All You Need Is Love - Yes, or No? Defend Proper 25A

 All You Need Is Love – Yes, or No? Defend.

This was one of the essay questions on our Christian Ethics final in Seminary. After the events of the last several weeks, love seems more in short supply than ever. There was already the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now an attack on Israel by Hamas from Gaza, and the Israeli retaliation with air-attacks on multiple targets in Gaza. Followed by the 565^th mass shooting in the United States this year in Lewiston, Maine. The most-deadly such attack this year, 2023. 

As the reporting from Israel and Gaza unfolded, I found myself feeling despair. I’ve spent much of my adult life and ministry combating anti-Semitism, fostering Christian-Jewish dialogue, teaching World Religions with special emphasis on the relationships of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all from a perspective of mutual respect and love. And now this. Then after hours of watching reports from Lewiston it struck me: I used to travel with a group of musicians up and down the Maine coast, often stopping at a particular diner in Lewiston for a rest stop and a bite to eat. At another time and place, we could have been sitting in the very place this Reservist opened fire with an automatic weapon. Since those days I’ve been the survivor of a smaller shooting event, putting me in a national fraternity of survivors, for whom an event like this brings it all back as if it was once again happening here and now. I cannot get the number 565 out of my head. All you need is love. Yes, or No? Defend with examples from scripture was the question. 

It seems that when put on the spot to answer the question: which commandment in the law is the greatest, Jesus answers with two. From Deuteronomy 6:5, the great Schema Yisrael, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” The passage goes on to say you shall teach it to your children, place a tiny scroll with this command at the entrance to your house. And it is traditional to pray this passage from Deuteronomy three times a day. Jesus’s interrogators should know it by heart. 

Then from the very center of Torah, Leviticus 19:18 he quotes: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The passage in Leviticus goes on to define neighbor as especially including widows, orphans, and resident aliens – foreigners in the land who are fleeing danger in their own country, or simply looking for work, usually to send something back home where there may be a famine, a drought, or other disaster, natural or human. When asked, Who is my neighbor? Jesus replies with a story that says even Samaritans, an enemy people, can be our neighbors. All you need is love. Yes or No? Defend. 

The story of the Good Samaritan illustrates that the agape love the Bible speaks about is not affection, not brotherly love, not romantic love, but simply putting someone else’s needs ahead of your own. The old King James translation of “charity” is much closer to the mark of what Torah, the Prophets and Jesus are all talking about. 

From the beginning, the earliest Christians understood that it is God who loves us first. And that our love of God is reflected in how we treat one another. We are to be the love of God to help one another in natural disasters, like the category 5 hurricane that just leveled Acapulco. As some have suggested, we are to be the hands of God for one another at all times of tragedy. Because no one person, no one community of persons, can survive and rebuild after such disasters. 

If we were to love God as God loves us, we ought to love one another as God loves us. This is what Jesus is saying to his interrogators. The trick in Leviticus is allowing ourselves to love ourselves as God loves us. I find in my nearly 40 years of ministry, many of us, perhaps most of us, find it difficult to really truly love ourselves. I see people, phenomenal people, people who do heroic things for others, doubt their own self-worth. What else could possibly lead a person to own an automatic military-style weapon, let alone walk into a bowling alley with men, women and children having a good time and open fire on everyone there? Or, invade a music festival of young people dancing and singing and begin killing people and capturing people and murdering children in front of their parents? Or, walk into a church office and shoot two women, one priest, one lay persons, execution style in the head, and walk out into the woods and takes one’s own life? Where has love been missing in their lives up to that moment? Where has any sense of compassion for the needs of others been? Why has no one noticed how empty, lonely and unhappy my life has been, people must ask themselves, over and over until something snaps? Until the only solution is violence. Against others, against oneself. 

So-called “Social Media” seems only to make things worse. Young people are cyber-bullied until they take their own lives. Political discourse devolves into mud-slinging at best, bullying and demeaning at its worst. Hatred in the name of race, or religion, or political ideology devolves into violence. Easier and easier access to guns and ammo make it easier and easier to take out one’s hatred for others or self-loathing on others – either specific others, or all others. 

I keep going back and going back to Professor Turner’s class on Christian Ethics and the haunting question on that exam. All you need is love. Yes, or No? Defend. 

One impulse is to blame the other, all others, for all the inhumanity we heap upon ourselves and one another. The next most frequent blame is aimed at religion itself – all religions. On one hand, it is true that most all the world’s religions teach the golden rule in one version or another – do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. On the other hand, at one time or another, every world religion develops some kind of toxicity – a sub group that believes our way is the only way. That the world is divided into us and them. And unless we work to eliminate “them,” we, us, won’t survive. It’s the lie of the serpent. It’s Cain and Abel. And we allow ourselves to believe it. 

