A Ministry of Irritation (Micah 5:2-4; 6:6-8; Pentecost 22a; November 9, 2014)

A Ministry of Irritation

Micah 5:2-4; 6:6-8
Pentecost 22a
November 9, 2014

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

We are the heirs of a rich tradition.  We have a sacred text with roots that go back three and half millennia.  We have patterns of worship and time that shape our lives.  We have a line of heroes and heroines—like Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Teresa of Ávila, Francis of Assisi, Benedict of Nursia, and Agnes of Rome, among countless others—that stretch from present into the distant past.  We have the stories of God’s people in the Hebrew and Greek Testaments. 

If there were no churches, no stained glass, no organ music, no choirs, no vestments, no Sunday school rooms, no mission agencies, no pension funds or conference centers, we would still be rich.  We would have this legacy of God’s people.

A priceless part of that legacy is the tradition of the prophets.   We think of prophets as people who can see into the future.  That would be a handy talent to have.  Every culture has had its ways of trying to see what will happen.  The Chinese had their I Ching, the Babylonians their astrology, and the Romans their augury and auspices.  Today, of course, we have economists.

But biblical prophets were not mostly concerned with telling the future.  Biblical prophets experienced a relation with God that allowed them to understand what God was doing in the present situation.  They were social critics, poets, preachers, and performance artists.  Their gift was not so much foresight as it was insight. 

We’ve already met two of them this fall.  Three weeks ago we met Nathan who confronted David about “the thing that he had done.” Last week we met Elisha who told the Syrian general Naaman to go jump in a lake.  Seven times.  Or maybe it was a river.  Anyway.

This week we meet a new thing, a thing that is, as far as I know, unique in the history of religions: a literary prophet, a prophet whose prophecies have come to us in a written and literary form.  Amos and Hosea were the first and lived in the middle seven hundreds bce.  Micah came along a little later and lived in the late seven hundreds at about the same time as the prophet Isaiah.

The narrative lectionary assigns a reading made up of two separate passages in Micah.  The first is a promise of a king in the old style, in the pattern set by David, a text we’re used to hearing in Advent.  The second is the famous summary of covenant life: “The [Lord] God has told us what is right and what he demands: ‘See that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey your God,’” more familiar to us, perhaps, as “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

I wasn’t sure at first what to make of this.  But the more I’ve chewed on this the more sense it makes.  The two themes in these two passages run through all of the literary prophets. 

The first is the dream of a righteous king, a king who will use his power to protect the weak from the strong, a king who will safeguard the covenant and its people.  When Micah dreamed this dream he naturally enough thought of David, born in Bethlehem of Ephrathah of the least of the clans of Judah, who became the king of a united Israel.  It was a good dream, but every time they thought they had a king who came close, he ended up letting them down.

They should have known.  Another prophet, Samuel, had told them.  Israel had asked for a king “like other nations,” one who could lead and protect them.  Samuel saw that this request was a rejection of Yahweh’s rule and warned Israel of danger:

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers.  He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers.  He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work.  He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.  And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

And that’s what happened.  But the dream died hard.  It lived on in the imagination of the prophets, not so much as an expectation but as an indictment of the kings they had, kings that fell far short of the dream of a righteous king, kings that oppressed the poor and favored the rich, kings that exploited the widow, the orphan and the immigrant.

The real danger, even worse than bad kings who failed to remember the covenant, was the kings who would warp the dream into a nightmare.  They took God’s promise to defend Jerusalem and to uphold the king of David’s line as permission to do as they liked.  God would always put a king of David’s line on the throne in Jerusalem.  Jerusalem was the city on a hill.  It would never fall to an enemy.  God would protect it. 

This warped sense of entitlement infected Judah and its kings simply forgot the heart of the covenant.  And that’s where the second prophetic theme came in.  Prophets were not terribly impressed with what we call religion.  Rituals, sacrifices, ceremonies, seasons and holy days may be useful for us, but they can also be a danger.  There is a matter at the heart of the covenant |and Micah tells us what that is: “See that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey your God.”  These are not really three different things, but three ways of saying the same thing, and it is one way of summing up the prophetic message.  God is, in Walter Brueggemann’s phrase, “passionately committed to justice.” 

When we talk about justice, we normally mean criminal justice, we mean that people who break the law will be punished.  We certainly have laws and we certainly punish the people who break them.  We jail more of our population than any other nation on earth.  But that’s not what God means by justice.

When we push a little, we might say that justice means that everyone plays the game by the same rules.  Justice is a level playing field.  Of course, the game has winners and losers because some are better at the game.  Those who lose the game are losers.  We wouldn’t dream of blaming the game itself.  The game is just the way the world is.  As long as the rules are the same for everyone, we call it just. 

