Jesus Gets Theatrical, Logsdon Seminary Colloquium, South Texas School of Christian Studies, September 19, 2013, Luke 16.1-9

Note: This is a slightly altered and expanded version of my Sermoneutics column on the same passage, adapted for preaching in the Logsdon Seminary Colloquium at the South Texas School of Christian Studies.

Collect

Great God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, with prophetic urgency your Son calls us to radical inclusion over righteous exclusion. Grant us grace to discount the debts that others owe us, that we might find both from you and from them forgiveness of the debts we owe.

Sermon

            When Adriana Baer took over as artistic director of Portland's Profile Theater, she wasted no time: She boosted the troop's income so as to create a margin instead of barely covering expenses; she produced a critically-acclaimed run of Athol Fugard's "Road to Mecca;" she even had the chutzpah to ask the company's founding director, whom she replaced, not to sit on the board of directors so that she could have a free hand.

            Then word came down: Profile had lost the lease on its venue after fourteen years and would soon have no place to perform. A thirty year-old woman in a racket where donors and peers tend to be elderly males, an East Coast arriviste with no ties to the local high society cliques, Baer found herself in need of a miracle - or a friend.

            She found the latter (and perhaps the former) quickly enough. Baer had already initiated weekly coffee klatches with Damaso Rodriguez, who ran the cross-town outfit, Artists Repertory Theater. He agreed at once to rent her company space in his building at the same price she'd been paying before. Rodriguez knew the riff: His former troupe, Furious Theater, had once found themselves bounced from their own Los Angeles digs in a similar scenario. The two producers agreed that in a day when corporate cutbacks and a sinking economy make a pig's breakfast of charitable giving, those who work in the arts cannot afford rivals, only allies.

            That's a little bit like what Jesus is getting at in the text we have read today, which I like to call the Parable of the Crooked Bookkeeper.

            The probable situation here is that the boss had developed a work-around for Torah prohibitions against charging interest. Instead, he lent in commodities rather than cash, then Shylocked his debtors on the payback. The steward figures he can slash the notes down to the principal and get away with it. His boss won't complain: after all, if you cheat Bernie Madoff, he's not going to rat you out to the SEC. His creditors, on the other hand, know better than to look this particular gift horse in its highly suspicious mouth, and may figure that it's cheaper for them to take him in instead of turn him in.

            Now note two things about the context of this parable: First, Jesus delivers it to first-century Jews, all of whom, upon hearing about a "steward," would think immediately of the Sadducees and the Pharisees who, between them, had cornered the market on God's blessings to Israel. Second, Luke locates this story in the long section, peculiar to his Gospel, called the Journeyings to Jerusalem (Lk 9.51-19.44), which will end with the Master's ritual destruction of the temple (Lk 19.45-47) and his explanatory sermon describing the same event. (Lk 21.10-38)

            The meaning of the parable now comes clear: Setting ethical niceties aside, Jesus warns the local holiness brokers that God has just about had it with them. They've jacked up the demands of the law with nosebleed interest charges that nobody can meet and Moses never dreamed of. Soon, their Master will return and eighty-six the lot of them from their base of operations in the temple. They are about to join the ranks of the homeless! Their best bet would be to hold a fire sale - slash the soaring inflation rates on righteousness and concentrate instead on relationships. Judgment day draws near and none of them has the cash reserves to pay off his sins. They can't afford the luxury of competition; they must embrace the wisdom of collaboration.

            And the application fits all too well with a congregation of pastors and seminary professors. Too often we view our privileged position as an invitation to audit the accounts of our fellow-Christians. Done correctly, this kind of Bible brokering empowers preachers to deliver righteous judgments against the spiritual red ink in other peoples' account books. And any delusions I may entertain that I have risen above my self-appointed position as a CPA - Certified Pharisaic Accountant - disappears when I inevitably find myself counting to make sure that the person ahead of me in the express lane at HEB does, in fact, have ten items or fewer!

            The problem with this is that any surplus sanctification I possess comes from creative accounting which embezzles a holiness that belongs to God alone. As the English poet laureate John Betjemen as expressed it,

Not my vegetarian dinner

Nor my lime juice minus gin

Quite can drown a faint conviction

That we may be born in sin.

            Read this way, the parable reaches its logical conclusion in verse nine: Adriana Baer found shelter with Damaso Rodriguez because she befriended him before her company became homeless. Rodriguez, in turn, lowered her rent because he saw himself in her plight. The religious leaders of his own day, Jesus warns, will find open doors in other people's homes only if they take the bold step of throwing wide the doors of what should be a house of prayer for all nations. And we, Luke perhaps hints by including the parable in his Gospel, will find a place to flop in the Kingdom only if we open ourselves to some wildly inclusive pew-surfing here and now.

