Close Encounter

 Luke 10:25-37

            I first heard of him when I was studying The Law.  Rumors floated that when he was a child he was a prodigy.  They said he had come into the middle of a gathering of learned lawyers and teachers when he didn’t even have a beard, and had stunned them with his insights and intelligence.  People would have forgotten about it had he not turned up running around the countryside, saying outrageous things, subverting our national traditions, embarrassing people who have poured money and years into their professional legal careers.  “Isn’t this the guy who’s always been the know-it-all?”  people sometimes wonder.  “That’s him; that’s the one,” the old folks say.  He is an agitator, a rabble-rouser.  It is clear that his agenda is either to incite a riot or cause his followers to.  That is why he had come straight into the capital, as any fool could plainly see. 

            We grew up not far from each other.  My parents knew some of his cousins.   They said that family members really were afraid of him.  Said he was touched in the head, out of his gourd, just plain weird.  Long before he got to be really popular, some of the local leaders approached me, concerned about the political risks he was posing in some of his rallies.  They argued that he was on track to attack the religious establishment with his radical ideas of giving money to the unemployed, flouting the very laws that everyone knows hold civilization together, empowering the underclasses, including illegal aliens.  They put it to me.  Was I willing to follow him around, tail him, pay attention to who he talked with and who he was close to?  They wanted to be sure that when the moment came they would have enough evidence to convict him should it come to that. 

            So that is how I came to be there on that day.  He had been giving one his favorite speeches.  He had organized some of the people to campaign in places where he was planning on coming and speaking.  Groups of them had gone out—I know because I was there when he dispatched them—and came back all bubbly about the support they had discovered.  To my thinking, it was no surprise.  People are always ready to go nuts about a religious populist, and that is pretty much what he was.  So I heard the reports.  I waited for his reaction, got up close so I could be sure to get it all.  He surprised me.  He mounted the little platform off to one side, seemed to get himself a bit worked up, and then delivered the speech that seemed to set his base on fire but did nothing for most of the others, including me.  It was about how the ones who think they know something know nothing, and the ones who think they are powerful are really powerless, and the ones who are helpless have everything and the ones who can see are really blind.  

            It made me sick.

            He turned to some of his leadership circle and told them that they really were lucky to be a part of everything that was happening, because generation after generation had wanted it all to come about but nobody, but nobody, had seen what they were seeing or hearing what they heard.

            And that is when something like a fiend seized me.  The words were coming out of my mouth as fast as the color was flushing my cheeks. “Teacher,” I said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” To my knowledge he had never seen me, never paid any attention to me, knew nothing about me.  But he looked straight into me with his piercing eyes, smiled a little—or smirked, it seemed to me—and just stood looking.

            “What is in the Law?”  he asked.  Did he know I was a lawyer?  “How do you read the Law on that?” 

            I cleared my throat and answered with the Shema.  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”  

            He lowered his voice and said, “That is the right answer.  Do that and you will live.” 

            Understand this now, I’m telling you.  There was nothing about any of this that I did not know.  The only thing that surprised me is that he actually agreed with me.  That threw me, it did.  But just having heard him in effect indict the entire tradition of Israel with his malarkey about how nobody knows the Father except the Son or the Son except the Father and blah blah blah, I set him up.  I asked him who my neighbor was.  I expected him to tell me that my neighbor was one of the whores that went around with him, hanging on his every word.  Or one of the poor who he seemed always to favor.  Or maybe one of the sinners that clung to him like flies eating honey.  But he didn’t say anything like that.  He told a story.

            A certain man, his story went, was going from Jerusalem to Jericho.  And on the way he fell in the hands of thieves who robbed him and beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.  Now a priest by chance was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

            Stop right there.  Of course the priest passed by on the other side.  Priests don’t have contact with corpses.  But I listened to see what was coming.

            Likewise, he said, a Levite, when he came to the place, saw him and passed by on the other side.

            But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.

            Do you have any idea of what the mere mention of a Samaritan did to me?  You have in your life people that don’t even deserve to live, let alone assume the place of modeling behavior.  Take your miserable ethnic minorities, your lice-infested addicts, your stinking street alcoholics, your moral cripples, your urine-soaked beggars, your dope pushers, child abusers, even the members of your Congress that you loathe and despise because they oppose everything you stand for.  Roll them up into one miserable excuse for a human being, and that doesn’t begin to match what in a Samaritan makes me want to vomit. 

