(Proper 19C)
September 16, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer lectionary:
Exodus 32:1,7-14 "Moses said, 'O Lord, change your mind'"
Psalm 51:1-18 or 1-11 Miserere mei, Deus "Have mercy on me O Lord"
1 Timothy 1:12-17 Formerly a man of violence
Luke 15:1-10 "Just so" stories: lost sheep, lost coin
Revised Common Lectionary (trial use):
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 It is I who speak in judgment
Psalm 14 Dixit insipiens - "The fool has said in his heart"
(and as above)
Aaron (Moses' brother) was the first but not the last priest to have a congregation say to him, "Up, make us gods to go bfore us." Human beings are always opening our little god-factories, where our idols are always made in the image of our immediate imagined needs, wants, or fancies. The story of the making of the golden calf (it was actually a diminutive bull, smaller than the life sized painted fibre glass cows we had distributed throughout Chicago a few years ago, which cowed no Stockyards bull) and the calf was a pretty color so that they didn't recognize it as bull sham. It is the mascot of our lives, for Martin Luther declared that the human heart is an idol factory. Aaron, like most priests throughout the ages, went along with the scam. After all, it brought in offerings. (Once the Bingo season was over and the raffle prize awarded he could make his excuses to Bishop Moses).
His excuse is very funny; it doesn't appear in today's pericope, but what Aaron did when Moses confronted him with his responsibility for the idol project was to say "Well, the congregation brought me all their earrings and broaches and necklaces and nose rings and lip clips and of course what I did was throw them into the fire, and out came this little golden calf." Would you believe Bull?
We have in today's readings a variety of views of the way God looks and acts. At the end of the epistle lesson we have an ascription of praise which goes like this: "To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever Amen." Two ideas are thus merged: that of the Hebrews that God is King of the Ages and is the only One fit to be worshipped, and that of the Greeks that God is immortal and invisible. Walter Chalmers Smith, moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, based the hymn "Immortal, invisble, God only wise" on I Timothy 1:17, and an omitted stanza reads "Nor passion doth fever, nor age can decay, The same God for ever as on yesterday." That God, yes, is immutable. But process theology has made it possible for us to include our God in the historical process, and permits God to change Godself--at least in revelation--to stay ahead of us on our pilgrimage. One of my seminary professors liked to make fun of this hymn and its remote and inaccessible, unfeeling Teflon diety: "Immortal, impossible, God only knows," he would sing when we lifted our voices to the old Welsh tune at matins. The idea doesn't seem to be present in the way Moses dealt with Yahweh in theExodus lesson today, where he implores the diety to change its mind. And there's no metaphorical language of kingship--Israel didn't yet have kings--and Yahweh wasn't happy about it when they decided to have them, but they bought him off by calling him one, too. Yet when they had queens, they didn't call Yahweh a queen, 'though he had referred to himself as Israel's mother. So we have Yahweh and Moses carrying on like two old friends who have business to talk about. Yahweh blames Moses for his poor management of the business. Or we might think of them as an old married couple arguing about the misbehaving children. When kids do something wrong, Father always says to Mother, "YOUR kids are acting badly" or Mother takes them by the ear to Father and declares, "You had better do something about YOUR kids." So in Exodus today Yahweh says to Moses, "You had better go back down from the mountain and look after YOUR people, who have corrupted themselves with these fraudulent gods." And Moses ripostes "O Lord, why are you angry with YOUR people, whom YOU brought out of Egypt?" Moses thus reminds Yahweh that it was he who had set the people free at quite a cost, and that if he was to disown them now the Egyptians would ridicule such a god, who makes promises he can't keep. And furthermore, what about the promises made to Moses' own ancestors--and he then does an ANAMNESIS--the undoing of amnesia--by calling up into God's memory the presence of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Moses doesn't crawl about like a courtier or hop about like a toady in the throne room of an Egyptian Pharaoah, for he doesn't look upon Yahweh as remote, or as "immortal, impossible, God only knows." God is partner, friend, enabler of the liberation of a people that Moses leads. And so Moses says to God: REMEMBER! This is the vital clue to our Jewish-Christian-Muslim calling upon God. REMEMBER O God what you have done in us and through us.