            "In my Father's house," Jesus says, "are many rooms," (Jo 14.2 NIV) but it may turn out that every room is a guest room and you can only stay if someone else invites you. Thus forgiveness, showing grace to others, is not an act of superhero holiness but simply the wisest way for believers to do business.

The Unmistakable Marks of a Christian Scholar: A Meditation on Luke 13.10-17, President's Chapel, South Texas School of Christian Studies, Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Disclaimer: I am continuing to mine the riches of Pastor Kyndall Rothaus' recent sermon, "Women, We Are Bent," available here. The following is a slightly-expanded version that I preached at yesterday's undergraduate chapel for the Hardin Simmons undergraduate program at the South Texas School of Christian Studies. In his absence, our president, Dr. Tony Celelli, graciously allowed me the privilege of preaching the President's Chapel.

Collect

Great God who arises with healing in your wings, you call us whose intellects are crippled by sin to think straight, that our thoughts might honor you. We come to you confessing that though we cannot obey, yet we desire to be obedient. "Give what Thou bidst, and then bid what Thou wilt." Make us straight that we might strengthen others, so that we might love you with all our minds, and our neighbors as ourselves.

Introduction

            Since this is an academic institution, and since we professors are always harping to you students about the evils of plagiarism, I'll begin with a disclaimer: The core exegetical content of this sermon comes from the sermon, "Women, We Are Bent," preached by Kyndall Rothaus, pastor of the Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, which you can read and hear in full on the church's website. I'm going to tweak her application slightly and then add an observation of my own.

            Pastor Rothaus makes the key observation that this woman - and it matters that she is a woman - is bent over; she occupies less space in the world than God intended. Rothaus goes on to make the point that our society - including, too often, the community of faith - kinks women into permanent question marks and insists that they interrogate their own right to fulfill the Creator's full purpose in them. "Women," she declares, "take a long time to learn how to stand tall, how to square our shoulders, how to lift our chins, how to take up our space." 

            She's right, too, but I would like to use her insight to address a different point; two points, in fact: As you begin your semester as a theology student in the Hardin Simmons program here at the School of Christian Studies, in your specific calling as a Christian scholar, I want you to urge you to take up your space, and lift up your sisters.

Take Up Your Space

            First, take up your space. Luke, the physician, studs his narrative with medical terminology. She is bowed together (v.11), a diagnosis of curvature of the spine. She cannot lift herself up (v.11), Galen the Physician's term for straightening the vertebrae. Jesus declare her loosed (v.12), a technical verb for recovery which Jesus places in the perfect tense, indicating a permanent cure, not a mere remission. She is made straight (v.13), the scientific word for restoring dislocated parts of the body to their natural position.

            Now, here's my point: The call of Jesus for you as a student is to stand up straight, to take up your space in the place you rightfully occupy in this community of Christian scholarship. Do not sidle sideways to the back row of seats! Do not avoid eye contact until your back bends you into a permanent case of blackboard blindness. Do not preface every comment with an apology and end it with a question mark! Do not double your opinions into the smallest possible package until you half-disappear from a case of scholarly scoliosis and curvature of the mind! Find your spine and untwist it! Find your mind and unfold it! Contribute to the ongoing conversation of faith in this place as one who, by the summons of Jesus Himself, belongs here! Like this woman, glorify God by finding the freedom in Christ to fill up the fullness of all God intends for you!

            But one caveat: Taking up space is a privilege premised on a responsibility. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him. (v.12) It was not a terribly difficult command: Jesus does not insist that she walk on water, but he does insist that she walk. And for a woman so badly bent, even the short shuffle down the central aisle might have seemed like a marathon. Yet Jesus, who has already proven his ability to heal at distance (Lk 7.1-10) insists that she invest effort in order to take ownership in the project of occupying her rightful space.

            You enjoy a privileged place as a student in this school, and Christ's invitation demands a response of effort. Want to know more than you know. Want to be more than you are. As Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia observes, "Some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent. . .is a prerequisite for getting an education that matters." Scholarship, study, hard work, these are the price of full participation, the required investment that God multiplies to unearnable dividends. Study to show thyself approved (2 Tim 2.15), work out what God has worked in, open your textbooks or close your mouth! A straight spine that supports an empty mind substitutes the presumption of arrogance for the praise of enlightenment. Don't worry if your mental pace is slow; don't worry if your academic gait lacks grace; don't worry if your intellectual advance is a bent-double-shuffle. Come as best you are able into the place where Christ has called you and let your Lord teach you to stand tall. Take up your space.

