summarizing a long tradition.

So it seems that we are not off the hook after all, since we don’t have to be rich to serve wealth.  We don’t have to own many possessions to be owned by them.  This text makes it all too clear that Jesus’ teaching and the way that our culture thinks about and values money are in deep conflict.  Because we are children of this culture as well as followers of Jesus, this conflict rages in our own minds and hearts. We have difficult choices to make, even if we are not required to sell all that we own and give it to the poor as a pre-condition for following Jesus and as a requirement for entering the life of God’s kingdom. 

These choices are a matter of learning to value differently than the world around us values.  While this is a real world issue, it is a spiritual journey that we are on.  The terrain over which we struggle is difficult.  We are not sure where we are, where we are going, or how to get there.  What we need is a reliable map.  I believe this text is at least part of that map.  When we unfold it we discover that we are not where we thought we were and that the road we are on is not the one we need to find.  We can trace a way, but it won’t be easy.  The trail is hard and at the trail head is a narrow gate.  But at least now we know what lies before us.  Now we can find our way.  That, dear friends, is good news.

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.

---

[i] Soren Kierkegaard, “Kill the Commentators!” in Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 201.

[ii] Micah 4:3-4.

[iii] Isaiah 5:8.

[iv] Deuteronomy 5:21b.

[v] Luke 6:24.

[vi] Matthew 6:24a, c.

A Religion of Complaint (Psalm 26, Proper 22B, October 7, 2012)

A Religion of Complaint

Psalm 26
Proper 22B
October 7, 2012

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

I was disappointed to learn that the flush toilet was not invented by Thomas Crapper as I had long thought.  The first patent for the flushing toilet was taken out by Edward Jennings in 1852.  Crapper did hold three patents for various improvements to the design.  His real contribution to plumbing was in merchandizing.  Crapper was the first person to assemble showcases for plumbing fixtures, a daring thing to do during the Victorian Era when table legs were covered to prevent anyone from getting a glimpse of a bare leg.

I am grateful to whoever invented the flush toilet.  I have known people who grew up using outhouses.  I have never known anyone who remembered the experience fondly.

There have been refinements since Jennings’s day, including those introduced by Crapper himself, but the basic idea has remained unchanged.  The heart of the system is the tank.  There is a drain valve that holds the water in the tank until the toilet is flushed.  The tank empties and the drain valve closes—or at least it’s supposed to, on which more in a moment.  A fill valve opens to refill the tank and, when the tank has filled to right level, the fill valve closes and it’s ready for the next customer.  The idea of using a float on the end of a rod to sense the water level and shut the valve is one of Crapper’s ideas.

The trouble with the whole thing is that it often does not work as advertized.  The two principal sources of trouble are the two valves.  Most of the time when a toilet isn’t working correctly, it’s because the valve that keeps the tank full doesn’t seat correctly.  The tank stays empty, so the fill valve continues to remain open.  One fix for this condition is to replace the valve, but I have noticed that they often fail.  The fact that there are two or three designs for the drain valve suggests that there isn’t a permanent solution for this problem.  Another fix goes by the technical phrase: “jiggle the handle.”

But I have noticed that the willingness to use this simple adjustment in technique tends to be structured along gender lines.  The women in my life have tended to regard a toilet that doesn’t shut off as having a flaw, a flaw that could be fixed, or, to put it more precisely, a flaw that I could fix.  I tend to regard a running toilet as the victim of operator error, requiring an adjustment in technique.

Now, believe it or not, I have said all of this for a reason—beyond giving myself an excuse to say “Crapper” in church.  And the reasons have something to do with the Psalms.  But before I get to that, let me push my toilet analysis just a little further.  A toilet is a piece of technology.  It embodies in porcelain and bits of metal, plastic and rubber a notion that we can control our world.  A toilet is sanitary, relatively odor-free, and spares us a dash to an outhouse in the dead of night in the middle of a snow storm.  Best of all it deals with our waste so that we are not required to give it much thought.

Like a toilet, all technology is supposed to simplify our lives.  If we do certain simple things, like pushing a handle, it will reliably do other things, like removing the waste, and preparing itself for the next operation, without the drudgery, the thought, or toil that would be required otherwise.  This frees us to do other more useful things, things like sending a text message to vote for our favorite contestant on Dancing with the Stars.