But God doesn’t.  God isn’t a referee who cares only about the rules of the game.  God takes sides.  The passage goes on to define justice, mercy and humble obedience.  It comes in the form of an indictment, but God’s passionate commitment to justice is obvious:

Can I forget the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is accursed?  Can I tolerate wicked scales and a bag of dishonest weights?  Your wealthy are full of violence; your inhabitants speak lies, with tongues of deceit in their mouths.  Therefore I have begun to strike you down, making you desolate because of your sins.  You shall eat, but not be satisfied, and there shall be a gnawing hunger within you; you shall put away, but not save, and what you save, I will hand over to the sword.  You shall sow, but not reap; you shall tread olives, but not anoint yourselves with oil; you shall tread grapes, but not drink wine.

When the game is rigged, God sides with the poor, the powerless, and the excluded, against the rich and powerful insiders.  This is the tradition of the prophets that came down through Samuel, Nathan, and Elisha to Amos, Hosea, and Micah, and on through Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, to John the Baptist and to Jesus.  And we who worship this God, who hear these stories week after week, who call ourselves Christians, are heirs to this tradition.

During the coming week, you’ll be making a decision about your church giving in 2015.  Maybe you’ve already done that.  There are many reasons that you can consider.  You can consider the programs of the church.  The Sunday school, the music program, the UMW circles, the fellowship groups are all good reasons for giving.  The work of the United Methodist connection in Iowa, the United States and around the world that combines the contributions of many to do things that we can hardly imagine, things like the end of malaria in Africa, is another.  The mere fact that the church as an organization allows for the mutual support and care that we experience here, is yet another. 

But for me, there is the matter of God’s passionate commitment to justice.  In a world of institutionalized violence and ruthless competition, a dream for some bought at the price of a nightmare for others, in a world system rigged to give more power and wealth to those with power and wealth, someone needs to take the side of the poor and powerless.  It certainly won’t be the governmental and financial institutions.  It falls to us, God’s people, the Church, to carry on the prophetic tradition.  That’s reason enough to give our time, and our energy, and our wealth, and our lives. 

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The Gift of Wisdom (1 Kings 3:4-9, 16-28; Pentecost 20a; October 26, 2014)

The Gift of Wisdom

1 Kings 3:4-9, 16-28
Pentecost 20a
October 26, 2014

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

My children’s bible was relatively well-censored, but somehow this story got in.  And it came with an illustration, too.  There were two women in the royal court with their long hair unpinned and disordered.  One was on her knees, pleading with tears.  The other was standing with her arms crossed, looking like she’d just eaten some cream of mushroom soup that was past its “use by” date.  Solomon sat on his throne, looking stern.  A soldier was holding a crying baby by its ankle in his left hand and holding a sword in his right hand ready to strike.  The picture froze the story in the terrible moment of decision.

Reading the story, I learned that Solomon had to decide—without the benefit of DNA testing—which of the two women was the mother of the child.  He hit on this strategy for testing them.  Sure enough the women revealed who they were and so Solomon had his answer.  It was a bluff.  All is well that ends well, I suppose.

And yet I kept coming back to the picture, the story frozen in the moment of its greatest horror.  The people’s “respect for the king grew,” the lesson says.  “Respect” here translates the word for fear which, granted, has a wide range of meanings, including awe.  The word of Solomon’s judgment spread and the people respected the king, were in awe of the king, or maybe they were just afraid.  I know I was afraid nearly three thousand years later just from looking at the picture!

Solomon was a wise man, so our tradition tells us.  They used to say that someone who could see past the surface into the heart of a matter had “the wisdom of Solomon.”  This, however, is the only example of Solomon’s wisdom that has come down to us.  What sort of wisdom is this?  It was useful, certainly.  It let Solomon dispose of legal cases that would have taken up a lot more of his time otherwise.  It enhanced his reputation.

I would call the Solomon of this story clever, rather than wise, but the ancients made no such distinction.  In Luke, for example, when Jesus promises his disciples wisdom, the purpose of that wisdom is so that will be able to give testimony that their opponents won’t be able to contradict.  Jesus in Matthew tells us to be “wise as serpents.”

There was a wisdom tradition in ancient Israel that continued for centuries.  Wisdom writers wrote a good deal of the Bible.  Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job and many of the psalms are a part of what scholars call wisdom literature.  Scribes who were part of the civil service probably produced much of it.  They were bureaucrats even before there were bureaus.  When we look closely at what is in these books, we find that wisdom is often little more than practical advice for knowledge workers who were trying to get along in the competitive and political environment of the royal court. 

