Teacher, what should we do?

 I preached this sermon last Saturday at a local house-church - it got significantly and quickly rewritten after the tragic event at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday.  I offer this as my reflection

Luke 3:7-18

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruits worthy of repentance.  Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.  Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?”  In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”  Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?”  He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.”  Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?”  He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

I've had this phrase in my mind all week: What should we do?  This is a perennial question, right?  Last night, after seeing the news from a variety of e-mails and Facebook posts that there had been a particularly disturbing mass shooting yesterday, my wife and I sat down to talk about it a little bit, and that's the same question that came up.  How are we supposed to respond in the face of such horror?  What should we do?

All week I’ve been thinking about John the Baptist, about how he’s got this band of folks – probably decent religious people who care about the state of their souls – and they’re following him out in the middle of nowhere and he’s calling them vipers and threatening them with God’s wrath and hellfire and brimstone.  Where does he get off, right?  What about the truly evil people who perpetrate the kind of terror we saw yesterday?  John is using some incredibly violent metaphors here: do you know what happens on a threshing floor?  I read the Little House on the Prairie series to the kids last year and I've got some inside information on this!  All winter long, when the farmers don't have anything else to do, they take bushels of wheat and spread it out on this big wooden platform and proceed to beat the tar out of it with sticks to separate the grain from the stalks.  And that's not all: the ax is at the root of the tree.  There's a winnowing fork, whatever that creepy thing is! We're supposed to be baptized by fire - or burned with unquenchable fire - and this is for the people who have actually troubled themselves to come out to the wilderness to be baptized by him.  Why is it so important that decent people get this message that God wants to seriously prune them, that they must become the kind of trees that produce the fruits of repentance?

I heard a story this week about a family out in the Texas hill country that have a farm they inherited from many generations of their forbears.  They have decided to rehabilitate the land, to cultivate it and try to make it beautiful and useful.  There’s a problem, though, in that for the better part of a century, at least some of this land was used as a dumping ground.  With decades of waste piled up, there are parts of the property where the good soil is actually several feet below the surface.  In the mean time, trees have grown up in this landfill – some of them beautiful.  I can’t but imagine there’s probably some scary stuff rotting under that land; that whatever beauty those trees provide is likely offset by the knowledge that poison underlies them, that their roots cannot be trusted.  What do you do with trees like that?

The temptation, of course, is to ignore the problem – because the solution is simply too much to be borne.  It’ll be OK, the trees look fine – it’s not really that big a deal.  But late at night, in the far corners of our minds, the anxiety is still there.  This is why all these groups of people keep coming back to John the Baptist with the same question.  What do we do?  He gives them really simple instructions – “share your stuff,” he says, and the people keep coming back and saying “wait, John, what about us, what should we do?”  They hear these simple instructions, but ones that are so deep and difficult that they simply cannot really hear them.  Did he just say to tear out the trees and cart off the bad soil and start over? Surely not.  So they keep coming back and asking.  What should we do?  Share your clothes with the poor.  What should we do?  Don’t take more than your fair share.  What should we do? Be satisfied with what you already have. What should we do?  Sell everything you own, give the proceeds to the poor, and come and follow me. 

It looks simple, right?  But we keep circling around it, because obviously those aren’t just the right answers in our particular situations, are they?  No, John, you don’t get my situation. What should we do?  There’s a lesson here, in this metaphoric farm of John’s, in this farm my friends told me about.  What we have to do is mourn the fact that we can no longer go on pretending we don’t know the roots are poisoned.  That we can’t just take part in the status quo and keep going.  We have to put the axe to the roots of so many trees that we love and tear them out so we can get to that rotten soil underneath and start setting it right.  Repent.  Turn the soil.  Repent. Don’t eat the poison fruit anymore.  Repent. Reclaim the land. Cultivate something new.  Do your part to make a new world where our neighbors and our children don’t live alone in fear of their emotions, where they don’t play out their cosmic internal hurts on the bodies of innocent bystanders, where healing is as close as the person next to you.  Repent.  Make the prophets’ visions come true.