I was reminded this week of something our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry once said: “To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. But maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement. And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.”  That week in Jerusalem, just days before he was crucified on a cross of the Roman Empire, Jesus tried to remind anyone who would listen that above all else we need to love God and love one another. And that in agreeing to love one another is the only way to make a future possible In two thousand years we seem not to have tried this. The time to begin to love one another would seem to be now. 

A contemporary of Jesus, Rabbi Hillel, once said, “If I am not for myself, then who is for me? If I am not for others, then who am I? And, If not now, when?” And if not now, when?

 https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/27/us/these-are-the-victims-of-the-maine-mass-shootings/index.html

Caesar? Or, God and Neighbor? Porper 25A

 Caesar? Or, God & Neighbor?

After three parables challenging the authorities and leadership of Israel under Roman occupation, we now hear the first of three attempts to trick Jesus into making a fatal error in judgement. The first trap is a question about taxes, something to which we can all relate. 

This attempt at entrapment in Matthew 22:15-22 is so familiar and domesticated such that it is hard to notice the nuances of what is really happening. Some Pharisees send a delegation of their disciples along with some folks identified as Herodians. This should raise a red-flag: Pharisees are those Israelites devoted to sincerely following of the commandments in Torah despite the Roman occupation, and also deny any idea that members of the Herod household are legitimate Jews at all; Herodians support the Herods who rule Israel on behalf of Rome and therefore are collaborators with the Empire, and had been accused by John the Baptist as being unfaithful to the way of Torah. Previous episodes in Matthew suggest that John still had a strong following, and that Jesus has taken up his mantle and his call for repentance. Even worse, the Herods serve as kings of Israel in at least several regions under Roman control. They are Kings of the Jews. 

These strange bed-fellows ask Jesus if it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not. They flatter him as sincere and faithful to Torah, and suggest that he does not allow himself to be manipulated by others. If he says yes, his followers will abandon him. If he says no, he will be arrested. Clearly, they have no idea who this is. Jesus steadfastly avoids all flattery directing people to honor only his Father, the God of Moses and the escape from Pharaoh, the first Caesar. Jesus sees through this ruse, and calls them out as fakes – hypocrites, as moral and religious counterfeits, as play-actors devoid of any and all sincerity. Ouch! That had to hurt. 

Getting right to the point, Jesus says, “Show me the coin with which to pay the tax.” This suggests he has no such coin himself. And that he suspects they have a Roman denarius in their pockets. Sure enough, they produce the coin. The Pharisees now have hoisted themselves on their own petard! Exposed! They are carrying an image, literally an icon, of the emperor who claims to be God in their pocket. This violates the third of the Ten Commandments that there ought to be no icons or idols of other Gods. It’s likely that they already pay the tax so as not to disturb the peace, while of course the Herodians do as well. After all, they are on the administrative payroll. Indeed, these are bad actors, role-players, and self-disclosed hypocrites. Who forget they are created in God’s image, God’s icon, not Caesar’s. Jesus could leave it right there. There’s nothing much more to say. 

But now Jesus has established a tactical advantage in this clumsy attempt to trip him up. As he had done just after entering Jerusalem, once again he turns the tables on them, putting them in position to justify themselves. He puts a question to them in front of all onlookers: “Whose head is this, and whose title?” he asks. “The emperor’s,” they reply. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” says Jesus. Check and Mate! Off they go, tails between their legs, amazed at just how shrewd this Jesus character is. For all their pretensions to being faithful to the God of Moses and the Exodus, it’s now left to them to decide what belongs to Caesar and the Empire, and what belongs to God. 

Next Sunday we will learn that the choice is not simply between Caesar and God. There is a third party for whom resources are to be pooled together – the neighbor. Our neighbors. Which the same Torah to which the Pharisees look for moral direction is uncomfortably specific: the community will arrange its resources to care for those with few or no resources themselves: this includes widows, orphans, and resident aliens. As an addendum to the Ten Commandments, Exodus 22:21-24 says: “21 You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. 22 You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. 23 If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; 24 my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans.” Double ouch! 

