Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Pentecost 22C - Proper 27 - Sunday, November 10, 2019
Job 19:23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38
Click here for an audio version of the sermon.
The source of the saying is unclear. We can imagine who might say it. It is a long list… Our cultural moment is awash in minds made up. It is a good, old-fashioned American value to have made up one’s mind. Nice if the facts agree with the thing about which one’s mind is made up, but not always required! Why let facts ruin a good story? Made-up minds are strong, resolute, determined, immovable. The culture idolizes people who know – or at least act like they know. Sometimes we even elect them to office. Having arrived at a made-up mind is a state not without a certain appeal. What is the alternative? Who wants to be defined as wishy-washy, lacking backbone, following the crowd, going with the flow? That all sounds rather limp. Molly Ivins, the late columnist and author from Texas expressed this idea in the images of my home state: “There is nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow line and dead squirrels.” Civilized conversations across differences are rare. Compromise is a dirty word. It is easier to demonize and despise than to dialogue. We may seem particularly polarized, locked in our minds that know and safely sequestered in our appropriate tribes, but we are not the first people to be so dangerously drawn into dualism. This is as old a game as the Garden of Eden and we encounter a classic example in the Gospel for today.
Luke is the gospel of universality, portraying a Jesus who eagerly seeks out the rejected, outcast, unclean, and unwell and brings healing, forgiveness, community, and hope. In teaching and miracle and parable Jesus declares the divine “yes” to each person without exception. But Luke is no utopian fantasy story where everyone takes Jesus up on his offer. The human “no” is always possible. Frighteningly real and easy. If heaven is likened to a banquet thrown in honor of one and all, a celebration of endless abundance and outrageous joy, then hell is the decision to stand outside the party, alone, in the darkness, and refuse to go in, refuse to break bread with tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers. Those outside believe it is better to keep their hearts safe in its casket of judgment rather than to dignify such a blasphemous gathering of human scum. My mind is made up.
The Sadducees in the gospel reading were skilled in the mind-making business, especially in how much better they were than, well, just about everybody. They were a priestly sect that only accepted the Torah, the first five books, as authoritative. We enter the scene in the early days of Holy Week. Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem, and attracting large and enthusiastic crowds, much to the consternation of the Sadducees who come to pose this convoluted scenario to Jesus. The Sadducees found no reference to the resurrection or life after death in the Torah, so they rejected it, though later writings begin to form an idea of resurrection, the Sadducees held onto to a hard-core purist position. The question to Jesus is, like the question about paying taxes to Caesar, a no-win trap to which there is no straight answer that will not add to the already deep divisions about these issues. “Do you read the text correctly, Jesus, or are you an enemy?”, they sneer. So, with the crowds listening for his answer, the Sadducees know that if they can publicly shame him, catch him without an answer, or at least without a good one, the crowds will see him as a disgraced charlatan and move on, order restored, problem solved.
Jesus knows what is going on, of course. His response turns the tables on them and uses their own sacred texts, his example of Moses at the burning bush is from Exodus 6, to make a point about life after death. God, he says, did not cease to be God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob after they died. “I am their God”, Yahweh proclaims to Moses, present tense. If the patriarchs are alive, then everyone is alive in God. Welcome to Bible study with Jesus, who probably has some good things to say about what the text means. His way of using the text is as important as the content. He is giving us an example of sacred reading.
Once when leading a retreat for a parish group here over a weekend, I allowed some time for questions during one of the sessions and someone asked, “Do you ever get bored reading the same psalms over and over again?” Without thinking, I said, “we don’t read the same psalms.” The answer is about a basic set of attitudes and assumptions about reading sacred scripture. The Bible is not a static history book from which I extract a finite amount of data. It is alive, breathed into. The inspiration happens in the interplay, the event, the dance between text and reader out of which something new is eternally possible. I don’t read the same psalms or any scripture the same way twice because I am not the same – my needs and questions are ever changing.
