Treachery, Theology, and Story

Luke 7:36-50

Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

June 17, 2007

Now I often tell you how lucky I feel to have a job wherein each week I live with the pre-selected passages from the church’s ancient lectionary. This is a hard sell, I know. But most especially this week. Those master souls who, over the centuries, put together the complex index of Bible lections must have rubbed their hands in glee over this cycle. Here’s my index for preaching this week, six selections. You figure out a sermon from them!

First, Luke 7. What John read. An unnamed sinful woman interrupts a dinner between Jesus and an uptight religious leader, who doesn’t like Jesus, one Simon the Pharisee. This woman is full of embodied emotion, she’s crying and then anointing Jesus’ feet with her tears and with ointment from her alabaster jar. She dries his feet with her hair. I can feel all of this, but how can I preach it?

Thanks to the parable about the great and greater forgiveness that Jesus then tells, this night-time story can enter the morning worship hour – and it was the one of the six passages I settled on for us. The other readings are really worth your checking out. In the second one we hear what a joke evil is if it weren’t so serious. From Kings 1: 21 we find how King Ahab’s wife makes the name Jezebel notorious forever. Jezebel arranges the murder of her husband’s enemy in a land grab deal. What’s the sermon? ”Don’t do that!”? In the next reading the depth of the sinful human heart emerges. Jezebel isn’t deep and Ahab is the king of arrested development. But in the second Samuel, we have King David, he who unified Israel, wrote Psalms, killed Goliath. In this reading good King David abuses Bathsheba’s ritual-purification bath, arranges to kill her husband, and commits adultery with her. Wow! Then the prophet Nathan condemns David with a poignant story of a rich man who takes for his dinner a poor man’s favorite household pet, “one little ewe lamb.” And David gets the story! He gets that he is that man.

Then the lectionary gives part of a letter from Saint Paul, Galatians Two. We’re moving from political and personal treacheries to a theology of sin and forgiveness. Paul’s a poetic theologian but he can be such a tortured intellect. All he’s really trying to write in his letter is that “God loves us anyway.” But Paul never got over his own intellectual arrogance. The logic of his love almost always gets disguised by his elliptical language. When you decipher his code it’s really pretty intriguing. But as a closed ellipse as a sermon, it can sound like Lewis Carroll: crazy making!

His point is to love because we have “in Christ” a new and a secret identity, as if we’re Secret Double O Seven agents in an undercover operation for the King, with a special license to love unto death, “to die another day,” again and again. But “in Christ”? I’m not one of those preachers who can toss off that prepositional phrase as if we all know what it means. Recently I think I kind of got it. To Paul to be “in Christ” is like we are one of Nietzsche’s “overmen,” “ubermensch,” supermen, beings beyond the good and evil of the law, self-transcending, by faith, because we really are immortal through Christ. But, “in Christ,”? “through Christ,”? Nietzsche and Paul, that’s more than a sermon can do! The lectionary also gives us two Psalms, 5 and 32. Psalms of existential sighs and hopes for forgiveness. They inspired our printed prayers and our first two hymns. But they didn’t inspire a sermon.

So lectionary, lectionary, everywhere but not a drop to preach! Luckily, my trance-like imagination took me to a sermon.
One sermon on six lectionary readings in 17 minutes! So, here we go!

Nancy and I got our cable hooked up this past week, and on her way back north for a week, she said, as I took her to that kiss and ride thing at the Metro, “Don’t forget to figure out how to turn on the TV, they have lots of interesting channels down here!”

Well, I was not able to figure it out. But nonetheless I had a fantasy, a TV fantasy, and I want to take you on a little tour of the shows I saw in my trance-like mind since I couldn’t click on the clicker. It being Father’s Day week-end I had the fantasy, also, of having complete and absolute control over the clicker!

Now the first thing I saw, how my fantasy began, was a real Father’s Day bachelor-like James Bond special, sponsored by the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC! Now, lots of men, if they really could have a Father’s Day wish come true, wouldn’t mind being “James Bond for a day.”