As an apprentice curmudgeon, one of the things that I like to complain about is the lack of wisdom in the world today: we have all sorts of knowledge, but very little wisdom.  I bristle when college majors are rated by how much you can expect to earn with a particular degree.  I achieve a state of high dudgeon when education is defined as preparing people for the job market.  We have developed great ability to advance in technology without learning how to ask—let alone answer—such basic questions as Why? and Should we?

For Solomon and the wisdom tradition that followed, wisdom was mostly a technique for governing.  Some of that technique was exercised through clay tablets and papyrus documents.  Some was exercised in architecture.  Solomon’s Temple, an ancient marvel, was propaganda in stone.  It proclaimed the eternal protective presence of Israel’s covenant God who would never let Israel suffer defeat and who would uphold David’s dynasty for all time.  In Solomon’s court the scribes kept track of the taxes owed, the labor drafted, and the goods given for God’s greater glory and the increase of Solomon’s power.  All of this was a part of the wisdom that Solomon prayed for.

And all of this, says the text, was so that Solomon could “execute justice.”  Well, that’s almost what it says.  What it says could be translated as “render judgment.” This gift of wisdom that Solomon as asked for could simply be the gift of being able to dispose of legal cases swiftly and in a way that impressed his subjects.  This would certainly make governing easier. 

But wisdom here is more than that.  It is “God’s wisdom…in him.”  This is not just a cleverness that lets Solomon govern with ease and efficiency for whatever ends he chooses.  This is God’s Hôkhmah, God’s Sophia, God’s Wisdom that has taken up residence “in him”, in the inner part of his body, his “innards.”  God’s Wisdom is as close to him as heartburn.  It is a part of him.  In this way, Solomon’s judgments will be a reflection of God’s judgments.  And, since God is passionately committed to justice, in this way, Solomon’s judgments will be just.  And that justice is not just for the rich and well-connected.  It’s for everyone, even for women counted among the lowest of the low.  Whatever it was that Solomon thought he was praying for, this is what his prayer meant.

From where I stand, it looks like we could use more of this kind of wisdom.  We could use more judgments aligned with the wisdom of God in the governing of our community, our nation and our world.  In a democracy, we say, the people rule.  We rule.  I’m one of the rulers of this country, speaking to other rulers of this country.  Like Solomon, we are called on once a year or so to render a judgment.  Sometimes the choices seem clear; other times not so much.  Sometimes the candidates sound like the women in our story, each claiming to be the victim of the other’s dirty tricks, each making a claim on the baby.  When we render our judgment by casting our vote, we need the same wisdom Solomon prayed for, not just to make our own lives easier, but so God’s wisdom might guide our judgment and justice might be done.

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.

What David Had Done (2 Samuel 12:1-15; Pentecost 19a; October 19, 2014)

What David Had Done

2 Samuel 12:1-15
Pentecost 19a
October 19, 2014

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

David the King is supposed to be one of the good guys.  He’s a hero in the Bible.  He is remembered by Israel and then by Judah as the ideal king.  When things were going badly, they hoped for a king in David’s mold.  When the figure of the Messiah begins to emerge in Jewish writing and thinking, he is seen as the heir of David, the Son of David.

To be sure, there are a couple of dissenting voices.  One of them is Jesus, himself.  In the twelfth chapter of Mark, Jesus questions the idea that the Messiah must be a descendent of David.  Another voice is in biblical story that we usually call David and Bathsheba.  It’s rather shocking, if you’re not prepared for it.  It would be like finding out that George Washington, our first President and a rather idealized figure, not only did not confess to chopping down his father’s cherry tree, but also had his staff break into the offices of his political adversaries and plant listening devices, and cheated on his wife with an intern and then lied under oath about it. 

But, of course, it isn’t that shocking to us, because we’ve heard about this story already.  Not only was there the 1951 movie starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward that has run on late-night television for three generations, now.  A quick search of Amazon.com for “David and Bathsheba” returns nearly 4000 titles.  The story has “legs.” Something about it fascinates us.  Maybe it’s the exotic setting.  Maybe it’s the political intrigue of a royal court.  Maybe it’s the sex. 

Maybe it’s because the popular version of the story fits a well-known narrative.  You know the one I mean.  Women use their beauty to attract and distract men.  And men are powerless to resist them.  Men under the sway of “womanly wiles” will do things that they know are wrong but they just can’t help it.  The narrative shows up in court rooms and in hearings on university campuses as the “she wanted it” defense.  It shows up in the abuse and scorned heaped on Monica Lewinsky.  It shows up in high school dress codes that regulate how girls dress so that the boys won’t be distracted.  It shows up in post-revolutionary Iran in the requirement for women to wear a veil in public so that young men won’t have impure thoughts.  It’s David strolling about on his rooftop in the cool of the evening who sees Bathsheba bathing and just can’t help himself.

