Sermon for October 4, Pentecost Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16 by Dick Moore

Transcription

1 Sermon for October 4, Pentecost Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16 by Dick Moore When we encounter readings from Scripture, we enter a time machine that takes us back to eras that were dominated by tribal cultures and values. This presents us with some problems. Except for team sport allegiances and political affiliations, we pretty much don't live in a tribal society. Tribal views on justice, commonwealth, religion, and leadership have been replaced by what we in Western Culture call the rule of law not the laws of the tribe, which are freighted with religious origins and ancient traditions that may be far out-of-date, but laws continuously made, passed, enacted, and enforced by ordinary humans like ourselves. Similarly, if we come to justice for any reason, we come to be judged by folks selected from our community, presumptively, people moreor-less like ourselves our peers, but not our tribal brothers and sisters. If we want to understand the cultures of our Scripture readings, it helps to examine the tribal cultures of the current Middle East and Asia. We really have a hard time doing this the value systems are strange and foreign to us. For example, in some tribes in Afghanistan, if a brother rapes his sister and it becomes known, that same brother must uphold family and tribal honor by killing her because she was promiscuous, having had sex outside of marriage even though it was forced on her. Such practices seem barbaric and mindless to us, while to those people they represent tribal necessities which demand fulfillment and if the family will not fulfill the cultural demand, the tribe will. The first rule of tribal culture is that the tribe comes first and it comes last, and the needs or perspectives of individual members are of no consequence at all. The second rule of tribal cultures, at least ones that exist in areas of conflicts over resources, is that it is more important to insure the survival of men than of women they are larger, stronger, and more able to use force to maintain the interests of the tribe, if necessary. Tribes start from families the larger the family, the larger the tribe, and the wealthier and more powerful the tribe. The wealthier and more powerful the tribe, the wealthier and more powerful the leaders of the tribe. The arc of human history is that through the tribal process, men become dominant and women and children actually become property this isn't necessary, and this doesn't happen in all tribes but it did and does happen in most. Religions in tribal cultures have mostly to do with the well-being of the tribe, and the deities are about fertility, growth, wealth, and power within the earthly realm

2 2 of existence this is immanence, which is the presence of the deities among the people, acting on the stage of human existence where tribal concerns are lived out. In tribal cultures, justice is retributive essentially, it's an eye for an eye; but it can also be punitive, with two eyes for an eye, or a hand for a stolen loaf of bread. Our justice system is both of these things. With us, the rule of law is a relatively thin veneer on top of simple retribution consider the fact that we still execute people for crimes. There are differences we mostly leave the deities out of it. But in tribal cultures, the retributive justice includes the actions of the deities if you're wealthy and doing fine, in good health, well then, you've pleased the deities, and they are showing favor; and the tribe loves this. Doing poorly, losing crops, children dying, cattle ill, and you've obviously angered the deities, and they are punishing you; the tribe hates this. This is Job's situation. Despite his claims of innocence, the tribe knows God hates him and is punishing him for something, and this punishes the tribe, too. Job is transformed from a source of well-being to a drag on the tribe's resources. Something has to be done. Spoiler alert when God restores Job's fortunes in the end, the tribe knows that God loves him again, and so the tribe benefits, and the basic tribal model of retributive justice is conserved and upheld all is right with the world, thanks be to God (and to Job for getting himself squared away). Sixthcentury BCE Jewish tribal culture needed this outcome, and the writer of Job was only too happy to provide. But of course the Job story is far more important than this, theologically, ethically, and morally, because as we know, Job was indeed innocent, a worthy and upstanding man to the end, despite the horrors piled on him. We are Job and Job is us why do bad things happen to good people? When Job asks God Why?, God replies that, in essence, God has far more important things to do than take care of Job. Probably true, but not at all satisfying or comforting, is it? But cultures change. Beginning in Asia, with Lao Tzu and the Buddha, religion started to become less about the fortunes of the tribe, and to become more interested in transcendence than in immanence, to become more concerned with how people might enter the realm of the divine, than with the divine entering the human realm. This was a deep shift in priorities, where individual relationships with the divine began to become as important or even more important than the tribal relationships with the divine.

