040613

June 13, 2004 - Guests: Medicine Hat College Girl’s Choir

Directed by: Joanne Collier

by Rev. James Farrell

A colleague shared the following story. She said, “My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 56. While still in shock he said, “I’ve followed all the right rules of living. I didn’t smoke, drink, or swear. I’ve gone to church every Sunday and several times during the week. I’m not even going to see the ‘three score and ten’ promised by the psalmist. It isn’t fair!””

Today’s scripture texts dance around the relationship between God’s law and God’s grace. People all over the world who hear these texts today may be experiencing life as unfair. God’s law is not meant to be slavishly followed to assure salvation in whatever form one needs that to take. Nor is God's law meant to be subverted for human ends. God’s law is meant to point the way to a relationship with the Holy One.

Thankfully, God's law turns upside down the notions of who’s in or who’s out…it challenges the thinking that some are accepted by their actions into the presence of God. It makes clear that people are welcomed by an act of God's grace and encouraged by a spirit of humility.

Sometimes that isn’t what we want to hear. We want evil punished and fast. And we come by that thinking honestly.

We hear a story like this story from 1^st Kings that says clearly that “God punishes evil” and even as we are celebrating the thinking that evil gets its just reward, we may also make a mental leap that says the bad that happens in life must be God's doing. “Because I have cancer, or because I have this malady or that problem I must have done something wrong.” I’m being punished!

We work it backwards. People search for some kind of natural and logical justice in the universe and on this side of eternity, I’m not convinced it’s there.

Still we want it to be there…we want to know that God punishes evil…don’t let them away with it God! Please!

First Nations folks all over the world would easily identify with the vineyard owner, Naboth. How many times have the Jezebel’s and Ahab’s in history used laws in conniving and treacherous ways to cheat First Nations people out of their land?

Presently, Middle East folks, struggling over land and seeing injustice everywhere they look would also identify with Naboth.

No doubt, women who have suffered from rules that prevent them from full participation in their culture’s institutions (including the Body of Christ) may identify with the woman in Luke’s story who weeps at Jesus’ feet. An outcast.

And in the face of these goings on, all that is holy in us cries out for justice, compassion, even retribution in some cases.

If there is a part of God's revelation that is tough to take it is that as we move through life it is important to remember that Statutes, status, and scripture don’t determine our lovability. Whether guilty or innocent, winner or loser, insider or outsider according to the law or the norms of society… in the eyes of God we are loved.

An ancient rabbi was once dared by a sneering critic to recite all of God’s laws while standing on one foot. (Remember that there are 676 commandments in the Torah.) The rabbi lifted one foot, and said, “First, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” His critic waited for him to continue, already smirking, already tasting the victory of the contest. The rabbi, still on one foot, then said, “All the rest is commentary.” – Lorain Giles

People love laws and without them, to be sure, life would be even more chaotic than it already is but it is not law that makes a difference it is spirit. Jesus was constantly trying to get people to understand the difference between the spirit and the law.

To Simon he said, “Simon, have you noticed (seen) this woman?" How could he not have! A woman of questionable reputation, in his house, right where guests were having lunch! Had Simon seen her? Yes, he had, but, he had not really seen her.

Jesus saw her. He saw a woman, deeply conscious of her failures and the sins of her tradition and culture. He saw a woman who loved deeply, repented, and therefore experienced forgiveness.

Jesus saw Simon as well. Simon did not see himself. He was too shielded by his goodness to see his badness. How could he repent unless he saw his own sin? How could he love deeply the source of his acceptance without sensing the source of his need? I don't know which comes first - the sense of need, the love, the repentance, the forgiveness, or if they are all jumbled together.

Similarly, the story of Naboth is a story of God seeing and saying through the inspired eyes of Elijah that our actions have consequences. Elijah says, “You sold yourself to what is evil.” And whether we look back 3000 years or 3 days, we see it over and over again. If we sell out to what is evil, sooner or later, we will self destruct.