David just can’t help it when he sees her.  He can’t help it when he stares.  He can’t help it when he asks his servants who she is.  He can’t help it when, on finding out that she is married to a man with no connections, he then sends a servant with orders to bring her to him.  He can’t help it when he takes her to his bed.  He can’t help when, after the discovery that she is pregnant, he first tries to cover up his crime by fetching Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, home from the front in the hopes that Uriah will never suspect that the slightly early full-term baby is not his, and then, when Uriah won’t cooperate, by having Uriah killed.  He just can’t help any of it.  None of it is his fault.  Because, Bathsheba is a woman.

This is the narrative that “mansplains” men behaving badly.  Eve is the one who brought death into the world.  Pandora is the bringer of troubles, her name—Pan-dora, all-gift—an exquisite irony.  Mary Magdalene is trouble; dress her in red.  Put a scarlet A on Hester Prynne’s outer garments.  David was innocent until Bathsheba came along. 

But with the help of his general who arranged for Uriah’s murder, David not only avoided a public relations nightmare.  He even positioned himself to look like the champion of the common man.  After all, Bathsheba was the pregnant wife of a dead war hero.  He is David’s chance to pose as the protector of widows and orphans as he looked after the family of Uriah the foreigner.  He was doing God’s work.   So Bathsheba came to live in the palace and when she gave birth, it was a son.  All’s well that ends well. 

However.  Isn’t that a great word sometimes?  However, “what David had done was evil in the Lord’s eyes.”  Enter Nathan, the prophet.

Now Nathan is in a bit of a pickle.  He’s a prophet and therefore has a duty to speak on God’s behalf, whether this pleases David or not.  On the other hand, David pays his salary.  So Nathan didn’t come to the king and accuse directly: “This thing you’ve been up to with Bathsheba is wrong and you are in trouble with God!”

Instead, Nathan told a story.  A rich man had a house guest and was therefore obligated to feed him.  But instead of feeding him from his own flock he stole a ewe lamb from a man who was so poor that this lamb was the family pet. 

David was corrupt and ruthless, but he was also a child of the Torah.  And he knew an injustice when he heard it.  And this was an injustice.  And he said so: “He must restore the ewe lamb four times over because he did this and because he had no compassion.”

“You are that man!” Nathan told him. 

This is not a story of a “helpless man, powerful seductive woman,” the narrative that informs popular imagination.  David has murdered a member of his guard and taken his wife.  Bathsheba had no power to stop David.  Although there was no overt violence, no knife to her throat, and no threats made out loud, when David’s power prevented Bathsheba from refusing his advances, meaningful consent on her part was no longer possible.  What Hollywood and popular culture have portrayed as a seduction with David as the victim, was in fact a rape and David was the perpetrator.

Nathan gives David no room for the “I couldn’t help myself” defense.  David’s problem was not in a female body bathing on a nearby rooftop.  David’s problem was the sense of entitlement between his ears and no amount of clothing on Bathsheba’s body would have fixed that.  No veil can protect a young man in Iran or anywhere else from his own thoughts.  The baggiest sweat shirt and sweat pants on his female classmate will not stop the distraction happening in the head of a male high student. 

No doubt David, like a lot of men today, would like to claim to have no responsibility, no ability to respond, no power to act.  But that just won’t wash.  Men can and do regulate how they respond to their desires.  It’s up to men to behave well.  It’s up to men to stop using women as an excuse to behave badly.  It is not the responsibility of the less powerful to control the behavior of the more powerful.  Young men in this country are fully capable of keeping their eyes on their own work and we expect them to do that.  Young men have to come to terms with their own imaginations and quit blaming young women.  Even David didn’t try out the “Boys will be boys” excuse on Nathan.  He knew that Nathan would not have it.

David recognized the wrongness he had done in the parable that Nathan told.  David acknowledged that he had sinned against God.  I wonder if he recognized that he had also sinned against Uriah and Bathsheba?  He knew that restitution was in order.  He knew that a man who stole a lamb would have to give four back to set matters to rights.  But Bathsheba was a man’s wife, not livestock, and anyway David had killed the man.  To whom would restitution be made? 

There are some things that David or anyone else for that matter can do that cannot be undone.  No repair will return things to the way they should be.  Retribution is possible, but justice is not.  David will have to live with this for the rest of his life.  And that’s what David did. 

The tradition has been kind to David, perhaps kinder than he deserved.  Perhaps because David was willing to live with this burden, he was not known for his worst deeds.  I don’t really know.  What I do know is that because we are part of a tradition that can see unflinchingly the faults even of its heroes, our faults will not prevent us from carrying this tradition on.  As God looked on David’s actions with stern compassion, so may God forgive our failure, mend our faults and restore us to the fullness of God’s life.

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