When a toilet doesn’t work, my assumption is that either my technique is wrong or that the toilet is broken.  My suspicion is that this is common among men.  When a toilet doesn’t work the women in my life have tended to regard the failure as relational.  That is to say that the problem is not really in the toilet; the problem is in the relationship with the man who has a wrench and can speak “hardware” if parts are needed.  A working toilet is part of my covenant obligation.  If the toilet breaks, that’s the toilet’s fault.  If it stays broken, it is on account of my covenant failure, and it is my covenant failure that will be addressed.

Now for the connection with the Psalms.  In a culture and economy so driven by technology it should not be surprising if we regard God and religion as parts of a technological system.  We should not be shocked that we are deeply convinced that if we only we use the proper technique, the system will give us what we want: peace of mind even when we are implicated in great guilt; wealth even in a system that favors those who already have it; healing for our loved ones even if they have fallen into the hands of a system that is more interested in profits than in outcomes; and, safety for our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, even as they go into combat where bits of flying metal will be entirely uncaring about who or what they hit.  If we pray and we do not get what we have asked for, then we conclude that there is something wrong with the technology or with our technique.

I think this partly explains why some kinds of religion are so attractive.  They provide assurances that they have the best technology and the correct technique so that religion will yield the hoped-for outcomes.

The psalmist knows better.  The psalmist knows that when human life ceases to be humane and just, that does not mean that her technique is wrong.  She does not go about adjusting herself to the unfairness of life, performing the inner equivalent of jiggling the handle.  Still less does she shop around for a different God, having concluded that hers is broken.  No, instead she regards her crisis as a crisis in the covenant.

Part of the power of the Psalms lies in the fact that, although the language of the Psalms is concrete and vivid, they themselves are rather unspecific.  Take our psalm for the morning.  If we take the first few verses as a clue, we can reasonably assume that the psalmist’s integrity has been challenged.  She asks for vindication from God on the grounds of her integrity and her unwavering trust in God.  She even asks to be put to the test.  She is confident that she will pass.

If we press on just a little further the references to the worthless (literally “the empty men”), hypocrites, evildoers, the wicked,[1] sinners, the bloodthirsty and the corrupt[2] suggest that some enemies are involved.  We might conclude that some bad people have been saying bad things about the psalmist.  Her reputation has been attacked and she finds herself with no way to defend herself.

That’s about as much as we can guess about the psalmist’s situation, but that’s enough, really.  Who hasn’t faced something similar?  The other kids make fun of us on the playground and whisper about us in the lunchroom.  The gossip at the office stops as soon as we come into room and resumes as soon as we leave.  Some of us have even encountered this at church where you’d think it would be different: people we had thought were our friends have begun to seem awkward whenever we’re around them.

The psalmist might take up this issue directly with the adversaries.  Perhaps she has.  At the point at which this psalm comes to speech, though, the issue is no longer primarily with bad people saying bad things.  The issue is now between her and Yahweh, the covenant God of Israel.  It’s clear what she wants.  It’s in all those imperative verbs that she addresses to God: “vindicate me,” “prove me,” “test [me],” “redeem me,” and “be gracious to me.”[3]

Her adversaries have acted.  Her response is to appeal to Yahweh.  Now Yahweh must act.  This request has not yet risen to the level of a complaint, but my suspicion is that it will if she does not hear from Yahweh within a couple of business days or so.  She has made it very clear that, as she understands the covenant, it is God who must act on her behalf.

She has done her part.  She has avoided the company of those who do not keep covenant with God faithfully.  This doesn’t mean that she walks around with her nose in the air or refuses to behave lovingly toward those with whom she disagrees.  She just knows that we are all shaped by our primary relationships.  She doesn’t want to be shaped away from that most important relationship of all: her relationship with the covenant God of Israel. 

She has instead made it a point to be a part of the company of those who attend to God in the temple.  This psalm like many has a high regard for the Jerusalem temple, the psalmist regards the temple as a privileged place for encountering God.  We can smile at her naiveté.  We know that God doesn’t “live in” the temple or any other building, including this one.  At the same time, though, the psalmist knows that nothing can replace the liturgical solidarity with other Yahweh worshipers that only corporate worship can contain and express.  Her relationship with God is not unique; she is part of covenant community.  She will worship God in a public way.

There is something fitting about this.  Bad people have been whispering bad things about her in private.  She will publically process around the altar.  She will sing a song of thanksgiving right out loud in front of God and everybody.  She will tell of the saving ways in which God has already acted.  A little detail is telling, I think.  Verse seven begins “singing aloud,” but the verb form is actually causative.  It would be awkward English, but it would be closer to the Hebrew to translate this participle as “causing to be heard.”  She won’t just sing out loud; she will be heard singing.  She will be relentlessly public about her confidence in God’s trustworthiness.