Bottom line, if you are doing evil, you are preventing yourself from ever having wholeness with yourself, or with your neighbor, or with the Holy One. And it doesn’t have to be as blatant as the murder of Naboth. In fact, harboring resentments can leave someone so diseased that they find it difficult to function within their community.

I know of people whose lives are so destroyed by a breakup…people whose hate and resentment is so deeply directed at their partners that they are incapable of moving on in their lives.

Jezebel and Ahab were so consumed by their lust for land and pride of status that they had allowed evil to root and sprout and grow in their lives to the point where murder seemed a natural way to get what they wanted. In fact, such lustful hunger still remains the cause of much of the world’s violent deaths… weather the prize is land, oil, gems, prestige, pride, revenge…you name it.

Great lessons in these readings!

But also there is the danger of extrapolating some of these stories into informing our theology. For example, in the Naboth, Ahab and Jezebel story one could leap to the conclusion that the line “I will bring disaster on you.” Means God kills.

Well, that just doesn’t mesh with how I understand God and God’s action in our lives. I don’t think God makes people sick. I don’t think God makes people die. No question that our choices can be lived out into good or evil but God doesn’t hover over us as the great executioner. They are two completely different things…in spite of old testament understandings of how God works in the world.

And, in the gospel, from Jesus’ conversation with Simon, one might think there is a hierarchy of sin. If you’re a worse sinner, you’ll get more forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not a “part measure” deal…it doesn’t happen in degrees…so the real question is: “Do some people receive more forgiveness or do some feel more gratitude?

In some ways, I guess you can’t really analyze it unless you’ve been there. You have to know the times in your life when you’ve been forgiven and how that has felt. Still, I believe it’s really about gratitude.

Jesus points out that Simon, who as a Pharisee has presumably sinned little and that’s certainly how his community would view him, and therefore he stands as someone who would have been “forgiven little,” and so he shows little gratitude! He doesn’t even extend basic hospitality. Whereas the woman, who had much need of forgiveness, lavishes love on Jesus.

Again, it was her longing. She had an incredible longing for forgiveness, or if not that, at least a longing for Jesus, for access to the Holy One…a longing to embrace that acceptance that Jesus embodied for her…a longing to be received exactly as she was at that moment in her life.

She couldn’t erase who she was but Jesus made it clear that in the-love-of-God she could be treated as someone who had her past erased. What Freedom!

I think both the First Kings reading and the gospel story have something to say to us about how tightly we hold to what is material versus what comes from the heart. Our world is so driven by people who connive to get what they want – governments connive, coalitions connive, people connive. This passage speaks to me about desiring the material—over love—to the point of losing sight of anything else that is important. It speaks to me about allowing the all-consuming lust for the world’s view of what is important to completely cloud the view of what really holds lasting value.

So, in the face of the elements depicted in the stories we share today—the question I ask you, is this: “Where is your redemption? Where is your hope?” Is it found in a comfort that comes from knowing that the Holy One does not like evil?

Perhaps the hope you embrace from these stories is found in the permission they offer to identify evil and speak against it…not in its traditional form, perhaps, but in its subtleties, like Simon’s prejudices?

Maybe your hope comes from simply being encouraged to be a voice that can speak as an advocate for the struggle of others. Recognizing and being motivated by the truth that wherever people are being oppressed and persecuted and punished and connived against and exploited… evil exists. Yet, in the heart of God, love exists all the more.

Faith alone draws us from that lure of evil and motivates us to take a stand as one spirited with the spirit of God. It is faith that allows someone to speak up and say that something is not right… God works through those willing to be challenged by the spirit. It is what Elijah was saying to Ahab…it is what Jesus was saying to Simon and, it is what God says to us always through the spirit of truth alive within everyone of us.

We are not alone, we live in God's world, and that is where we are spirited to live the truth of the spirit in the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.