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REVELATIONS AND MISTAKES

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A Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. September 13, 2015

Texts: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Mark 8:27-38

REVELATIONS AND MISTAKES

The story we just heard—the one where Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah—is right smack dab in the middle of Mark’s Gospel. All the rest of the book circles around it. Mark means for us to pay attention.

And it’s a great high point. Peter gets it right. He’s the first person to say out loud who Jesus is.

But then, as we heard, it all falls apart. Jesus starts to explain that being Messiah is not going to be all triumph and glory for him, and Peter interrupts: “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.” Jesus makes a meaningful turn of the head away from Peter to look at the rest of the disciples— just to let them know he’s talking to them, too—and says, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

And then, just to be perfectly clear that he means the message as broadly as possible, he calls the crowd in alongside his disciples and says to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

That was a fast slide down a slippery slope, wasn’t it?

so, what do we have here? We’ve got pluses and minuses. We’ve got hope of glory and intimations of suffering. We’ve got a big-time revelation and a big-time mistake. And Mark sets it up to make us to pay close attention, doesn’t he? Mark thought it was critically important to the story he was telling. And it’s also critically important right now in the world we’re living in. So let’s think about it some more.

Peter gets it right; he has his great moment of insight. And that leaves him thinking he’s got everything sewed up. He’ll be riding the Messiah’s coattails into a new and better world. Exactly how he pictured that world is impossible to know, but there’s a good chance that it included a lot fewer Romans than the world he was actually living in. There’d be a better deal for Peter’s own people—the farmers and herders and fishermen who made up the Galilean country folk. There would probably be a lot less arrogance from the big-shots in Jerusalem. It was going to be a new era of true religion and prosperity for the right people—his people.

But Jesus hauls him up short and says, “You’ve got a very inadequate notion of the Messiah. You didn’t pay attention when they read Isaiah in synagogue, did you? ‘I gave my back to those who struck me and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.’ If you’d listened, you’d know that God’s Anointed isn’t going to get an enthusiastic welcome in this world.”

And Jesus goes on to say to Peter and everybody else, “You won’t be getting rich or powerful off my messianic ministry. Just the reverse. Drop that idea right now.”

You may remember that, of course, they did no such thing. Jesus would have to keep repeating that lesson over and over again.

Now, I said that this passage was particularly important for us in the world we live in. Why? Because we’re living in another age when people are determined, like Peter, to translate their revelations into power plays. Not just religious revelations: atheists have proven as good at it as the religious have. (Just think Nazism and Soviet Communism.) I sometimes think scientists may be the most adept of all. Just think, for example, of all the money that’s changed hands over the last couple of decades because of people who’ve had a revelation that what you really need to be eating is the opposite of what you’ve been eating and then offered to sell you a pre-packaged version of the truth.

But I’m going to focus on religious temptations because, after all, that’s what we know best. And it’s easy to pick an example because it’s been all over the news—the case of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who decided that her religion had full possession of the truth and gave her the privilege of ignoring her legal duties and oppressing her neighbors. She turned her religious faith into a campaign to control the world around her, including people whose faith differs from hers.

And that, of course, is something we see a lot of now. It’s not just Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. Islam, at the moment, is rife with it—some of it in a much more vicious form. Even Buddhism is having its turn in Myanmar.

Judaism, isn’t immune to the temptation, either. The Settler movement in Israel and the West Bank is another example of it, particularly mind-boggling given that modern Israel was founded as a refuge from precisely this sort of treatment elsewhere. Was Peter envisioning a kind of Jewish caliphate? Did he want a Jewish Taliban? I don’t suppose he had that detailed a plan, but he was probably moving in that direction.

There is something scary about the way we human beings slip from our moments of revelation to the moment of imposing our insight on others. First, we just want everyone to share our insight. And then we move on to the point of thinking that our insight is so clear and so true that it cannot be questioned. And then it begins to seem obvious that we ought to compel others to see it, too. Peter was heading right down that path when Jesus brought him up short with “Get behind me, Satan.”

We mild-mannered Episcopalians may think we’re exempt, but we’re not. Historically, we’ve had our persecutorial moments, and we’ve certainly been known to entertain feelings of superiority (of which our fellow Christians are well aware). And add to that the fact that this is a liberal congregation. When liberals embrace new enthusiasms, we, too, can be quite political about demanding that others conform. We’re gathered here in Berkeley, right? We, if anyone, should know that political correctness has a certain tyrannical potential. This isn’t just a myth made up by Republican politicians, though they’ve certainly milked it for everything it’s worth.

