Thursday, June 25, 2015

Sermon for  Pentecost 5
Proper 8 B  ~  June 28, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
(first preached at Chjrist Church Bayfield, June, 2012, 
not preached in 2015, but suggested as background commentary)
                                                                 
God did not make death…righteousness is immortal.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,

Archbishop Tutu is fond of saying that we live in a moral universe. The Bl. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the arc of history bends toward justice. There is an objective moral law, just as real as the laws of physics —maybe more so, since they seem to keep changing. What is right may not always be so easy to figure out either — and our apprehension of it is according to our own imperfect understanding. But the right itself is objective. That's one way to interpret the declaration that righteousness is immortal. What is right does not pass away with persons or cultures. Even if some science-fiction, doomsday, apocalyptic scenario were to happen, and our planet and everything on it were destroyed, righteousness would not be destroyed, because righteousness is immortal. Righteousness does not depend on us. It is of God.
Another way to understand what it means to say that righteousness is immortal is to say that death is not an aspect of what is right, what is just, what is fair. Wherever it comes from, death is most definitely not a just punishment imposed by God on sinners. That is nonsense, just as the idea that the generative forces of the world are somehow unwholesome or poisonous God did not make death…righteousness is immortal. In other words, death is not God’s will and death is not just.
But we still die. In fact all people die. Some of us die surrounded by family and friends, full of years, and at peace. But most of us do not. The majority of people lead miserable lives, characterized by suffering and oppression. Sad, pathetic lives. Lives cut short, like Jairus’ daughter's, lives whose potential was never reached. But then, who ever does fulfill their potential? The whole of life is a series of decisions, forks in the road in which we have to take one or the other and taking one means not taking the other, and forsaking it, leaving that potentiality unfulfilled forever. Nobody ever lives up to their full potential. Still, some lives are more pathetic than others.
And that isn't fair. It isn't just; it isn't right. "Life isn't fair".  No, it’s not.  But that's the mystery of iniquity. That's the contagion of death that has mysteriously crept into the world. And God didn't make it. Nor did God ordain that life shouldn't be fair, but just the opposite that life should be fair because righteousness  –  that is justice –  is immortal.
The Son of God came to fix that: to destroy the “works of the devil”, to destroy death and unrighteousness. That is the subject of today’s Gospel, in which Jesus saves two dying people. It is really significant that both of these people are women. That is, people of no account, of no public significance. Life is draining out of both of them. The incident of the woman with the chronic hemorrhage is inserted, like a parenthesis, into the story of the comatose girl. Blood was life itself to the ancient Hebrews. Bloodshed was necessary for covenants and for atonement, but – paradoxically – human blood was also defiling. Anyone who came into contact with blood became unclean for a time, as did anyone who touched a dead body.
That is why the woman was so afraid. She had touched Jesus. No woman would ever even speak to a man, much less touch him, in public. Moreover, Jesus was considered a Rabbi, a holy man – especially untouchable! For a woman known to be constantly defiled by a hemorrhage to touch a Rabbi would be a real outrage. It would make Him unclean. It was entirely reasonable for her to fear that He would be angry with her for contaminating Him. Instead, He praised her and called her “daughter”, and told her that it was her faith that had saved her. Faith and fear, again. The woman trusted enough to overcome her fear of offending the Rabbi, but her fear remained. Jesus cast that out, too.
Notice that the woman did not say to herself: “Well, I have an affliction, and it’s not fair, but then life isn’t fair, so I will just have to learn to live with it.” There are plenty of advisers who would have told her so. Then as now there were plenty of sages counseling her to develop the serenity to accept that which she could not change, to give up her striving to be whole.  But that is not the attitude Jesus praised as “faith”.  What He praised was her refusal to give up hope that things could change: her trust in the goodness of God, her trust that God is not content with the unfairness of life. This trust not only heals her, but it causes the Godman to call her “daughter”.
This is the second time this word occurs in the passage. The first is when the desperate Jairus asks Jesus to save his “little daughter”. On the way to do so, Jesus is delayed by the woman He calls “daughter”, meanwhile Jairus’s daughter dies. The counselors of despair advise Jairus to give up, but Jesus says “Do not fear, only trust”. Faith and fear again.  I notice that this pattern occurs also in the Raising of Lazarus, in which Jesus delays while Lazarus succumbs. The latter story, in the Fourth Gospel, makes it explicit that the delay was intentional,  in order to reveal the “Glory of God”, but in both stories the bereaved people take a negative attitude toward Jesus: Martha reproaches Him for being late; the mourners at Jairus’s house laugh at Him scornfully, when He says that the daughter is only sleeping.
