June 17, 2007
(Third Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 6)
The Peter Syndrome
by Whitney Rice, Seminarian
2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15 • Psalm 32 • Galatians
2:15-21 • Luke 7:36-8:3
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening. Amen.
The seminarian sermon is a preaching form well-known for containing pompous theological terminology and heretical doctrine. Well, far be it from me to buck tradition, so here’s today’s Episcopal heresy: I like the Bible.
Before you start throwing stones, or rather, wine and cheese at me, let me clarify. I do not read the Bible for the purpose of quoting it at random during conversations to make people uncomfortable. Nor do I read it so I can verify who will be among the 144,000 airlifted in the rapture during "Jesus’ Apocalyptic Super Bowl Halftime Extravaganza Countdown to the New Jerusalem," covered exclusively by NBC. I don’t even read the Bible to find secret codes corresponding with Renaissance paintings that might land me a lucrative book deal and film rights.
Sometimes I read the Bible for devotional purposes. Sometimes I read it because I’m a seminarian and it’s my homework. But mostly I read the Bible for sheer entertainment value, and here’s why: the people in it. What I love most about scripture is the characters in it, and my favorites are the ones who have what I call the Peter Syndrome.
The Peter Syndrome requires people to act with great faith and then turn around and say something terminally stupid to a beloved friend and spiritual authority. I love Bible characters with the Peter Syndrome because they remind me so much of myself. And today’s lessons have two of the best examples: David the King and Simon the Pharisee. David has a colleague killed in order to hook up with his wife and pitches a self-righteous fit to the prophet Nathan because he doesn’t understand a parable being told about him. I can just feel his chagrin when it all comes clear and he sheepishly says, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Simon the Pharisee is standing in the corner in a similar self-righteous snit about the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her tears. I know very well that sort of deflated feeling he got and the rock in the pit of his stomach when Jesus said, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” There is only one response to a statement like that: "Dang it."
So what can we say about David and Simon? Well, the first thing that we can say is that we know how they feel when confronted with spiritual truth. Revelation is not always accompanied by angels and trumpets. For me at least, it often comes with more of a feeling of, “Boy, is my face red.”
And that is one of the characteristics of God’s communication to us: it is often nothing like we think it should be or want it to be. It is unexpected and can turn our comfortable ideas on their heads. I stumbled onto something like that when I read Nathan’s parable in 2 Samuel and saw Jesus in a new and unfamiliar way.
We have many ways of seeing Jesus: Son of Man, Son of God, Messiah, King of Israel, the Bread of Life, and the list goes on. Now, I want you to try something. Think of Jesus as the Lamb of God and listen to Nathan again: “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.”
What do you want to do when you hear the story of that lamb? I want to protect it from the unscrupulous man who killed it. Now put Jesus there. Have you ever thought of yourself as protecting Jesus? It’s kind of a strange thought, isn’t it? We often think of Jesus as our friend and brother, the one who protects and cares for us, and he does protect and care for us. But can we protect him, the almighty Son of the Living God?
I think the answer is yes. Jesus said that the kingdom of God is within us, and that he would abide with us. Too often we go out into the world with no sense of holding within us a spark of the divine. Too often we abuse ourselves by giving in to greed, selfish ambition, mindless materialism and stubborn ignorance of the suffering of others. If Jesus dwells within us and makes his home among us, surely it must bring him pain to see us hurt ourselves and our brothers and sisters, as though we had never been marked as Christ’s own forever.
The presence of Jesus within us deserves to be protected, cherished, loved in the way that we know he loves us. Nathan told of the powerful emotional bond between the poor man and his lamb that manifested itself in physical intimacy: “The lamb grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him.” Is Jesus with you and with your children as you grow in faith? Do you share food and drink with Jesus? Do you hold Jesus in your bosom, close to your heart? Is Jesus like a beloved daughter to you, beautiful and treasured?
Some of this may feel a little weird. How am I supposed to hold the Lamb of God in my bosom, share my bread and cup with him, and protect him like a daughter? Well, lucky for us, our gospel tells the story of a person who knows exactly how to protect and care for Jesus, and she is no spiritual giant. She is known simply as a sinner, and she has the courage to love Jesus with no thought for what anyone thinks of her.
In the same way that the poor man expresses his love for his lamb in physical acts, the woman in our gospel “stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair.” Think of what must have run through her mind at that moment—this is a dinner in someone else’s home, everyone knows I’m a sinner, Jesus is a great man being hosted by a learned Pharisee. And then feel the power of her love for him, her faith in him, that drove her to tears the moment she saw him. Think of the strength of the hope he inspired in her that made her interrupt these powerful men and let her tears fall on Jesus rather than wiping them away. I think she must have sensed that Jesus was a lamb in a den of wolves snarling and snapping for power and influence, and something in her wanted him to be cared for and protected. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and she is saved by her instinctive love for him. He says, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
How we all long to hear those words of Jesus and truly believe them: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” Jesus is no longer in his earthly body for us to care for and protect with our tears and our hair. So how can we be like this woman who is a sinner? How do we find her faith that we might go in peace?