No human being is safe from imitating Peter’s error. Like him, we persistently fail to get the message. We think that, because we’ve seen this revelation, everybody else has to as well—and in our time frame and on our terms. But no. The Messiah’s revolution isn’t going to proceed from triumph to triumph. It comes about through the persistence of trust and hope and love in the face of suffering and weakness. Beware of thinking that we’ll be able to bypass all that and just have a lovely wallow in our own brilliant grasp of truth—lovely as it may sound.

And now that I’ve said all this, you may think that I’m going to sum up here by telling us all not to be so damned confident. (Notice that I’m choosing my language in imitation of Our Lord.) But, in fact, that’s not quite it either. Mark isn’t saying that Peter’s revelation was wrong. It was what Peter wanted to do with it that was wrong.

There really is a revelation here. It’s just that Peter—like the rest of us—was very slow to understand it. What had he seen that made him acclaim Jesus as Messiah? He had seen in him a revelation of the heart of the universe. He saw in Jesus that God, moved by passionate love, had come looking for him, had come to draw him into God’s embrace, had come to reveal the true center of existence.

He went wrong in that he couldn’t, at first, accept that offer of love in it almost unimaginable breadth and depth. He could only think of it in the familiar terms: power, money, celebrity, religious certainty—all those things, you know, that Satan tempts Jesus with in another familiar gospel story. But it’s none of those things. It’s love.

Jesus wasn’t telling Peter to soft-pedal his revelation. And Peter understood that. Jesus was telling him to understand it more deeply and more truly. God, in Jesus, has taken the profound risk of coming right here among an ordinary bunch of people like us to offer us love. That’s the revelation we celebrate every Sunday at this Holy Table. And we draw from it hope and we pray that we will become deeper and wiser and more loving by it—not so that we can inflict it on others, but so that we can share it and welcome one another—everyone whom God touches with it.

Peter accepted the “Get behind me, Satan” and still confessed the “You are the Messiah.” It took patience and trust. That’s where we want to go, too.

THINKING ABOUT KIM DAVIS

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The case of Kim Davis, County Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, is giving me cause to reflect. On the one hand, I am strongly opposed to what she has done. Gay and Lesbian people have struggled long and hard to achieve, in practical terms, the full citizenship that, in theory, we always possessed. It is not easy to be gracious when one person who happens to be in a position of power feels free to nullify our most recent legal advance.

On the other hand, I am, like Kim Davis, a Christian who has occasionally felt it necessary to place myself sideways in some community process for reasons of conscience. To be sure, she may not regard my Episcopal tradition as Christian and I tend to look on her Christian tradition as a distortion of the historic Christian faith. Still, I fully understand the importance of conscience in matters of faith.

I am thus in the awkward spot of respecting her willingness to stand firm while at the same time believing that her understanding of Christian faith is mistaken on this topic and that she ought to reconsider. It’s unlikely that she and I will ever engage in direct conversation on the topic. Nor, I fear, is it likely that it would prove fruitful if we did.

My reservation is based on experience. For some years I functioned as one of the “point” people in the Episcopal Church’s long conversation on the topic of sexual orientation. I repeatedly found that Evangelical Episcopalians who attended (many simply stayed away) refused to engage in any real sort of conversation at all. They listened only in order to to decide how they were going to attack. As a result, they never really comprehended what was being said on the other side. They refused to treat faithful lesbian or gay Christians as anything more than interlopers. And they claimed the authority of Scripture for their position even while they were unwilling to go back to scripture with an open mind in order to discuss the interpretation of others. Their own presentations consisted in repeating what they had already said over and over, as if one more repetition might finally persuade where the previous hundred had failed.

In short, I have no expectation that people from the broadly Evangelical spectrum, including the Pentecostal tradition to which I am guessing Ms. Davis belongs, will or even can engage in straightforward conversation with those of us who belong to other Christian traditions. Happily, there seems to be some conversation on the issues of sexual orientation arising within the Evangelical world now. I pray that it may be more productive than what I experienced as an outsider.

My continuing question, however, as I think about and pray for Kim Davis is how Christian people arrive at points of such great intransigence on issues that are not really central to Christian faith. Christian perspectives on marriage have varied widely over two millennia. Many of the earliest Christians were profoundly suspicious of heterosexual marriage, which they saw as the enemy of true Christian faith and life. It was a distraction, exerting a constant pull toward worldliness and giving rise to the anxiety that undermines faith. Never was it conceived as a fundamental aspect of Christian belief. The Evangelical exaltation of marriage (and of the relatively modern nuclear family) owes little to the Bible and not much to ancient Christian tradition. It began as a twentieth-century reaction to the increasing visibility of same-sex oriented people—effectively a theologizing of homophobia—and not much different from the use of the curse of Ham/Canaan to justify first slavery and then the continuing degradation of people of African ancestry—a defensive move by slave holders and racial bigots.