GOD is more aptly described by words of relationship, not by piling up attributes like inaccessibility, immortality, impassibility, omnipresence, omniscience, omnicompotence. In our own time we have seen that God is more likely to be found in sharing our weakness and vulnerability, rather than revealing and revelling in carefully articulated om-ni-po-tence, a word that we otherwise heard only when Lily Tomlin's telephone operator character used it to describe the Bell system, when she asked if she had reached the party to whom she was speaking.
The God of violence, formerly embraced by all our religions (and manifest in their histories) has fled, horrified no doubt by our invocations of him throughout the ages. We have come some distance since dissent was dealt with by the statute "De Haeretico Comburendo", blessed by our beloved English Church. In the time of our holy founder Henry Tudor, Archbishop Gardiner pushed through Parliament an "Act to Abolish Diversity of Opinion" and within two weeks five hundred persons were under arrest. They did not pull their punches in those days--and dear Thomas More, who has since been canonized by Rome, wrote in his Response Against Luther that "since he has written that he has a prior right to bespatter and besmirch the royal crown with shit will we not have the posterior right to proclaim the beshitted tongue on this practitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she-mule." Such was the language of controversey and public dissent in pious times!
Saul had been an advocate of violence at the service of religion, and stood holding coats at the stoning of the Protomartyr Stephen. But the changing God changed him, too--that's what Conversion means: Change, radical Change. No one who followed Jesus down the Damascus Road as Saul did ever after took up stones to kill, nor any other weapon, if they followed far enough. For centuries, until the Emperor Constantine seduced the Bride of Christ, all believers refused the use of weapons, until Augustine sneaked them back into the vestibule as "self defense". Now we call pre-emptive missile strikes on Jerusalem Muslims acts of "self defense". "Formerly blasphemer, persecutor, violent person, but we received mercy because we acted ignorantly in unbelief, before the grace of our Lord overflowed for us". There are still for us those "comfortable words": "Christ Jesus came into the world to save the Excommunicate." Our violence has excommunicated us all.
In a commentary on the Exodus lesson one pastor oddly claimed the reason God was angry was that "a life dedicated to feasting and playing results in cancellation of the Covenant". I tried to find that hermeneutic strand of DNA in the text, but failed; there is none. God wasn't angry because they were having fun, but because they didn't include God in the fun. They had found a false friend to invite to their party--an artificial bull--and invited it in God's place. Puritans have been saying for centuries that God "don't like" music, art, . dancing and partying, and ripped up the beauty and joy of a thousand years and stomped on it in the Commonwealth, sold it off and built suburban houses.. They did themselves out of their own New Model Revolution in Cromwell's England by their hideous sobriety, which forbade not only drunkenness and dancing at the Maypole, but the apostolic ministry and the Book of Common Prayer, and made the Bible into a Pope at Geneva.
Rejoicing God likes, Idolatry God doesn't like. It is apostasy God hates, not a party. I note the way Moses calls God himself to repent, and to come back to being a friend, a liberator, a partner, and stop being a party pooper with hurt feelings. Look at the second reading, too. Although the first letter to Timothy was probably Not written by the Apostle himself, it was written by someone who had a pretty good idea of Paul's attitudes and so wrote in his name, with the blessing of the ekklesia at the time. (When I was a vicar in the diocese of Chicago, everyone knew that the Archdeacon wrote all of the Bishop's brainy pastoral letters, and signed his name to them so they'd be heeded.) The author talks about a God who has sent "Christ Jesus"into the world to save sinners, even a sinner like himself, who had (as he says) blasphemed and persecuted and insulted Christ, and who was "the foremost of sinners." This is the same God Moses knew, and the God Moses reminded to be that God again.