Can we do that?  Not by a long shot.  That’s the other piece that might be just as hard to swallow.  In all this threshing and burning, chopping and digging – I might have one good acre in me; maybe two before my time runs out.  In the mean time, I’ll make my own mistakes.  So even as I work my hardest to take part in my salvation, I can only make it as far out as my own skin.  There’s a whole world out there, one that needs me, and yet needs more than I can possibly offer, no matter how realized I may be.  We must also pray that that same winnowing fork and refining fire come to each and every soul in the whole world, that each of us learn to find the good soil and plant in it.  That is what Advent is about, that is what John the Baptist is preaching about in the wilderness.  Wait.  Watch. Pray.  Repent.  Bear fruit.  And while you are doing all that, one who is even greater is coming.  One who will baptize with fire.  Prepare him room.  Amen.

Divorce = Adultery?

Here's a sermon I preached today at my field parish - it got lots of good feedback, so I thought I'd share it around.  Enjoy!

Mark 10:2-16

Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus, they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”  He answered them, “What did Moses command you?”  They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”  But Jesus said unto them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’  ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter.  He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another she commits adultery.”

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.  But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And he took them up into his arms, laid his hands on them and blessed them.

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Those Pharisees are up to something, aren't they?  The first line tells us all we need to know: “some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus…”  If you take a look around the book of Mark, the only other character trying to ‘test’ Jesus is Satan!  When the Pharisees show up, then, it’s a cue for us to pay attention.  So what’s their game?  Why would they choose divorce as a subject to get Jesus in trouble?

It’s certainly not because divorce is a hotly contested topic in the ancient world – as the Pharisees’ answer to Jesus shows, it was a widely accepted practice all the way back to the time of Moses.  In first century Judaism, the debate had largely come to center around just how permissible divorce could be: one rabbi held that it was only a last resort in extreme cases, while another school claimed a man could divorce his wife just for burning his dinner!  Either way though, whatever Jesus said would have been well within the thinking of the times – so it’s not theology they’re after.

I think that this year especially, when we’re looking at an upcoming presidential election, we’re all very aware of how much more weight is hung on every word of an influential voice.  By this time in his ministry, lots of people are paying attention to what Jesus has to say – whether they agree with him or not.  And in first century Palestine, divorce was about as political as you could get:  King Herod had recently divorced his wife and sent her back to her homeland just so he could marry his brother’s wife instead.  Her people were nonplussed, and a war ensued.  Herod, then, was not particularly enthusiastic to hear criticism of his marital practices – remember John the Baptist? He lost his head over this very matter.  Prophets and politics are often a poor mix.  So it looks like the Pharisees – far from trying to settle what for them is largely an issue of details – are trying to get Jesus to say something that might make the king mad.

I think they got a lot more than they bargained for.

Jesus turned their question right back on them.  “What does Moses say?”  They are only too ready to launch into their version: “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate…”  But Jesus doesn’t have certificates in mind.  He’s not interested in descending into the finer points of how we might excuse the various circumstances of our lives.  Jesus isn’t having a pastoral moment here.  He goes to the source.  Where the Pharisees start with “Moses allows”, Jesus comes back with “God made!”  The Pharisees want Jesus to play by their rules – they want him to say something that – were any one of them to say it, it wouldn’t matter a bit.  But if Jesus were to say something critical of divorce, that would get him into serious trouble.  Well Jesus is going to get in trouble alright, but that comes later.  What Jesus does is issue a blanket condemnation of divorce that leaves no man justified.  I imagine that many in the crowd were just as shaken by his words then as we are today.  Marriage has never been easy, and divorce is a reality that all of us live with to some degree.  So to boldly stand out and say: Divorce = Adultery?  It’s shocking.  Jesus just condemned half of our population as adulterers!