And yet, I recognize that we all have to take our fundamental convictions seriously. Not just religious people, but all sorts of people. How then are we to live together without destroying our common civil society by trying to enforce our convictions in the public sphere? For that, of course, is the issue for the rest of us—not what Ms. Davis believes, but what she does or does not do in her office of County Clerk.

There is a parallel—in principle though not in gravity—to the much graver attack on civil society that now plagues the ancient center of the Muslim world (and laps over into other parts of the world). For some reason, we human beings find it possible to feel that the depth of our convictions exempts us from responsibility for their consequences in the lives of others. At that point, we forget that we are not in fact the God (or whatever other principle) in which we believe and we somehow turn ourselves into absolute authority. It is the deepest and most treacherous temptation of humankind, the true sin of pride. (It is also, of course, not limited to religious people. I need only name Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism to make that point.)

When we find that we are no longer willing to enter into conversation with the people we judge, that we only want to dictate to them, that we have decided that we can no longer learn anything knew or find a new perspective, that our faith is so complete as to admit of no addition or alteration, we are in grave danger. And we place the world around us in grave danger.

There are things in this world that would be worth suffering martyrdom for. God defend us all from them. But the privilege of denying other people their human and legal rights is not one of them.

A ROAD TRIP IN TIME OF DROUGHT

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lupine?
lupine?
thistle?
thistle?

 

 

 

 

 

 

A trip south to the Los Angeles area to visit family and friends took us through familiar terrain along Interstate 5. For some years, we have seen signs proclaiming that the drought was the fault of Congress (the specific object of wrath being environmental regulations protecting downstream waters). On the whole, however, we have not seen many signs of major damage until this trip. Yes, there were a few groves of dead trees. But orchards have their own life cycles, and we saw more orchards in infancy or youth than we saw dead ones. This time, however, we saw some mature orchards actually in the process of dying and more fallowed fields than we have been used to. The drought is tightening its grip, with or without the help of Congress. New signs are appearing that now lay the blame on the water consumption of California cities.

There are still green lawns in the LA area, but fewer than there used to be. Even the Getty Center, being the good citizen, had turned off most of its beautiful water features, leaving only the rivulet that runs down the to the pond by the great bougainvilleas. The gardens there were designed from the start to use relatively little water otherwise. Despite tales of people who continue to use water lavishly, there are many signs of civic responsiveness.

Just to keep us off guard, nature reminded us that this is a time not just of global warming, but of global weirding, giving us a first-class, midwestern style thunder storm in the middle of our ever-dry summer. It hung for an hour or so over Silver Lake where we were staying. Flashes of lightning followed immediately by deafening claps of thunder. Jon watched a tree on the other side of the street fall to the storm. The Fire Department arrived about fifteen minutes later, inspected, and apparently found no danger.

But the more interesting part of the trip from a gardener’s point of view was the return. On the advice of our friend Scott, we went north through Ojai, a beautiful little town with a very interesting artists’ collective called Ojai Valley Arts, then on north on state highway 33. The scenery is beautiful even when dry, but we found ourselves ascending into clouds and drizzle and an unfolding carpet of yellow flowers along the roadside—a lupine-like flower, about two feet tall, and a lower-growing thistle-like one. I’ve been unable to identify either more precisely from the two books I have.

From highway 33, we turned west down the Cuyama Valley, which looked much more desolate than the country along I-5. Much of the land seemed to have been fallowed; but, not having been there in a normal year, we found it hard to guess what it might look like in more favorable times..

We spent the night in Pismo Beach, with the bonus of a good view of the Pacific, complete with whale splashing about in the middle distance. Then north again on 101 till we turned off toward Carmel on Arroyo Seco Road and then Carmel Valley Road. There were places along Arroyo Seco Road that looked truly desolate. Even the oaks appeared to have died. Only when we crossed over toward the ocean side of the hills did matters improve. There we found great swaths of classic California: golden grasses under the broad, dark green branches of live oaks.

The impression, over all, was that the drought is certainly working major damage, not only to agriculture but to some of the native plant life. The dead oaks were particularly troubling. Had the water table been lowered by indiscriminate pumping? Possibly. Other terrains, however, seemed to be weathering the drought, albeit in a subdued state. And it didn’t seem to take much rain to bring the flowers on highway 33 out of hiding.

Next winter? Anyone’s guess, though the current prognostication is for a major El Niño event, which usually means rain for California. My own garden would be glad of that.