            So I listened, my stomach turning.  What was a Samaritan doing on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho in the first place, I wondered.  The story went on.  The Samaritan went to the half-dead man, bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.  Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

            I admit it.  All of this stunned me.  I was beginning to catch on that this was a fiction, not a true story.  No real Samaritan would have done such a thing for a Jew. So when he asked me which of the three men in the story proved neighbor to the man who was robbed, I did not want to answer, because I knew what answer he wanted.  I kept my mouth shut.  By this time everybody within a hundred yards had gravitated towards him, listening to what he was telling.  If there was one there must have been ten dozen pairs of eyes, all of them now fixed on me.  I had no choice.  “The one who showed him mercy,” I said.

            He looked at me.  I thought for a second he probably knew me.  His jaw shifted slightly to the right, a characteristic he has when he is about to say something thoughtfully.  He pursed his lips, nodded slightly, then walked straight towards me.  He stretched out his arm and I drew back, thinking he was maybe going to punch me.  He bent over, motioning for me to get close enough to hear him.  Then he spoke in a tone slightly above a whisper.  “Go and do likewise.”  He put his hand on my hand.  When I looked up his eyes were twinkling.

            I can’t quite describe what I felt.  Was it relief?  It felt a little like relief. I sort of want to say I felt something like—like attraction to him, but I wouldn’t go quite that far.  I can say that I felt something escaping from me.  I halfway expected him to ask me my name, or what I thought about what he’d just said.  But he and I just stood there for a bit until a wave of bodies passed between him and me, and within a few seconds I couldn’t see him.  He was off to somewhere else and I was soon there by myself.

            What happened after that is hard to say because, to tell you the truth, it is still going on.  I keep remembering his walking up to me, his arm reaching out to me.  It’s kind of funny—and a little embarrassing—that I thought he might be going to punch me.  He would have had every right to, certainly if he had known what I was up to.  I was his enemy.  His enemy!  I don’t know what he did and didn’t know, but if he had had any idea of what I was up to or why I was there or who I was working for, well, I don’t imagine that even somebody as peace-loving as he’s supposed to be would have passed up the chance to humiliate me at the least, or maybe expose me, or, as I had momentarily imagined, simply haul off and land me one right in the face. 

            So am I the one befriended by an enemy who treats me as a neighbor?   Was he all along the Despised Samaritan, reaching out to me though I would have stuck a dagger straight into his heart and twisted it?  Why did he look at me as if he knew me, understood me, even liked me?  Maybe I am the man of wounds, battered though I don’t feel it, blind though I see, half-dead though with my spirit at full mast, waving like a curtain in the breeze, hoping to God that somebody will come by and look on me and love me and heal me.

            But that is not what he said.  “Go and do likewise,” were his words.  He did not see me as half-dead or entirely dead.  He seemed to think that I could do it, that I could be a neighbor.  Why else would have he have told me to go and be one? 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

             

           

           

Poured Out

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15

Galatians 2:15-21

Luke 7:36-8:3

            All three of today’s scripture lessons present us with a rather complex knot in which are wound together the dynamics of forgiveness, gratitude, and morality.  In both the story from II Samuel in which the Prophet Nathan confronts David and the gospel story in which the woman anoints the feet of Jesus the themes of sex and love are at least a prominent part of the background.  The paragraph from Galatians that we heard in between these stories is the sharp attempt of Paul to place the center of our relationship with God in Christ, not in the morality of law-keeping. 

            Get ready for some surprises here.  These three things taken together are likely to shatter what you imagine the purpose of Christian religion is—indeed perhaps the purpose of any religion—and quite possibly your self-understanding as well.

            Let’s begin with the compelling masterpiece that is today’s Good News from Luke.  To start off, it is a distinctly different story from a couple you might have heard not long ago in Lent and Holy Week.  There are at least three different stories and four separate accounts of a woman anointing Jesus.  Those in Matthew, Mark, and John take place not in Galilee, as today’s story does, but in Bethany, a little village not far from Jerusalem.  Matthew and Mark place the anointing by an anonymous woman in the house of Simon who is not a Pharisee but a leper.  In both their versions the woman anoints Jesus’ head, not his feet.  In both stories, the onlookers—disciples in one case—fuss at the woman because she has wasted expensive ointment, which could more appropriately have been converted into cash for the poor.  In both stories, Jesus takes the side of the woman saying that she has anointed his body beforehand for burial.  John identifies the woman as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.  Mary anoints the feet of Jesus and wipes them with her hair.  All of this takes place the week before the Passover during which time Jesus was crucified.  The voice that objects to the profligate love of Mary is that of Judas Iscariot who was to betray Jesus.  And Jesus’ response is an order to let Mary alone, to let her “keep it [the perfume] for the day of my burial.”