It has been pointed out by many, such as Walter Brueggemann, that this definition of just who our neighbors are lies at the very heart of Israel’s, and therefore Jesus’s, core narrative and values. The Ten Commandments list the bare minimum requirements to sustain and become a people of the God who saved us from the land of Pharoah’s Egypt – a land of conspicuous and endless monopoly and hoarding of resources for the few at the expense of the many. Double the quota of bricks those Hebrew slaves must make so I can build more and more storehouses for food and other stuff for me and my cronies, says Pharaoh! And at the end of the day, tax their meager wages to add to my personal treasury! 

Perhaps the most overlooked of all the Ten Commandments, despite its being the only one that is stated twice, is the Tenth: Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s herds, and you shall not covet anything else of your neighbor’s. This is the first time the neighbor is mentioned in the Bible. Covetousness is often misunderstood as mere envy, or wanting, but covetousness also results in the action of taking. Like the other nine commandments, covetousness is a behavior: “wanting and desiring quickly becomes seizing and acquiring and produces an acquisitive system of money and possessions that is self-propelled until it becomes an addiction that skews viable social relationships so that no one is safe from predatory eagerness.” [i] 

And it has been noted that the commandment to observe Sabbath one day a week is in part to pause, take time out, from any and all systems of covetousness that threaten to destroy all viable social relationships with our addictions to money and possessions. Jesus recognizes there is no binary answer to begin with. God and Caesar are not the only choices here. There are the neighbors. The people of the land. Especially those without resources. His answer to those trying to trip him up assumes that whatever you give to God and/or Caesar better be used for those in need, the neighbors we have in Jesus, and not to fatten the already fat-cat storehouses and bank accounts of the empire and its elite rulers, nor the storehouses of whatever institutions claim to serve the Lord God of Israel. Which of course, includes the Church. Which at the time Matthew was writing was well into its infancy if not already in full-blown toddlerhood! 

Jesus knows these traditions of the Bible. And calls one and all who dare to listen to what he has to say to decide once and for all just what we are to do with all that the good Lord has given to us. Which in practical terms means some sort of return to Manna Season where everyone was given enough, no one got too much, you could not hoard it, and where people took a day off from all work and acquisitive and consuming behaviors. Nothing much has really changed. What belongs to Caesar and the empire? What belongs to God and our neighbors? How we answer these questions makes all the difference.

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[i] Brueggemann, Walter, Money and Possessions, (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 2016) p.17

What Can We Say After a Week Like This?

 

What To Do After A Week Like This?

The past week has been for many, grueling and simply unbearable. Images of the invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists have been unimaginable. The responding air strikes inside Gaza have been equally upsetting. We want to believe that we, that people, that human beings, can be better than all of this. We want to believe we have seen this all before: the poison gassings of World War I; images of concentration camps, gas chambers, and pits filled with corpses in World War II; the ravages of nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; defoliation and destruction of lives with Agent Orange in Viet Nam; the Killing Fields of Pol Pot; the butchery in Rawanda. 

This is not even to go into the long list of how many of our European Ancestors, often in the name of Christ, treated the native first-world peoples of this land, imported Africans slaves, and other immigrant groups with terror, beatings, slaughter and all manner of human brutality. 

And now this. On the nightly news. And the immediate reaction of so many of us is equally repugnant. And we want to assign immediate blame. As if pinning it down on one person or one group of persons will somehow make it easier to manage. As if tragic moments like that unfolding before our very eyes is a call to judgment of others – any others. All others. 

One result of quick judgment has been a meteoric rise in anti-Semitism. We fail to remind ourselves that Jews and Arabs/Muslims are all Semitic peoples. We rush to choose sides. Rather than look at ourselves to question just what we may have done or said that feeds into the kind of hatred being force-fed into our homes on TV and Radio day after day, night after night. 

We hear a Jewish mother whose daughter was dancing and singing at a music festival one minute, and the next has either been captured or slaughtered, plead for peace, crying we are all of the same genetic material. When will we ever stop and see that, she says? It is hard to watch. It is even harder not to watch. 

We come to church on Sunday looking for a word of hope, of peace, of justice, of love. Instead, we are confronted with a story of a king who orders people be invited to a wedding feast. The servants sent to deliver the invitations are beaten and killed. The king in turn marshals his troops and destroys the city and everyone therein. Then he orders his servants back into the main streets to find more guests, and they do – some good, some bad, - all are admitted into the feast. But that is not good enough. The king spies a man with the wrong clothes. He is not wearing a wedding robe. “How did you get in here without the proper wedding robe?” The man is speechless. He was just hustled in off of the streets with no time to stop and think, let alone go home and change. The king orders him bound hand and foot and tossed into the “outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.” 