That’s the most important thing.  In the midst of her suffering at the hands of her enemies, she has focused on God’s peculiar and particular quality of steadfast covenant love.

This is rhetoric of course.  She lays out her case before God.  She is innocent.  She has been the faithful Yahweh-worshiper that she has appeared to be.  She has nothing to conceal.  Those arrayed against her are worthless hypocrites, wicked evildoers, bloodthirsty and corrupt sinners.  Given those choices, of course God will choose her over her enemies.

And God is just the sort of God who will indeed take notice of her plight, who will hear her case, and who will act.  God is trustworthy; she is witness to God’s steadfast covenant love; God will act in ways that are consistent with the ways in which God has always acted.  God will be gracious because that is who God is.  God will redeem and vindicate because that is what God does.

It’s all rhetoric, but rhetoric is not a bad thing.  Why shouldn’t the psalmist make as persuasive a case as possible?  After all, at bottom, what that means is that she regards God as able to be persuaded, which is another way of saying that she regards God as faithful to the covenant and willing to be held to account within the bonds of the covenant.

What happened to her prayer?  Was it answered?  I don’t know.  None of this is a technology.  She and we are dealing with a person, a person with freedom, a person who is bound to us in covenant, but remains free, just as we do.  I believe though that I can guess about a couple of possible outcomes.  If God vindicated her, proved and tested her, graciously redeemed her, as she insisted that God do, she would have been found “in the great congregation” giving blessing to the covenant God of Israel.  If not I suspect that she would have more to say to the covenant God of Israel.  Then, I think, we would discover more of what a religion of complaint looks like.

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] Ps 26:4, 5.

[2] Ps 26:9, 10.

[3] Ps 26:1, 2a, 2b, 11.

Passing (Proper 21B, Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22, September 30, 2013)

Passing

Proper 21B
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
September 30, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
1^st United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Like the Song of Solomon, the Book of Esther is featured in the three-year lectionary only once.  Also like the Song of Solomon, the Book of Esther does not mention God at all.  But it’s a great story and I hated to let it pass knowing that the chance wouldn’t come again for another three years.

Here is an abridged version of the tale:

Long ago in the Persian Empire which stretched from India to Ethiopia, King Ahasuerus, better known to us by his Greek name, Xerxes, was living in his capital city of Susa and wanted to show off how rich he was.  So he held a series of banquets which lasted for six months.  During the banquets he showed off every possession that he had plundered from his enemies, now conquered and subdued and paying their tribute to him as part of the empire.  Last of all he wanted to show off his most prized possession, his wife Queen Vashti, so he sent his servants to summon her to the banquet.  She refused to come.  The king was angry at this display of independent will.  He divorced her so every man might remain the master of his house.

But this left the king wifeless, so he set about finding another one.  He held the world’s first Miss Universe contest and invited all the young women of the empire to enter.  Now there were Jews living in Susa and among them was a Jew named Mordecai who had an orphaned niece whom he had adopted as his daughter.  Her Hebrew name was Hadassah and her Persian name was Esther.  Mordecai persuaded her to enter the contest and she not only made the cut as a finalist, the king was so pleased with her beauty that he chose her to be his queen.  But her relationship to Mordecai remained secret.

Shortly after Esther became queen, Mordecai was hanging around the palace and overheard two men plotting to assassinate the king.  He reported this to Esther, who reported it to the officials who uncovered the plot and so Mordecai had saved the king’s life.

Shortly after this a man named Haman was appointed as the king’s prime minister.  Haman had the king order that everyone should bow down to Haman, but Mordecai refused to do this because Jews did not bow down to any human.  Haman took this personally and, having found out that Mordecai was a Jew, decided to have all the Jews killed.

Haman told the king that there was an alien people in the empire who refused to obey the king’s laws and offered to have them destroyed.  The king approved of this.  Haman picked out a date for this pogrom by casting dice, called “pûrim.”

When news of this plan leaked out Mordecai and all the Jews in Susa and throughout the empire put on sackcloth, smeared themselves with ashes, and went into mourning. 

Now in all of this time Esther had not revealed who her people were.  So when Mordecai sent her word about the plot and asked her to intervene on behalf of the Jews, she suddenly found herself caught on the horns of a dilemma.  If she revealed who her people were she would be subject to the decree just like all of her people.  But the Jews were indeed her people.  Add to this the fact that for anyone to go into the presence of the king without his invitation was punishable by death.  Esther was one torn and anxious young woman.  Mordecai refused to go easy on her:

"Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews.   For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this."

