We re Off to See the Wizard

Transcription

1 We re Off to See the Wizard Pentecost 8 - Proper 11B Grace St. Paul s - 7/19/15 As you are contemplating one of the classic movie scenes of all time, let me introduce you to my friend Mary. Mary was affectionately referred to by some of us as the church rat. For as long as she could remember, her life revolved around religious structures. When you looked at her family tree, you saw a half dozen individuals who were central characters in the formation of American churches, going back to the Revolution. Her immediate family was the fourth generation of this tradition. Mary and her family were not only in church every Sunday, but numerous times during the week. It was a foregone conclusion that she would attend Sunday school every week. She also went to parochial school, where she had religion classes every day. She was an acolyte the first day her church allowed girls to step foot on the altar. Then she was on the Altar Guild. As an adult, she served as a lay eucharistic minister and a lay reader. She visited parishioners in the hospital. She worked in her church s soup kitchen. She took all the church s religious education classes religiously, so to speak. It did not surprise her Rector therefore, when in her mid-20 s, she told him that she felt called to ordained ministry. Mary entered the discernment process and breezed through the usually lengthy undertaking in record time. Filled with the Holy Spirit, and energized to soak up everything, Mary could hardly contain her enthusiasm as she walked into her first Bible class at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. As it happened, it was also my first Bible class there and in the harmonic convergence of the universe, Mary sat down next to me. That very first day, the professor introduced 1

2 us to the documentary hypothesis of authorship of the Pentateuch. We learned that there is not one author of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but four, all of which are woven together into a single text, each with its own distinct point of view. We would read Chapters one and two of the Book of Genesis, a story Mary thought she knew very well. But this time, with new eyes, Mary realized that these first two stories conflict with one another, each describing creation differently and disagreeing on even the simplest of details about the order of events. She read the story of the Exodus, utilizing the techniques of biblical criticism she had just learned, trying to put the text in its proper cultural and historical basis, and she saw that there are widely different accounts of the same event. In one, there is the escape from Egypt as she knows it, with the Read Sea splitting open for the Israelites to pass. In another, there is no sea at all, only mud that causes the Egyptians chariot wheels to get stuck. She studied Psalm 29, laying it next to a Canaanite poem written hundreds of years earlier. She discovered a nearly word for word duplication, except the god in the Canaanite version, Baal, had been replaced in the Psalm by the god of the Hebrews, Yahweh. I watched each day as Mary s frustration grew and then, all at once, she lost it. She broke out in a rant in front of me and at the end she yelled at the top of her lungs, How can you just sit there? Don t you realize what all this means? Then she burst into tears and ran away...i never saw Mary ever again. When people like Mary learn what biblical scholars have known for at least the last 200 years, many feel just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. They feel like Toto has just pulled away the curtain to expose their entire belief structure as a fake construction by a little man pushing buttons. 2

3 How is it, you might rightfully ask, could Mary have spent so much of her life in the church and not known any of this before? I would suggest it is because the hierarchy of the church has been petrified that if all of you knew the truth, you would have a Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz meltdown, just like my friend Mary. You would get the idea that everything you knew about religion was a fake Hollywood set. In fact, there continues to be those who tell me that I should not have told you any of this. It s too dangerous, they say. You could take away someone s faith. And they are right. There are great risks in what I have done here this morning. But if any of us are going to understand what is really going on in our Hebrew Bible readings today, I believe there is absolutely no choice but to expose the wizard. So here is your warning. I plan to continue to pull back the curtain this morning until you see it all. I do so because I firmly believe that all of you need to stop being treated like children, that all of you deserve the opportunity to experience a deeper faith, a faith beyond wizards, a faith centered in the very realm of God that Jesus wants us so much to experience and know. So, ready or not, here we go. See this book? I have a newsflash for you. God did not write it. People wrote it. People just like you and me. They had wonderful experiences of God and they told each other about them in stories that they passed down for centuries. Then someone wrote down those oral stories on papyrus. Beloved, there is a big difference between the word of God and the words of God. And when we truly understand that about this book, we become aware that just because there is no wizard, that does not mean that there is no God. This is how Renita Weems, professor of biblical studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School explains it each year to her 3

4 new Hebrew Bible students. This is not a course on what God said, this is a course on what Israel said God said. I don t know what words our own Karen Borek uses when she tells her students here at the U of A about this, but I bet you it is very similar. So let us listen to Israel in today s lessons. To begin with, they have a problem. They have lived in a world of clans and tribes during their entire existence. But every nation around them had a king as their leader. They do not, because under the Mosaic Covenant that they adopted after their escape from Egypt, they feel as if having a king would be contrary to their relationship with Yahweh. From that Exodus event, they understand Yahweh as their protector, their goel in Hebrew. There is no English word for goel, because the concept doesn t exist in our political or religious world. Perhaps the best way to relate it to you is the term godfather as we understand it from movies about the mafia. The godfather is the person that protects the family, the clan, the society. Yahweh is the one who protects the Hebrew family and culture. He, and I say he because this is definitely a masculine experience of God, is the one who saved them from the powers of the world. Yahweh is the one who split the sea so that they could escape from Egypt, who provided food and water in the desert, protects them from their enemies, brings them into the land of milk and honey. Because this is the experience of God for the Hebrew people, they have decided that having an earthly king would violate their relationship with Yahweh, because Yahweh is their true king. From this experience, the Hebrews understand Yahweh as the one who doesn t save the Canaanites or the Amorites, but the god who saves them. It is from this Mosaic theology that we get the terms God s chosen race, a royal priesthood, a people set apart. Mosaic or saving theology is central to the Hebrews 4