            Luke’s story, as you can see, is very different from any of the others.  Simon, a Pharisee, has invited Rabbi Jesus to his house for dinner.  It is a particularly festive meal, because contrary to everyday custom, dinner guests are reclining at table on couches.  In what seems to us a bizarre occurrence but which in those days was apparently common, a woman, probably one of many people hanging around the outside of the house peering in at the guests, comes into the house and starts what is clearly an extravagant show of affection for Jesus.  The woman is a harlot.  Everybody apparently knows this.  Simon, somewhat surprisingly, does not upbraid the woman but is in fact scandalized that Jesus, reputed to be a prophet, apparently does not know who and what the woman is.  He also reasons silently that if Jesus did know, he would certainly put a stop to it.  Thus, Simon figures, this man is no prophet.  Jesus in fact knows Simon’s thoughts.  Perhaps they are not that hard to discern.  At any rate, in the fashion of the day he poses a little riddle about the two debtors with greatly different debts, both forgiven.  Who will love the more?  When Simon says he supposes the one who was forgiven more, Jesus says that he has answered rightly. 

            Ah!  The trap is laid.  “Do you see this woman?”  That is the real question.  Simon not only does not see her as anything beyond a street harlot, nor does he see himself.  And because he does not see his need for forgiveness, he has no earthly idea why one would carry on so in gratitude for forgiveness.  How could he?  Jesus contrasts the woman’s profligate outpouring of love with Simon’s rather reserved—to say the least—display of hospitality.  Underneath is the issue of the way Jesus himself is treated.  And that in turn reflects the way he is or is not understood to have anything to do with forgiveness.  Luke does not tell us directly but suggests that something has transpired before between Jesus and the woman.  Now the interesting thing, frequently ignored by readers and commentators, is that the woman is still a harlot.  Nothing in the story or the text suggests otherwise.  Surprise Number One.  Most people would argue, along with Simon the Pharisee, that Jesus would in no way knowingly put up with an active prostitute cavorting with him in public in a scene that has obvious sexual overtones (think:  feet and the letting down of one’s hair, an obvious sign of intimacy). 

            The question is whether Jesus has already forgiven the sins of the woman (which the story implies), or whether he forgives her sins after this display of love.  It might seem of little importance, but the way we answer this question perhaps tells us something valuable about what forgiveness is.  From the point of view of morality, the woman is clearly a sinner and thus an outsider.  Yet Jesus has reached out to her, apparently not for the purpose of bringing her to the rank and status of insider, but simply to affirm her.  His pronouncement at the end of the story that her faith has saved her most likely means that her faith has not been nullified by her work as a prostitute.  And “saved” means to be made whole, to be made right, to be justified, not “saved from damnation” the way it later became distorted to mean. 

            Now the faith that justifies intersects with Paul’s point to the Galatians.  Like Simon, Paul had been a Pharisee. And Pharisees were deeply committed to keeping the Torah, the Law, as meticulously as possible.  But Paul’s transformation into a follower of Christ had brought him to understand that it is not keeping the Law that makes us right with God, saves us, makes us whole.  Rather, it is faith in Christ—putting our whole trust in Christ’s grace and love—that justifies us, makes us “just” or “right” with God.  He even goes so far as to say that he has been crucified with Christ.  He is obviously talking about a mystical experience, but it has very practical outcomes.  It is no longer “Paul” who lives, but Christ who lives in him. 

            What if the woman that came into Simon’s house were to have said that?  What would it have meant for her?  It might have meant that she had almost literally been melted by the love of Jesus to the point that her whole life took on a different meaning.  Did she cease working as a prostitute, if that is what she was?  Maybe.  But it possibly would have meant that what mattered to her was not what she did or who she was but rather that her whole life might now be overflowing with the kind of love that Christ showed her, the sort of acceptance that she experienced from him.  Might it have been that in all of her relationships she now was as extravagantly loving to everyone, pimp and client and competitor and alienated family member, as she was towards the Christ who loved her and would give himself for her?  Do you suppose that the fundamental change in her was that rather than selling love she now broke herself open as if she were a very alabaster jar, pouring herself out without reservation to accept others as she herself had been accepted and affirmed?

            Be honest.  What bothers us about all this is that, as good as it sounds, it veers perilously towards what Paul himself saw, namely the likelihood that Christ is an agent of sin!  On some level we fear that if God and his Christ are not moral police officers either pulling us from immorality or punishing us for willfully staying in it, somehow the whole system is going to capsize and we will find ourselves awash in corruption and savagery.  Well, that is something to ponder all right.  Where does morality fit in with all this?  Is there any such thing as a moral imperative? 