3 Eventually, this led to our current Western Culture, with it's strong emphasis on the well-being and concerns of individuals first, and the well-being of the culture and its institutions (including churches) second. The idea of individualism has become so important to our culture that we've given aggregations of people business corporations the legal powers and rights of individuals, which rather turns everything upside down. It's the re-emergence of the tribe as a purely commercial entity, with the only tribal value being corporate power and wealth, which of course benefits the tribe's leaders the most... Jesus had different understandings about what it meant to be a tribe. In today's Gospel reading, the Pharisees, knowing this, come to try and put him between two powerful competing groups by asking him to state his position on a conflict about divorce that had been raging among Jews for two hundred years. They asked if he supported Rabbi Hillel's interpretation about the law of divorce, which could be obtained by the husband for any reason at all, or if he supported Rabbi Shammai's interpretation, which only allowed the husband to divorce his wife on the five specific grounds of Mosaic Law. Interestingly, in Jesus' time, the Hillel interpretation was widely accepted, and older men divorcing older wives in order to take younger wives was common as it is in our culture today. In Jewish law, only the husband could instigate a divorce. But Jewish wives had a loophole they could petition the Rabbinic courts, asserting that their husbands had broken the marriage contract, and those courts could force husbands to grant a divorce in effect giving women the right of divorce that Mosaic Law did not provide. Jesus comes down on the side of the Shammai interpretation that divorce was possible, but only for the reasons given in Mosaic Law; but Jesus further observes only to the disciples what is wrong with that interpretation, that it too, allows breaking a marriage contract, which affects the well-being of the community. We all know that it is easier to get married than to stay married staying married is hard work. Jesus' emphasis seems to me to be that of asking people to enlarge their understanding of what community means, to always think about the larger issues of well-being in community life, and to act as God intends, not as God demands in the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law. That Jesus shares this only with the disciples, tells me that he had the expectation that they would understand and follow his teaching about the sanctity of marriage, and the importance of the commitment it contained, even though the larger culture was breaking it down. The Christian Church, as receiver of the gospels, but not of Jewish customs, interpreted the lessons about divorce in Mark, Matthew, and Luke literally, and the 3

4 effect on lives could be brutal. As recently as our own lifetimes, divorced people were denied communion, and were often forbidden to remarry in the church, and this was generally true across all Christian denominations, some more strict than others. As an example, back in the 70's, dear friends in Little Rock, she a therapist and business woman, and he a lawyer who became an Arkansas Supreme Court Justice, and both divorced, were unable to remarry in the Episcopal Church. They had a civil ceremony and a subsequent Blessing of their marriage. This was a painful issue that brought traditional understandings out of the background and into the light of rapidly changing cultural values. Had the Church been following the spirit of Jesus' teaching or the letter of it? I prefer to think it was following the letter. The spirit of Jesus' teaching was to honor marriage, and wouldn't that mean, despite the painful experience of divorce, that remarriage is good for the community? Similarly for marriage among gays and lesbians if marriage is so good for the community, how can their marriages be bad? To me, Jesus called all of us to a more global understanding of community and behavior, to an understanding that we are all of one tribe, one community in God, and as such, how we treat one another is fundamental to our life in God's realm. What would happen if we started to think about and see the immanent, God with us, and the transcendent, we with God, as one indivisible unity, a single process joining heaven and earth, the divine and the incarnate? I think this could be a process that would make God's realm better and this realm better; we, all of us, everyone, always with God and God always with all of us, unified and whole, all with the understanding that if our world is better for each of us and all of us, then God's world is better, too because they are the same world no difference at all. I believe this is what Jesus meant when he said that the Kingdom is at hand, close enough to touch but maybe only when we make it possible for each and all of us to touch it. This idea of unity is a real current in the stream of present-day theology that is being fleshed out and developed by people like Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Matthew Wright, to name only a few of the many theologians, philosophers, and mystics now deeply engaged in this work. This is a movement toward a deep and cosmos-wide unity that can mine the best of the vast store of spiritual treasure held by the various religions and philosophies of the world, and provide the Holy Spirit a much more receptive environment to work in. We believe that God has a plan, and that this plan depends on our participation with God in creating the ever-evolving world that is yet to be, the world that Jesus saw so clearly and laid the foundations for. For me, this means that there are many paths, and one destination: the world-wide we who fully join the sacred and 4

5 5 the material into a seamless whole. And, unlike most (or maybe even all) of my religious forbears, I don't see or feel the need for an apocalypse to bring this about; all that's needed is to do what Jesus told us to do love God and love our neighbor, every single neighbor, everywhere. Amen.