So my heart was strangely warmed watching the secret life of cold war spies. How great, I thought. Espionage! A secret identity, language, code. Magical technology and a moral struggle between good and evil empires, with life and death consequences. Not unlike St. Paul’s inner Christ against the empire. The ultimate Nietzsche spy story! This was a good fantasy, I thought, and it included some strange female figures – some innocent and beautiful, some conniving and evil.

But then, in such spy worlds nobody really makes moral choices. The chess board of good guys and bad guys is all set up. There are only moves to make: check and checkmate. Nobody grows or changes. There are hijinks but no history, no personal development, no social change, nobody chooses sin or every says they’re sorry. Nobody asks anybody for forgiveness in James Bond’s spy world.

But just as that fantasy ended a new channel came on, another fantasy. This one called “The Lectionary Channel.” It featured Bible passages indexed for June 17, 2007. Oh, bummer! I thought. But soon the Bible world and Bond’s world seemed similar. There was treachery. You recall Jezebel. There she was looking like Susan Sarandon with her conniving evil plot to kill her husband’s enemies so that he could have the land he wanted. King Ahab is a big baby in the Bible. He takes to his bed in a pitiful collapse because he can’t have what he wants, when he wants it, because he wants it. But we don’t call women “Jezebels” anymore. A woman who stands by her man and attacks his enemies seems more like a presidential contender than a “Jezebel.”

Ahab and Jezebel on the Lectionary Channel remind us that the Bible is the good book about bad people. Bad people are always fun to watch, like mixing the “Jerry Springer Show” with “West Wing.” Ahab and Jezebel, the seamy side of politics, the low rent of high drama, like Lady Macbeth and that weak husband we all love to hate.

But unlike good Shakespeare, 1st Kings gives a moralistic conclusion to the comic-book evil here. The biblical bottom line moral is that the prophets Elijah and Elisha “know” that God hates Ahab and his false-god worshipping wife. So there! They deserve their fate. This is not helpful I thought of this show. Not sermon-helpful. Not life-helpful. Sure there are manipulative women and weak kings but how’s this bible story supposed to help us today? Are we to believe that as Israel tilts towards chaos again, as in Ahab’s time, that it’s because of the personal morality of some leader’s wife? That she worships the wrong God? Are we scandalized by Jezebel? No matter what the graduates of the so-called moral majority and religious right think, do we really believe the moral arc of the universe is bent by soap-opera morality?

Conservative Christians through out our country are still preaching sermons from this one Old Testament theology and millions believe it. In their world a good Christian President like Jefferson Davis was/is preferable to a non-Christian, non- believer like Abraham Lincoln. In their world the constitution should make this a Christian nation as the Confederate constitution said of the south. But the north did not.

Whose side was God on? I hope you reject the use of the Bible for such self-serving so-called morality, both here and in the Middle East. For one thing, the Bible gets better. My next fantasy show was a re-run of the Lectionary Channel’s show from 2nd Samuel about that once-upon-a-time-good-king David. Treachery, but spiced a bit with Bathsheba stealing the show from Jezebel. This of course is a dangerous fantasy. How was the story of Bathsheba to be filmed? She, the archetype of any sexually manipulated, abused, or assaulted woman.

King David is still in his James Bond spy morality spying on Uriah’s beautiful wife, as she takes her ritual purification bath. From his roof top David’s thinking “for my eyes only!” But here at least we can get closer to the heart of sin, as we get closer to the life in forgiveness.