This episode from Matthew 22:1-14 is unbearable to read aloud, let alone listen to it against the backdrop of the events of this past week. In one sense, this parable seems to have arrived right on time, bearing such eerie resemblances to the ongoing events of horror and destruction. 

First, we need to stop and remember that the biblical texts do not ever offer the last word on any subject other than the graciousness, mercy and abounding love of God for humankind. These texts, most especially parables, are meant to simply be the first word, discussion starters, meant to provoke us to somehow do better than we are doing. And remind us, as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and South African leader, Nelson Mandela, spent life-times urging us to see that doing nothing in the face of such evil is the same as allowing it to happen. There is no such thing as remaining neutral. 

Second, we must see and acknowledge what damage such texts as this Parable of the Wedding Banquet can cause. The standard interpretation says it is about Jews rejecting Jesus, and Gentiles, properly dressed of course, are the good Christians. It could stand as a condemnation of irrational and unacceptable violence.  Yet, the Church, has allowed the standard interpretation to persist. So doing, the Church allows anti-Semitism to persist day after day. After day after day, after day. 

There ought to be no world in which the destructive behavior of this king is to be emulated, condoned or allowed. Matthew, writing after the holocaust that was the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, most likely portrays this king as the Empire of Caesar’s Rome who destroyed any and all opposition to its insatiable appetite for money, power and land. 

Then there is the wedding robe: just what might that represent? Most likely it is the Robe of the Gospel, of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God, who calls one and all to reach out to the others, rather than reject, demean, accuse and destroy the other. A gospel that calls us to love others the way we are meant to love God, which means to love others as God loves us and them. 

Finally, with such challenging texts, we might try to imagine just how Jesus presents this story. Matthew does not indicate if he is angry or sad as he tells this tale of a king and a wedding banquet. What is his tone of voice? Can we imagine his facial expression? His body language? Does he look serious, or is there a slight smile on his face? Is he encouraging violence against others? Or, is he asking the Church to look at itself and its behavior toward others? [i] 

Does the text encourage us to stop pointing our fingers at someone or some group to blame? Or, are we to look deep within ourselves and the Christian community to see if we have been living our lives as if we are following Jesus? As a nation that some like to claim is adherent to Judeo-Christian values, do we walk the walk? Or, just talk the talk? 

When we listen, really listens, to this story, we must conclude that such a response to people turning down an invitation to a party is unacceptable. Such a response to someone showing up in the wrong clothes to the party is unacceptable. And yet, throughout centuries and down to this very day, there have been Christians who have slaughtered those who refuse to be baptized, and turn away people who are not “dressed” just like us. And yet, we still find the time, as a Church and as a Nation, to have the hubris to say the problems of this world are with everyone else but us. 

[Coda: As I finished writing this, I walked outside into a misting rain around sunset in New Hampshire, to see a rainbow, full end to end and then doubled across the sky as a reminder of God’s promise and hope that one day we will become the people God creates us to be.]

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[i] For this suggestion on how to reflect on such parables I am indebted to my friend and teacher Amy Jill Levine and her book: The Difficult Words of Jesus (Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2021) p.151-155.

How We Read The Texts Proper 22A

 

How We Read The Texts

A few days ago, I thought I knew where I was going with today’s parable, most often called The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. But then I began to dig deeper and everything changed. 

Matthew’s Jesus in chapter 21:33-46 speaks of a “landowner” who creates a vineyard on his property, similar to how the prophet Isaiah describes God creating our Earth. He sends his servants to his vineyard to collect “his produce.” The tenants killed one, beat another and stoned a third. He sends more servants, and it comes to the same end. He sends his son thinking surely, they will respect him, But no, they toss him out of the vineyard and kill him hoping to “get his inheritance.” Jesus asks those who are listening, “When the owner comes himself, what ought he do to those tenants?” [Note,  he does not call them wicked!] They reply, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Jesus gives a quotation again from the prophet Isaiah about a rejected stone that becomes the cornerstone of God’s kingdom which will be taken away “from you,” and given to those who will bear the fruits of the kingdom. “From you” presumably means the chief priests and elders who challenged by what authority Jesus was turning over tables and withering fig trees. Suddenly. they say among themselves, “He is talking about us, the gatekeepers of the rituals and traditions of our people!” 

Beginning with the early church and through the centuries to the present day, it has been presumed that God is the landowner, Jesus is the Son, and the tenants are the Jewish people who reject God’s Son. Which is why people call it The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. This has caused no end of troubles. It is a parable in Mark, Matthew and Luke that Nazi interpreters used to justify killing the Jewish people in the Holocaust. But a god who would “put those wretches to a miserable death” does not sound like the God of the Exodus and the Ten Commandments who is described in the Hebrew Testament (Old Testament) as “gracious, merciful, abounding in steadfast love, and who relents from punishing.” This is not the God of the Exodus and Ten Commandments. This landowner is not the one Jesus tells us to love along with our neighbor. 