Lift Up Your Sisters

            Next, as you take up your space, lift up your sisters. I notice in this story that the result of contact with Jesus is that a person gets taller. I also notice that the ruler of the synagogue (v.14), the man who is already the tallest hog at the trough, gets upset. In fact, I notice that the same verb tenses describe the responses of these two individuals. The New Revised Standard Version comes closest to getting the translation right:  Just as the woman "began (and presumably continued) praising God," the ruler "kept saying to the crowd." From this, I would deduce on the one hand that the mark of Christ's presence in my own life is that the people around me get taller as well. I would deduce on the other hand that the mark of Christ's absence in my own life is that I try to look tall by keeping those around me short!

            The problem with Christian scholarship is that far too often, as we learn to take up our space, we encounter the desire to cramp those who continue to seek their space. Also, if we are unwilling to make the necessary effort to stand up ourselves, or are uncertain of our ability to do so, we want to compensate by making sure everyone else stays bent over. Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said that fatigue makes cowards of us all. I would add that insecurity makes jerks of us all.

            Now this may be fine in the secular academy where Darwinian competition and draconian condemnation rule the culture, but such spine-twisting territorialism has no place in the presence of Our Lord. The mark of Christlikeness is not your solo soaring as a single star student, but your contribution to an active, straight-shouldered, full-throated, stiff-spined community of fellow-students in your immediate vicinity. 

            If your colleagues get shorter around you, if your enacted theology kinks them into commas that pause before speaking, or quirks them into question marks that make every declaration a request for permission, then you have ceased to be the incarnation of Christ and have become instead an enraged ruler who forgets whose synagogue it is in the first place. But if the grades of those who study with you steadily climb like marks up the pantry door, if their comments in class quickly begin to eclipse your own, if they suddenly speak out and you find them standing so tall that you can now look up to them and be glad to do so, then perhaps indeed in you Jesus visits the classrooms of this place.

            I commend to you the advice given by George MacDonald in his poem, "Willie's Question":

I will tell you the only plan

To climb and not to fall:

He who would rise and be greater than

He is, must be "servant of all".

Turn it each way in your mind,

Try every other plan,

You may think yourself great, but at length you'll find

You are not even a man....

Be admiral, poet, or king,

Let praises fill both your ears,

Your soul will be but a windmill thing,

Blown round by its hopes and fears."

Conclusion

            A windmill thing/Blown 'round by its hopes and fears; whipped into a whirl of happiness by the latest word of praise from a professor or torqued into a tornado of jealousy if the kudos go to someone else: That is not the fullness of life promised in the Kingdom of Heaven, and I urge you not to stand for it.

            Take up your space! Lift up your sisters! And one day you will stand before the Throne of Grace to take the only final exam that counts, and you will hear your Lord say, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. (Mt 25.40, 23)

The Unmistakable Mark of a Christian Man: A Meditation on Luke 13.10-17

I'll begin with a disclaimer: The core exegetical content of this blog comes from the sermon, "Women, We Are Bent," preached by Kyndall Renfro, pastor of the Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, which you can read and hear in full here. Pastor Renfro makes the key observation that this woman - and it matters that she is a woman - is bent over; she occupies less space in the world than God intended. Renfro goes on to make the point that our society - including, too often, the community of faith - kinks women into permanent question marks and insists that they question their right to fulfill the Creator's full purpose in them. "Women," she declares, "take a long time to learn how to stand tall, how to square our shoulders, how to lift our chins, how to take up our space." 

She's right, too. Consider two stories I found almost at random in the paper the past couple of days. Actress Anna Gunn plays the character Skyler White on the television drama "Breaking Bad." I've never watched the program but it concerns a high school chemistry teacher who, upon discovering he will soon die of cancer, determines to put his job skills to use cooking meth so as to leave a decent nest-egg for his family. By the time he goes into remission, he has become hooked on the easy money and lavish lifestyle his new trade affords and decides to keep going. Skyler, the protagonist's wife, apparently functions as the voice of morality, a sort of anti-Lady McBeth who calls her mate out on his descent into decadence. Here's the kicker: While fan sites tend to empathize with the husband, entire websites devote themselves to hating the wife. Gunn reports that some of the vitriol extends to her personally. "My character," she muses, "to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women." 

Women, we might say, who stand up. 