            Listen to Nathan the prophet, whose story about a little pet lamb nailed David much as Jesus’ riddle grabbed Simon the Pharisee.  “You are the man!” says Nathan.  David’s sexual desire for Bathsheba had led him not only to commit adultery with her, in effect stealing her from her husband Uriah.  And when Uriah foiled the plan, David had him killed.  Yes you are the man, David.  And there are consequences.  Sickness, death, sorrow, and ultimately the division of your own family will result from what you have done.  “I have sinned,” David admits.  Before David’s story ends, we see unfolding layer by layer the very human, flawed character that was indeed Israel’s hero and model king.  Through it all, however, he was a man “after God’s own heart.”  He was not the darling of God because he was morally upright, or because he was talented, or because he was successful, or any of those things.  He simply was David.  We don’t need to justify David.  He needs no justification.   And this is the wonderful and mysterious thing that Paul finally sees:  it is not by keeping the Law even perfectly that makes us right with God.  We are forgiven and free simply because God loves us lavishly. 

            The theologian Paul Tillich wrote in The Shaking of the Foundations, “…Sometimes a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying:  ‘You are accepted.  You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.  Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later.  Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much.  Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything.  Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”*  That is Good News to beat the band.  Sure, there is accountability, suffering, even despair at various points along the way.  And there is plenty of room and reason for confession.  But the overwhelming Word of God is not a word of condemnation, but a word of consolation.  And it is, “You are accepted.  I love you.”  Can you imagine a response to that Good News that does not begin with profound gratitude?  Can you think of anything you want to do other than kick up your heels and dance as you have never danced before, belt out a song or a cheer, hug someone, or maybe even take a prized bottle of something precious and break it open and pour it out like all the tears of joy your soul could squeeze out of you, and hug and kiss the one who loves you so? 

            The community of Jesus has no better model than the harlot in Simon’s house as to how to respond to God’s grace.  Because she does exactly what Jesus himself does:  she pours herself out without counting the cost.  It is, in the end, a far better way to live than the pinched and narrow morality of Simon the Pharisee.  And only those who have been forgiven much will ever understand why.

* Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York:  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), 163.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

Down and Up

John 14:8-17  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

            For as long as the world lasts, we’ll probably continue thinking on some level that up is good and down is bad; that God lives somewhere in the sky; that heaven is where God lives and thus must be somewhere up, up, and away; and that if anything like Jesus or the Holy Spirit comes from heaven to earth it must involve a coming down.  In other words, it is virtually impossible for us completely to free ourselves from thinking spatially about these things. 

            What to do?

            I have long been on a program to call all that into question, enough so that people can begin thinking differently about it, a program which I continue to think is worth the effort.  But I have to admit that there is, after all, some value in the up-and-down kind of thinking, as limiting as it is.  One might even say that there is built into the human experience a predisposition to thinking that up is better than down because in all human cultures that seems to be the way we imagine spatial values, with few exceptions.  So when we come to Ascension Day, which we celebrated ten days ago, we imagine that Jesus after his resurrection went “up” although we know perfectly well that heaven, being everywhere precisely because God is everywhere, is no more up than down.  And when we come to today, Pentecost, our prayers and hymns say things like, “the Holy Spirit came down on this day from heaven, lighting upon the disciples,” and “Come down, O love divine.”  We know the limits of that language if we have been hanging around the world longer than about five years, though we still use it. 

            So, without exactly throwing in the towel, I invite you to move in the direction of seeing that there is some usefulness in thinking about life and death, God and humanity, heaven and earth, time and eternity in up-and-down terms.  Before it is over with, I think you’ll be able to see that we wind up in an amazing place where the adverbs “up” and “down” blend together and disappear.

            Let’s start with the motion of baptism, since that is the centerpiece of our Pentecost celebration.  You have heard me tell you before my mantra about baptism:  when you forget everything else about baptism remember that it is “down under and back up again.”  If you remember that, you will not likely forget that baptism is a way of ritually acting out and applying Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Down under the water is like “down into the grave.”  It is a symbolic burial.  And “back up again” is the movement of the resurrection.  Remember that the best kept secret in Christianity is that the resurrection does not happen after you die.  It happens in your baptism.  When we come out of the water and back up again, we are indeed united with the Risen Lord, and we thereafter are living in the resurrection.  It has no end, to be sure.  But its effective beginning, certainly symbolically, is in baptism.