All through the Hebrew Scriptures, we have this refrain over and over: "Remember, O Lord, your loving kindness and your mercies, which have been ever of old." Today's Psalm is a case in point. "Give me the joy of your saving help again, sustain me with your bountiful Spirit." We expect God to be generous, not stingy, and so remind God of our customary relationship! That's why we're here on Sundays and holy days--and why we go to our daily prayers--to remind ourselves and our Liberator of our relationship.
Jesus didn't come to endorse good behavior and pass out merit badges to the best little girls and the best little boys in the world. Paul indeed says that he himself was singled out for God's attention because he was so bad, not because he was so good. Converts often rankle us, however. Saulos/Paulus must have been insufferable to the belivers who'd been round long enough to remember what a rat fink he had been as a persecutor of the ekklesia. Remember Claire Booth Luce, and the old story about her buttonholing the Pope after her conversion to the Church of Rome (her husband, Henry Luce, continued a presbyterian till the day he died). The story is that after she'd been in private audience with His Holiness for some hours, one of the Cardinals put his ear to the keyhole and heard the Pope say, "But Mrs. Luce, I am already a Catholic!" Yahweh must have said something similar to Moses in the audience he granted him at Sinai. Moses reminded God that he too was a Jew, for they were all related to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so are we all related in that faith. And we need to remind ourselves as well as our God of that.
The way Jesus saw God, and the way he wants us to see God, is acted out for us in his own life, and is told to us in the gospel today: "This one [and this God] receives trashy people and eats with them." Most of the translations say, "This man receives sinners" but that's not good enough, because in the Bible the word 'sinners' is a technical term which didn't have the common meaning we hold for it now. We think, for instance, that we are all 'sinners', so that's no big thing to claim identification with sinners. But the people of Jesus' time used the word only when they were talking about those who were de jure or de facto EXCOMMUNICATE. Those who had violated or were living in violation of Torah, people who had been told "Don't come back into the synagogue or the Temple, you creep". They were people who were traitors, trailer trash, pimps and bimbos, con-artists, outcasts, along with all those poor people who couldn't afford to keep the fancy rules of fancy religion, or afford its tithes and offerings. So Jesus tells the story of the lost sheep, and of the lost coin--the story of a shepherd and the story of a woman who lived alone--both outcasts in ancient society. And Jesus tells a story not of their doing penance, or turning away from their non kosher existence, but of their joy in their discovery, their wish to invite all their friends to a Cavalier party, to come to the cabaret, my friend, come to the cabaret! Jesus says "God is like that!" Yes, God is like the straggly nasty shephed boy out looking for that stupid straggly sheep. And God is like that hapless and penniless woman, eking out a living on her own, and scrabbling around on her knees looking for a stray coin that fell out of the sugar bowl and slid under the fridge. And of their Joy in restoration and recovery. So God's joy in our change-of-mind, our change-of heart. Just So God changes us, and God changes godself.
Most Islamic literature is sombre, sobersides, but an old story from the 9th century Kitab al-Ikhwan switches the gospels' portrait of John the Baptist as "eating no bread and drinking no wine" and Jesus portrait as a "glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of sinners." (Luke 7), and instead reports: "John the son of Zechariah met Jesus the son of Mary, John smiling of face and welcoming while Jesus was frowning and gloomy. Jesus said to John, 'You smile as if you feel secure.' John said to Jesus, 'You frown as if you are in despair.' God revealed, 'What John does is dearer to Us.'"* A veiled criticism of asceticism, but also safely directed away from Islam. No religion nowadays wants to appear blue-stockinged or blue-nosed. Even devout Muslims get high enough to shake that thang when they become whirling dervishes, and though wine is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, it is freely offered in the paradise of the Quran, served up by handsome youths. . "Just So", says Jesus, politely as Rudyard Kipling, for this is a Just So story. There is Just So joy in the presence of the angels over one outcast who finds and is found of God. So G. K. Chesterton wrote "Where'er the Catholic sun doth shine There's music and dancing and good red wine; At least I've always found it so Benedicamus Domino."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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