And a side-note, not climate related: we went to the Getty Center to see the Andrea del Sarto show—mostly drawings and a few oils. The drawings are mind-boggling in their elegance and detail and liveliness. Our friend Joseph told us to be sure to see the small exhibit on Degas and pastels, which proved to be a great treat, too. The little computer show on the making of pastels provided a fascinating enrichment to a choice set of works by Degas and contemporaries. We had a pleasant lunch on the terrace and returned to the galleries only to find them overrun by children with smart phones, taking pictures of everything as fast as possible and, as near as I could tell, actually looking at nothing. Their parents pretended not to know them. We decided to call it a day for the museum.

EVANGELICALS AND THE SUPREME COURT

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The Supreme Court, this past week, did three faithful and honorable things, one on behalf of housing for the poor, one on behalf of medical care for all, and (what interests me particularly here) one on behalf of marriage. I say “marriage” rather than “same-sex marriage” because this will actually prove a gift for all Americans by helping to create a public understanding of marriage that doesn’t depend on ideas of sexual hierarchy that are no longer meaningful in our world. It will become easier for all of us (heterosexual people included) to think of marriage as a union of two equal partners.

There will, of course, be a period of backlash, and I don’t minimize its danger. Backlash has an intrinsic weakness, since it is always more a stance against than a stance for something. No matter how much the radical right claims that they’re defending marriage, it will only get harder to see them as doing anything more than attacking a historically marginalized group. Still, we know from the recent murders in Charleston that backlash can continue exacting a mortal toll even after 150 years. There is no expiry date on human depravity.

But my question today is whether Evangelicals will be able to separate themselves from their recent history of making homophobia a stand-or-fall article of religion. There is a laudable effort in this direction on the part of some younger leaders. Older ones mostly seem to be digging the trenches deeper and raising the barricades higher. Given the direction of the population at large (including younger Evangelicals), they may well find themselves leading a much reduced army; but they have loud voices and plenty of money. Will the the rest of us simply have to wait for their decease? (Being pretty much of the same age as they, I do not expect that I will live to see that.)

I have always been perplexed that Evangelicals have committed themselves so intensely and irrevocably to this attack on same-sex marriage. The Biblical case for their position proves tenuous when examined closely, as I argued in the 2nd edition of Dirt, Greed, and Sex (the 12th Chapter, new to that edition). It is stitched together from a patchwork of texts in a way that ignores their substantial differences. It gets much of its power from the fact that it aligns so readily with homophobic feelings, a fact that even some conservative Evangelicals seem to be on the verge of recognizing.

Homophobia is a particular form of the basic human reaction of disgust—a reaction that has proven remarkably malleable, both for good and for ill. It was fundamental to the Nazi campaign to dehumanize Jews, but it has also been used historically to summon emotional energy on behalf of civic morality. The mistake is in assuming that disgust is, in itself, a warrant for an ethical judgment. Sometimes, it is something we need to unlearn or at least disregard. It would be very helpful to the whole conversation if every one involved were to read Rachel Herz’s fascinating and informative That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion (Norton).

Another part of the difficulty for Evangelicals is that they are prisoners of infallibility. (Yes, I know “infallibility” isn’t their preferred terminology, but it’s the everyday word.) Evangelicals, like other Protestants, like to think of themselves as the opposite of Roman Catholicism, but they’re very close to it in this respect. Both groups have, at least in theory, a source of infallible divine knowledge. And people who have committed themselves to this principle do not like it if their leaders start making strange noises about what the infallible source teaches. After all, what ‘s the good of an infallible source if it can change?

Witness the current conservative resistance to Pope Francis (God bless him with long life and health) as he begins to push back against the infallibilities of his predecessors. (Yes, I know that that’s not the right language from a Roman Catholic perspective, either, but I think it describes the current dynamics.) In Evangelical circles, the reaction will typically be even more sweeping and trenchant. For it is not, in practice, the Bible that is their infallible authority, but their received interpretation of the Bible, an interpretation of which the leaders of the churches are custodians. To change that is felt as virtually equivalent to changing the Bible itself.

In my less hopeful moments, I sometimes think that Evangelicals will prove to have killed Christianity in the US with their intransigence on this topic and such other issues as evolution and global warming (against), and laissez-faire capitalism and Armageddon (for). They have, after all, succeeded in christening themselves as the only real Christians—and the secular press has implanted that identification firmly in the public mind. It is hard to imagine a future where this kind of proud intransigence can continue to flourish. Even the durable myth of the glories of the Confederacy is beginning to crumble after 150 years.

God, to be sure, has pulled Christianity through other self-induced disasters, finding the right agents and the right times. But it won’t be easy to deconstruct the current entanglement of faith and unreason, whether in Evangelical reality or in public perception. God prosper those Evangelicals who are trying to do exactly that. For a long time now, the word “gospel,” which once meant “good news,” has sounded on Evangelical lips more like a threat than a source of hope. That was not always the case. I pray they can change it for the future.