            When you think about it, all of life is a matter of going down under and coming back up again.  Peter Senge and some colleagues describe that process in a very interesting book called Presence, one of the most deeply theological books I know, although it says nothing formulaic about God.  [Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers,  Presence:  An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (New York:  Random House/Doubleday/Currency, 2005).]  They speak of the “U,” which captures the motion of traveling downward and coming back up again. The three parts of the U are sensing (observing, becoming one with the world), presencing (retreating, reflecting, allowing inner knowing to emerge), and realizing (acting swiftly with a natural flow).  Traveling the U, going down and coming back up, involves letting go of our pre-established ways of thinking, going down into deep reflection, and coming up having let go of our own will, ready not to impose that will on a situation.  We could put this in a dozen, perhaps a hundred, different ways and it would amount to the same thing:  letting go and being open.  I suggest that that is exactly what our mythical language of “dying and rising” is getting at.  Each day, each moment, we have the opportunity to hear the call to let go, to rest in silence for a time, and to rise again, living in openness from a place quite different from our ego with its habit of controlling and imposing its will on situations. 

            Pentecost has everything to do with going down and coming up.  But it is not perhaps what you think.  It surely is not what the traditional language implies.  Pentecost is not a matter of the Holy Spirit “coming down” except in the sense that coming down can mean the great joining the small, as when an adult bends or kneels down to look a child in the eye or to hear what the child is saying or to share a moment of supreme importance with the little one.  Pentecost is an infusion.  It is a filling.  It is a breathing of life and energy into an otherwise dispirited, innervated, confused and paralyzed community.  Like all the other events in the story of salvation, Pentecost is not a one-time event, but a reality that makes itself felt time and time again.  When we feel—justifiably—that we are little more than a sack of dry bones, here comes Pentecostal wind, breathing new life into us.  When you appear to be a fallow field, just waiting to become fruitful and productive but somehow unable to do that on your own, the fire of Pentecost can rush through you like sparks through stubble, consuming all that holds you back and igniting your energy to do what you have believed was impossible.  So if you want to locate Pentecost on the U, somewhere on the journey between going down under and coming back up again, it is right there at the bottom, exploding, giving you the kick that lifts you into new life.

            But Pentecost is really even more than that.  I mentioned that last week we were celebrating the ascension of Christ.  The ascension is not a commemoration of Jesus’ flying up into the sky and out of sight, but rather that the entirety of human nature, which he himself embodied, he took with him into the very life of God.  Do you get that?  Your human nature and mine becomes a part of the godhead, the life of the Trinity, the essence of God.  No longer can we talk about God and humanity as being distinctly separate.  We get a taste of that in the gospel for today.  “Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied,” says Philip.  Jesus replies that when we have seen him we have seen the Father, because he and the Father are one.  That is powerful language!  It means that if we are united with Jesus, then we are united with God.  There is no getting around it.  Your life, your decisions, your struggles, your heartaches, your aspirations, your energies, your laughter, your work, your prayer is the ground on which you meet God.  God is in your body, God is in your mind, God is in your imagination, your dreams.  You will discover the Most High God in the most lowly depths of your own experience.  There is no place you can go where God is not.  And that is the miracle and meaning of Pentecost.  It really is quite simple.  It is about God’s Spirit being in you and your spirit, your nature, being inextricably bound to the reality of God.

            That is why Baptism is down under and back up again.  It is about traveling the U down into the grave and all the dark places and finding there the power which raises you up.  It is about journeying with Christ through the sicknesses in which you find strength, through the failures in which you learn to cope, through the times when you doubt your own worth and yet come to the indescribable peace of accepting yourself as simply human.  Baptism keeps going on and on because there is literally no end at the end of the U.  The more we travel the U, the more we see that we haven’t finished one trip before another begins.  The deaths and resurrections begin flowing together.  “Up” and “down” glide together and become indistinguishable, because the worst things can be blessings and the best things can turn out to push us to our knees.  Past, present, future all mix together in a timelessness which we mostly know through the moments that send shivers of excitement through us, or the sights and sounds that move us to tears, or from the occasional minutes when we find ourselves still in the presence of God while praying or meditating.  All of it is Pentecost.  All of it is resurrection.  All of it is taking to heart that nothing about us is or ever can be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

            Thomas Diaz and his little brother Felix are going to be baptized now.  Thomas I think is most excited by the knowledge that he is going to get a candle when he has been baptized in water and sealed by the Spirit.  The candle will burn and go out, but the fire of the Spirit never will.  It is the energy that will raise him up from every fall and the light that will shine through him and before him in every dark place he will ever go.  And that is your gift too.  Down and up, up and down:  God is in motion, and the motion of God is always God attempting, so to say, to nestle in your heart.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013