So Esther asked Mordecai to have the Jews fast for her and three days later she took her life into her hands and stood uninvited before the king.  To her relief she was pardoned by the king who asked what she wanted.  She invited the king and Haman to dinner.  It wasn’t much but it was the best she could do, given the state of her nerves. 

Her nerves did not improve and at the dinner the most she could do was to invite them to another dinner.

In the meantime, Haman was fit to be tied over Mordecai’s continued refusal to bow down to him, so he decided to have a gallows built so that he could hang Mordecai on it.

Now the king was suffering from insomnia so he was reading the royal chronicles which was a well-known cure and he noticed a record of a Jew named Mordecai who had foiled an assassination plot but who never been rewarded for this act.  The king summoned Haman and asked him how the king should honor someone whom he wished to honor.  Thinking the king was talking about him, Haman replied:

"For the man whom the king wishes to honor, let royal robes be brought, which the king has worn, and a horse that the king has ridden, with a royal crown on its head.  Let the robes and the horse be handed over to one of the king’s most noble officials; let him robe the man whom the king wishes to honor, and let him conduct the man on horseback through the open square of the city, proclaiming before him: ‘Thus shall it be done for the man whom the king wishes to honor.’”

The king was pleased with this and told him to go and honor Mordecai in this way for having saved his life.  You can imagine Haman’s shame.  But it wasn’t the last unpleasant surprise for Haman.  That night at the banquet with Haman and the king, Esther finally worked up the nerve to reveal her people, to plead for their lives and to accuse Haman of plotting their destruction.  The king in fury ordered Haman hanged from the gallows that he had built for Mordecai.  Then he decreed that, on the date set for their destruction, the Jews be allowed to defend themselves and to plunder the goods of any attacker.

Forever after that the Jews have celebrated the festival of Pûrim, or “lots,” to commemorate how they had been rescued from danger.

That’s the story of Esther.  Although God isn’t directly mentioned in so many words God’s fingerprints are all over this story, most especially in the message that Mordecai sent to Esther, pleading for her help:  “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this,” a message that suggests that there is more at work in these events than a single ambitious Jew and his adopted daughter. 

The story is built around several reversals: a girl from a despised minority becomes queen; Haman must honor the man whom he hates and is then hung on the gallows he had built to execute his enemy; a day planned for the destruction of the Jewish people becomes a day of celebration.  Perhaps the largest reversal in the story is that the unnamed character turns out to be the most important actor of all.

It would have been an easy matter to have preached a sermon on this pattern, a pattern that God’s people are quite familiar with.  After all, it is the testimony both of Israel and of the early followers of Jesus that the God with whom we have to deal in this text is the God who delivered slaves into freedom; brought exiles home; gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf and mobility to the lame; the God who raised Jesus from death to life.  This is the same God who declares the poor to be blessed and the rich to be pitied.  In Esther as in the rest of the Bible, our God is a God of surprises and reversals.  Sum it all up and it fits under the expression that Jesus apparently used in a variety of contexts: “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

This is a central dynamic in our experience of God’s actions among us and it gives rise to an ethic that privileges widows, orphans, strangers, the sick, the powerless, the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned and, in general, all those who occupy the margins of our culture, economy and politics.

But along the way to preaching that sermon I saw something else, something that disturbs me, and challenges the privileged stance from which I have read this text.  I noticed that the story only works at all because Esther can “pass.”  Esther—actually Hadassah—is a Jewish girl who can pass for Persian.  No one can tell from looking at her that she is not the Persian queen that she seems.

“Passing” is a notion that comes out of African American culture.  In some ways it was set up by white people and the “one-drop” rule.  That is, under the law in many states, it used to be that race—and all the barriers or access to privilege that race signified—was defined in a very strict way: if any of a person’s ancestors were black, if there was a single drop of black blood in their veins, they were black, even if they looked white.  This rule removed ambiguity: there were no bi-racial people; they were either black or white.  But in place of the ambiguity it left a great deal of anxiety-provoking uncertainty: just because a person looked white didn’t mean that they really were.  There could be—and probably were—racial imposters who looked like one thing but in reality were another.