But God did not make death; God sent His Son to destroy it. He does so, however, in private. He puts the scornful mourners out and takes only the parents and the closest disciples – Peter, James, and John  –  into the room of the dead girl. Then He ignores ritual defilement again, taking her by the hand, and restores her to life.  But was she dead, or – as Jesus Himself has said – only asleep? It is the scornful mourners who say she is dead, not Jesus. But then Jesus strictly commands the witnesses that no one should know about what had happened. Why, if she had only been sleeping, as He had just said?
It is also a little hard to imagine how the witnesses were supposed to obey this strict instruction. Were they supposed to bury the girl alive? Forbid her to go out? Everyone knew she had been sick to the point of death. Jairus was a well-known public figure, who had sought Jesus’s help in the middle of a big crowd, and everyone knew that Jesus had gone to the house even after the report of the daughter’s death had come. Then there were those mourning people Jesus had put out of the house. Some of them, presumably, had actually seen the girl die. How could the fact that she was now alive be kept from everybody, so that “no one should know of it”?
Perplexing. Maybe it points to another theme of the whole passage about faith and fear. God cannot compel faith. For if it were compulsory, it would not be faith, just as we do not hope for things we can already see. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ observes that if people did not believe the prophets, neither would they believe if someone rose from the dead.  Dostoyevsky elaborated: the doctors and scientists would crowd around the resurrected person, withdraw and confer   among themselves, and then announce that they would reserve judgment.  A few months later would appear scientific papers, redefining death. The resurrected person was never really dead, but only in a previously-unknown kind of coma. Resurrections, of course, do not happen. So, the raising of Jairus’s daughter occurs in private. Dead people do not wake up, and when the girl appears again among the living, skeptics are free to believe what Jesus said to begin with “the child is not dead but sleeping”.
Both of these victories over death were private. The woman was anonymous in the crowd. No one, not even Jesus, knew what had happened. He just felt that “power had gone out of Him”. He didn't know who had been healed until she came in fear and trembling, fell down at His feet, and told the whole story. I suppose the people pressing close to them in the crowd might have heard something about what the woman thought had happened, but in the large, excited crowd, only a few. The healing, though not exactly private wasn't really that public either, even though it occurred in the middle of a big crowd. What really happened was known only to the woman. The woman could not doubt that she had been healed, but then, she trusted to begin with, and as Jesus said, it was her trust that healed her. Everybody else could easily ignore it. So even in these two spectacular displays of divine power over death and injustice, people remained free – free to doubt the activity of God in the world, free to resign themselves to the supremacy of death and to the loathsome cliché that tells us “life isn’t fair”. Whatever else we may think about these incidents, It seems clear that He didn't want the news to get out.
Why? I can think of two reasons. The first is that the Divine project of liberating the creation from death, is much larger than these local victories. These are signs of what is going on, but what they point to is vast beyond imagining. The Victory over the usurper death will take place on an even more mysterious, cosmic level. As the Godman travels around Galilee and the Decapolis He cannot not help undoing death wherever He goes. But these healings and resurrections and exorcisms are almost incidental. They help to establish His reputation and to lend authority to His otherwise fairly-conventional teaching (as Nicodemus said to him in his nocturnal visit, “we know that you are a teacher sent from God because no one not of God could do the wonders you do") but the point of these healings is that they are signs: signs of God's will to set creation free from death altogether, for God did not make death and God's righteousness has nothing to do with death. Righteousness is immortal.
The second reason I can imagine for Jesus’s insistence “that no one should know” is that God will not interfere with our autonomy. God will not force us to hope by doing wonders that we MUST acknowledge. Divine love requires that God remain incognito in the world, for otherwise, we would be deprived of our freedom, and thus we would no longer bear the Image of God.  God is not like the American strategist in Vietnam who thought he could save the village by destroying it. God will not destroy His Image in order to save it. Indeed, even God cannot free us by violating our freedom.
So, even the Resurrection on the Eighth Day occurred secretly: not just in private, but in secret. There were no witnesses to the actual Event, only to its consequences. People like Mary Magdalene saw Him alive again, shortly after the Resurrection, but they did not see Him rise from the dead.
Nevertheless, those who witness the results, like the Woman with the hemorrhage, Jairus and his wife, Peter, James, and John, may – if they wish – celebrate the mysterious hope that the bondage of death is undone. Those who are willing to live in this hope may come together to rejoice, and to join in the common effort to advance God’s justice, which has nothing to do with death. For “God did not make death…and righteousness is immortal.”

AMEN
MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

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