If it were not already called The Parable of the Wicked Tenants, what would we think all this might mean? First, the landowner. The Greek text calls him an oikodespotes. He is an oiko despot, literally a home or property despot. Despotes is the word from which we get the English word despot. Its meaning is precisely the same in Greek as it is in English. It means an absolute and arbitrary ruler, from whom there can be no appeal. It was the title slaves were required to use in addressing the master who owned them as property. [i] 

Typically, in first century Roman occupied Israel, oikpdespotes meant some rich city slicker, or even a foreign investor, who has usurped farm land from peasant farmers who were in debt and then hired the former owners of the land to work the land as slaves or tenant farmers. Try to imagine what it is like not only to lose farmland that had been in your family for generations to some large agri-business corporation, and then have to suffer the humiliation of working that land to produce profits to the oiko despot. Suddenly, this story sounds like a possibly justifiable peasant revolt, which revolts were not uncommon throughout the land. Suddenly, Jesus seems to be telling an all too familiar and recognizable tale – especially since the chief priests and elders in Jerusalem were enmeshed in this economic enslavement collecting their share of taxes on the land, and collecting further taxes to be sent on to Rome – The Ultimate Oiko Despot! 

Rome, seen in this light, becomes the very Oiko Despot that the Israelite peasant farm slaves would love to overthrow so as to get their family farmland back. Which makes this a tale about another kind of justice. Jesus begins and ends the parable with references to Isaiah, a prophet poet who is deeply concerned with God’s care of justice for the people of the land, the poor peasant tenant farmers, widows, orphans and resident aliens. Beginning around the year 63CE the people of the land did revolt against the Roman occupation, resulting in the Temple and all Jerusalem being burnt to the ground. The chief priests and elders ultimately have had no place to be authorities over the traditions and rituals any longer. Rabbinic Judaism as we know it was born shortly thereafter. 

The problem and danger of giving these parables a title and a singular interpretation becomes obvious. In his book, Parables as Subversive Speech, William Herzog II suggests that “…Jesus’s parables…were not meant to be stories with either a clear moral or a single meaning that could be gleaned by reading them ‘correctly.' Rather, they were meant to be discussion-starters, whose purpose was to raise questions and pose dilemmas for their hearers. They were open-ended stories that invited their hearers to enter into conversation for the purposes of exploring the social scenes they presented and connecting the hearers to the realities of their lives to the larger systemic realities in which they were caught.” [ii] 

Jesus says, let those who have ears, hear. What do we hear? In which “larger systemic realities” do we as a society, or a church, find ourselves caught? Has the Church been a good steward of the Kingdom of God? Could the vineyard be the creation which God “in the beginning” hands over to us as stewards, caretakers? Do we care for Earth’s resources? Or, do we exploit them? Or, could the vineyard be all of humankind in our beautiful and creative diversity? Are there such things as systemic racism? Do we honor the dignity of all people? Are there places where workers today are being exploited? Do we care for women and children everywhere? Do we care for our democracy and republican form of government? Or, is it time to overthrow it and hand it over to the oiko despots of this age? 

These are just a few of the systemic realities which surround us every day. And letting stories like Jesus’s parables be discussion-starters in which we listen to the texts and listen to one another and the nearly endless possibilities of application to our lives. And we must be cautious when an English translation of the Bible assigns a title to a story like the story of this vineyard. It is one thing for Matthew, Mark and Luke to portray the chief priests and elders to think its all about them. But they already thought everything was about them. And many of them were just doing their level best to live within the friendly confines of the Ten, and ultimately 613 commandments found in Torah – the first five books of our Bible. 

What this story is not, I am convinced, is a story that means to conclude “the Jews were wicked and killed God’s Son. This is the most wicked and perverted reading of this tale, and to think anything like could come from the mouth, heart and soul of Jesus is offensive.  Rome, and Rome only, was responsible. When it comes to biblical interpretation, we can do better than that. May God, in God’s infinite mercy, love and graciousness help us to be compassionate to see the best in one another, and especially to see the best in all others. No exceptions. Amen. 

[i] https://godswordtowomen.wordpress.com/2007/12/30/oikodespotes/ 

[ii] Herzog II, William, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed  (Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 1994) p.259.