White people experienced this uncertainty with both fear and fascination.  It’s not too difficult to imagine white people’s consternation in discovering that a person they had been treating as a social equal was an imposter who had no place among them.  But “passing” was a phenomenon that white people found fascinating.  Louisa May Alcott wrote several short stories and short novels under pseudonyms.  Unlike her bestsellers—Little Women and the related books—these were romantic stories in which the heroine was a white woman and the hero was often a “Spaniard,” code for a person whose racial pedigree could not be established with any certainty.  Miss Alcott entertained bi-racial fantasies.  No wonder she used pseudonyms!

From the perspective of the person passing the issues were somewhat different.  Passing gave a man or a woman access to all sorts of white privilege: education, careers normally closed to blacks, and social standing in the dominant group.  Of course, the greatest fear of whites and therefore the greatest coup to be scored by someone passing was to marry a white person and have children.

But a person could pass only by cutting all connection with their history and the people, social relations, and influences that had shaped and formed them.  Just who was a black person who was successfully passing as white?  Passing was a pricey privilege.

Esther was passing.  She was the queen in the king’s favor.  She had influence and some degree of power.  She certainly lived comfortably, shielded from the harsh realities of the non-elites who lived in the slums of Susa.  For a while she pulled it off.  She had evaded any final decision about who she was.  On the outside she was a Persian.  But the Jews were still “her people.”  Mordecai blew her cover with his refusal to stop being a Jew.  The decision she had evaded had hunted her down and forced a choice: either she would inwardly renounce her Jewishness and conform to her outward appearance, or she would stand with her people as a Jew inside and out.

We know how Esther decided.  Unlike many people who have attempted to pass, she “outed” herself because she could not renounce her true loyalty.  If she could not pass as Persian without ceasing to be Jewish, she would be Jewish.  If she could not pass as Esther without ceasing to be Hadassah, she would be Hadassah.

As the story suggests, though, passing isn’t necessarily an entirely bad thing.  What would have happened to the Jews of the Persian empire if Hadassah had not been able to pass for Esther?  If a Jewish girl had not been able to pass for a Persian queen?  Mordecai was right when he told Esther: “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”

Which brings me and you, too, if you’re willing to come on this journey, to a difficult place.  Like Hadassah/Esther we have two identities.  We carry two passports because we have dual citizenship.  We appear to be rather ordinary American citizens.  We pay our taxes, obey the laws, love our country and wish it well.  But we are also Christians who in following Jesus of Nazareth as his disciples have met the God of surprises and reversals, the God who, as the liberation theologians say, has a preferential option for the poor, where the phrase “the poor” is understood to mean any of those slaves, exiles, blind, deaf, lame, unclean, imprisoned, naked, hungry, thirsty, oppressed or powerless folk who live in the margins of our world.  This is the identity that was imposed on us at our baptism, the identity that we claimed at confirmation, and the identity we impose in our turn when we baptize our children.

Most of the time we pass.  But the two identities that we carry—Hadassah and Esther, Jewish and Persian, American and Christian—do not always sit well with each other.  Most of the time we can live in the American culture without blowing our cover.  And Lord knows the rewards for being able to do this are pretty good.  I have a house that is warm when it is cold outside, cool when it is hot.  I am well-fed.  I have nice clothes.  I can stay clean.  My bed is comfortable.  My life is comfortable.

In the midst of my comfortable life I confess to living somewhat anxiously.  Someone has said that in a world where people are starving you can either eat well or sleep well, but you can’t do both.  I don’t know if I completely agree with that—after all, I don’t know that my going hungry will fill the bellies of those whose prayer for their daily bread mostly goes unanswered.  But I have an uneasy sense that this “someone” has hit a little too close to the mark for my comfort.

Mordecai wasn’t thinking much about Esther’s comfort.  “For just such a time as this,” he said.  Those are terrible words, and yet, the two or three times that I have heard them in my life I have found them not comfortable, but nonetheless strangely comforting.  They have meant that I could no longer pass, but had to be publically clear about who and whose I am.  They also meant I no longer had to pass, but could be publically clear about who and whose I am.  There is something liberating in that.

So the story of Esther doesn’t just celebrate the God of reversals.  The story of Esther also poses a series of questions that are both uncomfortable and liberating: When push comes to shove who are we really?  What does it mean to pass?  What would it mean to stop passing?  What would we lose and gain by that?  When do we know that it is time to stop passing, when “this” time is “just such a time”?

I don’t begin to know the answers to those questions.  I’m not sure there are iron-clad answers to those questions.  But they are really good questions.  If we let them, they will shape and form us.  For all that they make us uncomfortable, they are good news.

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.