5 understanding of God, but God did not throw it down from the heavens. It came about because people experienced Yahweh as their godfather. But in today s first reading from Second Samuel and Psalm 89, the theological groundwork changes completely. We suddenly hear about a king for the Hebrew nation, something that goes totally against the whole concept of the Mosaic covenant. This is because the Hebrew people have experienced God in new ways since their liberation from the Pharaoh. They now know a God who is with them in their daily life. God is not just their godfather, the one who reaches through the clouds to save them, but one whom they have experienced personally. Their new experiences suggest that God s grace is present in and through this world. God still performs signs and wonders, but in the theology we hear in today s readings, God is constantly creating and caring for them. Because of these new experiences of God, people believe their relationship with God has changed. They call this change the Davidic covenant, for obvious reasons. To be human is not to wait on God to save us, but to share in his kingship. The Hebrew people can now see that having a king is not contrary to the word of God. In fact, as humans, we are called to share God s kingship. The word messiah comes from royal theology, the anointed king. In the royal theology expressed today, the Hebrew people now see themselves as having an obligation in the world. No longer is it just God s job to save them, as was understood with the Mosaic Covenant. They now see themselves not so much saved by God, but blessed by God. Those of you who were here last week will recognize that I preached from a blessing theology standpoint, suggesting that all of us need to work to bring about God s realm. 5

6 The dichotomy between saving and blessing theology is evident throughout the Bible. The two themes continue through the Christian scripture and up to our lives today. In the Christian Scripture, it is Peter who expresses saving or Mosaic theology in the debate over whether the Gentiles should be let into the church. The Gentiles are not saved, they are not the chosen people of God, therefore they cannot be admitted to the church until they are circumcised, until they convert to Judaism. But Paul argues from the standpoint of blessing or royal theology, reminding Jews that once we are all aliens, and that everyone has the opportunity to experience God s grace. The author of Ephesians in today s lesson sides with Paul. But now you who were once far off have been brought near by Christ...He has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall. And Jesus spends most of his ministry breaking down the wall of the Mosaic covenant. Today he does it again by reaching out to all the folk who feel like they are not saved, those Mark describes as like sheep without a shepherd. Now when people hear this massive shift in Hebrew theology from saving to blessing, it is another case of Toto revealing the wizard. It is often heard as just another biblical contradiction, describing a random God who changes all the rules at the drop of a curtain. It is why my friend Mary ran away from everything she ever knew. It is why so many will never set foot in a church. And the folk who stick it out and stay in the tradition? We fight about this. In our dualistic way of thinking, we say well, it has to be one or the other. So the fundamentalist side of our tradition embraces saving theology and the progressive side has completely switched to blessing theology. Those are the choices we have been given; leave the church because the wizard has been revealed to be a fraud; or choose 6

7 one of the two theologies as the right one and make believe the other tradition is not in our sacred text. I want to suggest to you this morning that there is another possibility. To get there however, we need to take an extreme risk. We need to let the grand and powerful wizard go forever. Instead, we need to believe in the man behind the curtain. That is who wrote our sacred text. If we can accept that both saving and blessing theology are the result of two cultures experiencing God in two very different ways, we realize that not only are they both true, but it would be sacrilegious for us to not embrace both of them. But wait, there s more. If you can draw back that curtain, we get something even more critical. Suddenly, all the so-called contradictions that my friend Mary experienced disappear. That s because we realize that they are all just different experiences of God and the living Christ. And when we accept this, we are suddenly transported from the one-dimensional, black and white Kansas into the technicolor world of OZ. The Bible becomes a beautiful multi-colored patchwork quilt of meanings and the world becomes a kaleidoscope of brilliant rainbows as we enter the realm of God. This is the bold, new path that can open up for us, a yellow brick road that lead us to the real OZ, a place where we can reconnect with all of our tradition, a place where both saving and blessing theology are worth preserving because they are both true experiences of our ancestors, a road that can lead us back together so we can continue our journey, arm-in-arm. So are you with me? Let s tear back that curtain and reveal the real wizard to the church and to the world. Let us reveal the deep meaning in our scripture that becomes 7

8 accessible to all of us when embrace the word of God rather than the words of God. Let us knock down the walls that have separated us from a major portion of our community. Let us walk together into the most beautiful, the most intense, the most colorful world we have ever known. We re off. We re off to see the Wizard. The real wizard. Our real God. Amen. 8