Next story: Women at the Wall, a group of devout Jewish women who want full access to pray at the Western Wall of the temple in Jerusalem, reacted with scorn when Israeli authorities erected a sort of scaffold that would allow men and women to pray together. What these women want, as far as I can determine, is the ability to wear prayer shawls and phylacteries and to read Torah and sing while praying at what may be Judaism's holiest sites. A court ruling recently granted them this access, but the ultra-Orthodox have crammed the area to keep the women out, cursing and spitting on them at times. 

Anat Hoffman, leader of the women's group, declares, in language particularly suited to our text, "“We have to be vigilant and fight for every centimeter." 

And now for what I consider the greatest gift of Pastor Renfro's sermon: the part she didn't preach. "I wish I knew what to tell the men about a story like this one," she says, "but I don’t." And although she then goes on to tell men something very valuable and very affirming, I am still grateful for the window. (Good sermons, I think, should leave lots of white space for congregational glossing - the way Jesus' parables do.) 

And here's what I want to write in the margin of this excellent sermon; here's what I want to tell men about a story like this one: The mark of a Christ-like man is that the women who come into contact with him stand taller. 

This is the part of the article where radical feminist and womynist theologians would insist that the story remains flawed because the protagonist still needed Jesus - a man, forsooth! - to set her free. We'd probably get a lot of gender stuff about re-jiggering the names of the Trinity, too. But to me it's simple: A woman encounters Jesus and walks away taller. I'm not saying that women can encounter Christ only in men. I am saying that women can encounter Christ in men, and that if they do, this will be the result.

You can flap the pages of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians in my face all you want to. If your reading of that text doesn't result in you on a cross and your wife on a roll, you've mangled it. You can quote all the hairy, chest-thumping popular books on "Christian manhood" you want: The mark of Christlikeness is not white water rafting but a joyous, active, straight-shouldered, full-throated, tall community of women in your immediate vicinity. 

Sitting once at a Lord's Supper service, eyeing the congregation around me in an admittedly abstracted, undevotional kind of spirit, I noticed a man take the trays of Baptist shot-glasses and Pharisees' teeth, remove a set for himself, then hand each element to his wife and daughter. Liturgy is enacted theology, and that was an entire chapter: There may be one mediator between God and man, but there are two between God and woman; one of them is the man Christ Jesus, and the other is the man you married. I watched two women get shorter that day.

If the women in your life get shorter around you, if your enacted theology kinks them into commas that pause before speaking, or quirks them into question marks that make every declaration a request for permission, then they are not encountering Jesus in you. But if the marks steadily climb the pantry door of your relationship with wife, daughter, colleague, or friend, and - perhaps this is the best test - if well-positioned men around you get "indignant" at you for it, then maybe Jesus showed up in the synagogue.

Seventh Day's the Charm Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost August 25, 2013 Luke 13.10-20

            In 1836 a bill came before the English parliament aimed at enforcing strict blue laws on Sundays. Novelist Charles Dickens, under the pseudonym Timothy Sparks, fired off a little pamphlet opposing the legislation. In the opening lines of "Sunday Under Three Heads" he carps that:

Menial servants, both male and female, are specially exempted from the operation of the bill. 'Menial servants' are among the poor people. The bill has no regard for them. The Baronet's dinner must be cooked on Sunday, the Bishop's horses must be groomed, and the Peer's carriage must be driven.

           The law, Dickens sneers, requires leisure on Sunday for those already at leisure and sanctions labor on Sunday for those who have labored all week.

            Jesus has something of the same beef with the application of the Sabbath laws in his own day: They free the healthy to remain healthy and the sick to remain sick and, as a bonus, free the healthy from doing anything to heal the sick. A rich man can order his servant to untie his ox but God cannot order His Son to untie His daughter. Jesus argues that God's Sabbath frees the strong to heal and the weak to praise.

                        Jesus attempts two miracles here: to untwist a woman's spine and to untwist a ruler's mind. Only the first one really comes off. To be fair, the woman's backbone had only been corkscrewed for eighteen years; early training had doglegged the official's thinking from childhood.

            The counter-argument about coming on a different day falls pretty flat: This woman had gone 0-for-6 through eighteen years of Sundays-through-Fridays. The synagogue held no healing until the synagogue held Jesus. That may have been what really bugged this official: He'd rather Jesus not heal on the Sabbath day because he knew that he himself could not heal on any day. Dallas Willard insists that one dimension of The Kingdom Among Us is "power to work the works of the kingdom," and that "the world we live in desperately needs such works to be done."