If we’re confused here – if we don’t understand God and find ourselves a little shaken by this, let me just point out that spiritually, that’s a pretty healthy place.  If God was always easy to be around, he wouldn’t have to begin most of his conversations with “Fear not.”  So let’s sit with this discomfort together for a bit, let’s examine where it comes from.  I’ve listened to so many sermons that try to defang what Jesus just did – to take the sting out of it and make it sit a little more comfortably – but I think that to do that is to miss the point.  It’s supposed to sting.  Jesus defines adultery pretty broadly in other places – it’s what happens when we look at another with lust in our eye.  And it’s not too many more verses after this that Jesus sends a rich man away with the words “sell all you have and give it to the poor.”  And just a few verses before our story, Jesus is regaling the disciples with the disturbing advice to cut off their feet and gouge out their eyes rather than continue to sin.  Jesus is trying to break through some defenses here, and they’re clearly some very strong ones.  I think if we’re trying to contextualize or explain away Jesus’ words to the point that they no longer convict us, we’re in the same camp as the Pharisees when they try to pin down the exact point of acceptability for their behavior.  It’s a kind of spiritual ethos of “How much can I get away with?” Or, perhaps more accurately, “How much effort is this whole faith thing going to take?”  There’s a reason that the icon for our faith is an instrument of capital punishment – it is only in dying that we find new life.

OK, so we’re all adulterers, or callous rich people storing up wealth at the expense of the poor, or at least people who would like to walk without crutches and maintain our 3-D vision.  What then?  What does Jesus have for us if he’s going to take us down so low?

By way of an answer, let me ask:  What are we so afraid of?  Nobody likes to have this pointed out, but yes – we all are sinners, the world is a broken place.  Even God’s son has a family tree riddled with adultery and cruelty and willful pride: heck, even Mary and Joseph came within a hair’s breadth of splitting up themselves! I don’t think anyone in this room who has had their lives rocked by divorce would think to themselves “hey, this must have been what God had in mind when the world was made!”  It’s not; we’re missing the mark – that’s the definition of sin after all: missing the mark.  It’s no secret when we look around us that we’re not really living in the paradise that God intends for the world to be, and this is true particularly with the institution of marriage.  The church teaches that marriage is one of the few things we have left from before the fall – Adam and Eve were married in the garden before they were cast out.  Traditionally, in fact, the marriage ceremony of the church is considered not so much a sacrament as a blessing and affirmation of something that God has brought about.  Marriage is something that is designed into the very fabric of creation: when two people come together in such a way that they multiply love and demonstrate steadfast commitment and mutual blessing, they are expressing a part of the very character of God.  Even if the fall had never happened, we would still have marriage – the church, however, would be unnecessary!  Our religious practices, our prayers and fasting and pilgrimage, serve to recreate for us a space where we can remember that the world is created for good. We come to this place to remind ourselves every week that God is working – in more ways than we can possibly imagine – to redeem the world, to bring into being a world of abundant blessing and love that we were all created for.  So when Jesus gives his answer to the Pharisees, he reminds us all that divorce is part of the brokenness of our world.  To bring questions about excusing it or managing it well to our faith is to miss the point.  He doesn’t want the Pharisees to ask ‘is it legal to divorce?’ so much as ‘how do we have a great marriage?’  Our faith is not about what we can get away with as much as what we’re striving toward.  We’re not there yet, so we stick together and keep plugging on.

We’re sinners.  Does that mean God doesn’t like us?  The Pharisees were living in a time when Rome’s brutish power was grinding their beloved nation into a land of poverty and suffering.  The Pharisees saw this as God’s punishment – clearly God is angry with Israel and using Rome to mete out his discipline.  So what should we do?  Get back in line of course!  Their big goal in life was to keep the law in an effort to bring back God’s favor and restore Israel to its former glory.  If we’re sinners, doesn’t that mean that God is angry? I think that more likely it means we’re angry with ourselves, and we project that back onto God.  Think about it: who do you suppose Jesus had dinner with that night?  I’d put my money on tax collectors and sinners.  If he’s angry about their behavior, he sure seems to have an amiable way of expressing it.

Jesus did get pretty angry in our story today, though: people were bringing children to be blessed, and the disciples were turning them away.  Jesus got indignant when he saw this – because it hasn’t been all that long ago – in the previous chapter of the story – that Jesus picked up a child and told his disciples “anyone who welcomes a child, welcomes me”, and here they are turning children away.  I think what Jesus did next is the object lesson for all of us afraid of an angry God: he said “this is how you enter the kingdom of God:” and he picked up a child, embraced her, and blessed her.  That is our God.