The blind greed of Jezebel doesn’t compare with the eye-popping lust of David, and while both of them in their separate stories ( I Kings and 2 Samuel) arrange for the murder of a person blocking their desire, the theology of David’s story exceeds Jezebel’s. David’s prophet is Nathan. He’s just a better theological consultant than Elijah/Elisha. Certainly he has more to work with in David. And he “does” his theology with a story not a moral lesson. The story of the one little ewe lamb taken by the rich man moves the moral will and the human heart of King David. He can see himself as God sees him, as, like us, sinners in the hands of a God who knows us. And there will be consequences. Redemption is not restoration. Yes consequences to David’s sin: “Oh Absalom, Absalom” Where art thou?! David’s son Absalom has his father’s sin visited upon him. This story, David and Bathsheba, takes us into the religious world we care about and know: human temptation, power, its abuse; awareness and with it redemption. A world here of life long tragic consequences but of a heart that changes, a confession, a promise of forgiveness.

So my television fantasies seemed to take on a progressive development from the secret world of Bond-like spies who are supermen playing chess but never changing, to morality plays of treachery with Jezebel-like cartoon figures who prove to the simple-minded that bad things happen to bad people because they are bad, to King David who is a good person who does bad things and changes through confession and forgiveness.

This three step fantasy is an outline of 3 stages of moral development: ruthless Manichaeism; comic moralism; compassionate redemption.

My fantasy was ready to give me sermon-gold! Although I got to listen to some beautiful Psalms next, Psalm 5 as Hymn 161, “As Morning Dawns”, and Psalm 32 as Hymn 184, “How Blest Are Those.” Psalms that make sacred our sighs and cries to God. Psalms that sing of the happiness of those whose sins are forgiven.

Then the most amazing and beautiful show came on my trance fantasy TV. It showed a slice of life, a world very different from any of the other five lectionary readings: Galatians, Kings, Samuel, the Psalms. Here in Luke was a world beyond political treachery although at the house where Jesus eats with the Pharisee you can still feel the boot-heel of the empire
outside the door. Here in Luke 7, is a theology of love, judgment, faith and forgiveness, that Paul could only diagram. He never knew how to tell a gospel story.

In this story there was a man, Jesus, who brings us the sharpest most intimate picture of the world of sin and forgiveness, the world of the burdened human heart and the release of loving forgiveness.

And yes, this Jesus is the Christ so he has all the moves any James Bond would have. He is un-flappable, he is calm, cool and collected. I see his piercing eyes in my fantasy. He engages in the high risk dangers of moral temptation. Low life does not bring him down. High-power life does not scare him away. He brings up the low, the sinning woman; he brings down the high, the Pharisee. Like any hero he risks life and reputation, but not like Bond from duty, but like God from love.

The man, Simon, and the unnamed woman do not play chess, they are not moralistically one dimensional, they are complex, dynamic, changing people who make choices and are transformed. She has sought Jesus out. Simon the Pharisee is hospitable but cold, compliant yet ready to change. He is not a lost cause and Jesus has his number. More than a Bond-woman, a Jezebel, a Bathsheba, this story has a totally alive, totally beautiful, totally real woman, person.

Oh yes, be still my beating heart! What would Jesus do with such a woman? Bond kisses and kills. Ahab cannot stand up. David cannot help but lie and lie down. But Jesus? He looks, but she has already seen him. She sought him. She dissolved to his feet in tears. With joy and release, she kisses him ceaselessly. For them it’s all about spirit. He sees her sin and her faith. She sees his love and forgiveness. He sees her gaping trust, she feels his gripping trustworthiness.

This is a world, after all the others, I had to care about upon seeing, had to pay attention to. As a religious person it’s a world I have to say something about, share, preach. In that room, over that meal, with those three people, their words and gestures, the personal heart of God is shown, revealed. Clearly God loves this woman. She has made choices, moral and immoral. Jesus looks at her but he speaks to his host. She is so very there. Will Simon join the scene? Jesus asks Simon for his naked truth. “You answer rightly Simon,” and so what about you? Can you forgive? Can you ask for the greater forgiveness, like her? Can her story change your story?

We gather in this room to get it beyond treachery and theology to be in this personal story, the real world of forgiveness, the story and the world that that woman brought into the lives of Jesus and Simon at their rare, now beautiful, dinner together. Amen.