            Perhaps if we follow Jesus so assiduously that a word spoken in His name will undo decades of demonic damage, we will no longer need laws that prevent soccer leagues from scheduling games on Sundays. Perhaps if we view worship as freedom of the strong to serve the weak, people will come without compulsion.

Fast and Loose,

Doug

Apache Cicada: A Sonnet from the Sonoran Desert and Ancient Greece

In the deep South and up the East Coast of America, this is the year that Brood II of the seventeen-year cicada emerges. These bugs live underground for over a decade and a half, then boil to the surface where they make a lot of racket, make a little love, do no real harm, and then die, leaving their offspring to burrow back into the dirt and start marking time.

In the Sonoran Desert, which includes Southern Arizona where I grew up, we have something called the Apache Cicada. These guys appear every summer around the solstice where they boil to the surface, make a lot of racket, make a little love, do no real harm, and then die, leaving their offspring to burrow back into the dirt and start marking time. They also leave their molted skins clinging to tree branches, crackly little chitinous exoskeletons that make a very satisfying crunch between thumb and forefinger. They are sometimes called "rain bugs" because they seem to emerge just prior to the summer showers.

In addition to delivering a bolus-dose of nostalgia for my desert childhood, all this talk about cicadas reminds me of the story of Eunomos (Greek for "Good Name"). In Greek mythology, he was a Jimmy Henddrix-level cithara player who entered a competition only to have a string snap during a crucial arpeggio. This was the day before roadies so no one stood by to hand him a fresh axe. Instead, the myth tells us that a nearby cicada leapt onto the lyre and sustained the note, allowing Eunomos to bear the gree. (I think the prize involved a record contract as the winner of Ancient Greece Has Talent or Grecian Idol, but the sources are unclear on this.) Because of its annual emergence from the earth, the cicada symbolized resurrection. The Greeks and Romans considered the insect's wild, droning song an expression of religious ecstasy and held them sacred to Apollo.

Anyway, I pondered all of that and attempted to put it into sonnet form. You can read the result below.

Apache Cicada: A Desert Sonnet

Dry tymbal-click grits song on slate-hard heat
And rends the weft and woof of warmth-warped air.
Sound pounds, rebounds, resounds, redounds, repeats
Staccato scrape that whets spines sharp and spare.

My soul's string snaps short, twangs, and silence stills
Sweet praise I sought to render to my Lord,
Frustrates the proffered offering of my skills.
Dry, chitinous crackling chokes the sundered chord.

The locust leaps upon my wounded lyre,
Sustains the stifled note to swelling praise.
Rain-bringer, singer, you who never tire:
Draw out the strangled chord of my brief days.

O God, let desert sever self-sought fame,
And sing through me instead the one Good Name.

Laodicean Sonnet

The idea for this sonnet began months ago when I first istened to Malcolm Guite's sermon,  "Not a Chocolate Jesus: Learning from Tom Waits and Johnny Cash". In the opening lines of that message, Malcolm calls for "some piece of sacred art, on the side of a cathedral, maybe, painted very beautifully at the far end of King's College Chapel, somewhere like that. I would love to see the image of Jesus spewing lukewarm Christianity out of his mouth in disgust, a flood of saccharine platitudes, a spewing out of absolute disgust of prosperity gospels all flowing out there, all those versions of Christianity which are based around, 'I'm all right, Jack,' the very things that Jesus is specifically criticizing in that passage in Revelation where he says, 'You say, "I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing," and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.'" The image arrested my thought, and while I do not  mistake my sonnet for great art or my blog for the wall of a mighty cathedral, I couldn't get away from that picture. The first line came fairly quickly. I worked the rest out on weeks' worth of morning and evening walks through my neighborhood with my dog. I offer it here for what it's worth, perhaps as no more than an introduction to Malcolm's sermon for people who might not otherwise have known about it.

Laodicean Sonnet

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. - Revelation 3.16

"If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity. I am certain there must be a patent American article on the market which will suit you far better." - C. S. Lewis

I saw the face of Christ fish belly-pale

And bloodless blanched. Five wounds in mottled skin

Glowed livid. From his bowels keened forth a wail.

Bright blazing eyes now banked, glazed, gazed within.

Chest's sudden spasm under golden sash

Belched forth and splattered plastic platitudes.

From white robe's hem now ricocheted and splashed

Best lives, bland smiles, be-happy-attitudes.

From wide mouth many waters thundered forth

Great half-chewed chunks of saltless sentiment.

Gobs, globs of branded worship without worth

Spewed, spattered, spat in torrents of torment.

'Midst Heaven's host dry heaves declared a stop.

Christ wiped his mouth. An angel grabbed a mop.