What is clear from Jesus’ use of the story of Moses at the burning bush is that Jesus had read the text. He had listened to it, pondered it, noticed things about it. He had connected stories together. That God uses the present tense, “I am” the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob means something. And because of that reading, Jesus can upturn a trap question about marriage customs designed to embarrass him by referencing a story that speaks of the very identity of God. The question, Jesus is saying, is not “how do I get my doctrinal details and ethical conformity to every law so close to the text that I become the super-righteous person I am expected to be”. The deeper and more important questions are; “who is God, how does God come to us and invite us into relationship and promise to be faithfully present to us even into eternity?”
The Sadducees did not read like this. They found in the text what they wanted in order to perpetuate a system of temple control and power that benefited them. Their agenda created a bias that turned the text into a weapon with which they could attack their enemies. The Torah contains many commands to the people to show respect to the foreigner, generosity to widows and orphans, welcome to the stranger, and compassion to all – a revolutionary ethic that said treat others as God has treated you. The Sadducees, if they had read carefully, should have seen in Jesus an embodiment of all that the Torah says about neighborliness, a call back to the heart of God’s covenant with a people for the whole world, and then welcomed Jesus with joyful gratitude as Messiah. Instead, the Sadducees’ reading of the Torah, in seeking to discredit and defame Jesus - who only ever did good and obeyed God - conveniently skipped over those passages. Their stubborn refusal to let go of their power and status in exchange for the wonder of God’s truth will keep them outside the party.
If we read the Bible solely to justify our positions so that we can insult and demean the other in error, or even just different from us, it is not the Bible we are reading. Have you ever thought, “Don’t confuse me with what the Bible says, my mind is made up”? As a professor of mine liked to say, “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out”, but be open-minded and open-hearted enough to be bothered. If you sincerely read the whole thing, especially the parts you do not like, you will be bothered. The Bible inspires us with truth, encourages us, moves us with its beauty, but don’t stop there, keep going. It talks about justice, money, possessions, generosity, service, love. It bothers us. Read it again. Or, actually, read it as if for the first time. This reading is not about fully grasping those mysteries, but remembering the first rule of theology: God is God, you are not. Sacred reading is the decision to enter more consciously into the presence of God in reverence, ready to be instructed, consoled, or corrected, as God’s voice speaks in the text.
The correction part is the hardest and most uncomfortable. Notice that Jesus told the Sadducees they were wrong, “and the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed in the story about the bush…” He rejects their misreading and corrects it. He resists nonviolently and non-judgmentally, however, with a view toward opening their minds and hearts to perceive the truth. Reading in this way will give the text access to us, to mirror back to us what it has to say about our minds, our privilege, our attitudes, and invites us to honesty. God then unmakes the mind that we so quickly make, and makes it into the mind of Christ. We are headed toward the last day. We can’t go into the party with a God of our own making. We can only enter the banquet feast as guests of the God who is. Jesus here is showing us how to be liberated from our stubbornness and inviting us into a life of grace that is wide enough to allow God to do in us and others what we cannot do alone.
Many times, Jesus could have entered the power game, taken a side, and demonized those labelled less holy and worthy than him – which would have been everybody. That is what fanatics do, and Jesus is not a fanatic. Jesus is a radical. Fanatics define themselves by us versus them. Radicals believe that in the depths of our being we long most for communion and community even more than competition and rivalry. Radicals believe something better is possible in our relationships, that the great shared feast is real, and it is coming. Where fanatics want to trap, radicals want to liberate. Listen to your thoughts and words – radicals use words like “children of God”, “all”, and “alive” and turn the world upside down.
O God, bother us. Expand our made-up minds, enlarge our constricted hearts. Remind us that our holy reading reveals how much more there is to know of your infinitely mysterious yet revealed and present grace. No, Molly, there is more in the middle of the road than just a yellow line and dead squirrels. The middle place is the holy place, the meeting place, the middle of the road is where the bridge across the divide that tears us apart is waiting to be built, where possibilities are born, where one hand extended in friendship toward another is the beginning of a peace that will last and a justice that will never fail. After the arguments, the positions, the schisms, the elections – after all the walls are down and all the labels peeled off and there is no more “us versus them” but only one great holy “we”, after the conquests of nations are swallowed up by the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, what lasts forever is life, real resurrection life, a party. Come on inside.
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