How do we protect Jesus? By seeking and serving Christ in all others as we pledged at our baptism. We care for Jesus by looking for his presence in everyone we meet and cherishing them for it. By acts of love and service of all kinds: working at the Community Kitchen, listening to a co-worker struggling through a divorce, giving boldly at stewardship time. We can remember why we loved the way the sun shone through our spouse’s hair when he or she still had some. We can refuse to let war and greed be the symbols of our country and racism and exploitation the dirty secrets that uphold them. We can live as though the truth of the gospel made us so full of faith that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that we spill love onto everyone around us like it truly will multiply with the giving.
This gospel woman lets Jesus’ presence overwhelm and surround her so much that she no longer cares about the criticism of others. When we are protecting Jesus, we have no time to protect ourselves from hurt, embarrassment or fear. And that kind of reckless courage is what enables us to take the action that expresses the love of the Holy Spirit within us. Protecting the spark of divine fire in ourselves and others means we have no time to protect our own image, to protect our carefully guarded physical and emotional territory. We have no time to protect our righteous political dogma, our hard-earned money, or our carefully maintained pristine Episcopal aloofness. We don’t even have time to protect our doctrinal integrity and certainly not our emotional status quo because we are too busy loving people. We are too busy being moved to tears by the beauty of God’s children. Letting ourselves be touched and moved by the glory of God reflected in others is a dangerous and painful life. We will find ourselves crying as we truly open our eyes to the need around us, but our blessing is that the presence of Jesus within us makes those tears a spring of the living water welling up to eternal life.
I often find myself wanting to live the gospel with the kind of passion that our woman from Luke shows. Interrupting a dinner and bawling on the feet of the guest of honor is a grand gesture, extravagant with meaning and emotion. But whenever I think of doing something this bold, my Peter Syndrome acts up and I succumb to fear of grandstanding or just tripping over my own feet.
But the truth is, life for ordinary people in our day and age does have opportunities to take action powerful enough to be a Bible story. One of our own did so and paid the highest price for his love: Jonathan Daniels [ Episcopal Church Calendar | Wikipedia article], the Episcopal seminarian who was shot to death defending a black child from white supremacists.
In March of 1965, Jonathan left the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts to answer the call of Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil rights workers in Selma, Alabama. He put his formal studies on hold, knowing that he would learn more about following Jesus in the trenches of the segregated South than in the hallowed halls of theological discourse.
On August 13, 1965 Jonathan was arrested for picketing and held in jail for six days, refusing to accept bail money unless all of the non-violent resisters were released with him. On Friday of that week they were released and went to a drugstore to find something to drink in the sweltering Alabama August. They were met outside the store by a white man with a shotgun who demanded that they leave or be shot. After a short confrontation, he aimed the gun at a young girl in the group. Jonathan pushed her out of the way and took the shotgun blast himself, which killed him instantly.
Jonathan Daniels saw the face of Christ in everyone he met and he protected that presence of Jesus with his life. He knew what it meant to love. But lest we despair of having that type of courage ourselves, Jonathan’s writings reveal something that makes him even dearer to my heart: he had the Peter Syndrome. Like David the King and Simon the Pharisee, he found himself trapped by his own very human motivations, writing shortly before his death: “I lost fear when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord's death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God. I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance! The point is simply, of course, that one's motives are usually mixed, and one had better know it.”
Jonathan was surely a man after God’s own heart, and he gives me hope. He was an Episcopal seminarian who died for his faith at twenty-six years old. His selfless courage inspired Ruby Sales, the girl he saved, to go to seminary and become an Episcopal priest herself. If it had not been for his sacrifice which awakened the Episcopal Church to the cause of justice for oppressed Americans, it is likely that neither she nor I would have had the chance to serve the Body of Christ as ordained ministers.
And yet this martyr and hero of the faith knew himself for the frail human he was, dominated sometimes by selfish desires and inglorious motives. But even in his wry self-awareness, he did not feel that his own limitations had to limit his life in Christ. He was open to the moment when he could choose to let the presence of Jesus within him overcome every doubt and fear and become a fragrant offering to the Most High.
So what is our call in the midst of these stories—David, Simon, and Jonathan? Our call is to live like Bible people, loud and brave and flawed and fearful and joyful and alive for the Kingdom of God. Our call is to be the gospel writ large by recognizing the presence of Jesus in ourselves and in everyone around us, and then to grow and nurture and care for that holy flame through service to one another. The life of a pilgrim is lived in a thousand small moments of caring and in one decisive second of sacrifice, in days and weeks and years of enduring faith and in a wild reckless stand for justice and truth. And what is the reward for that hard-won courage, the prayed-for strength to love so boldly that nothing else matters? Feeling the sacred stillness calm our raging soul at last as Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” Amen.
Gentle Reader—Listen
by The Rev. Bruce Hall, Deacon
Like some of you, I appreciated the recent exhibit of portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls at nearby Union Station and the opportunity it gave to better understand scripture and context that shaped it. It was a popular showing, with many persons, sacred and secular, stopping buy to ogle and wonder at just what these scrolls mean. It was with similar interest that I read recently that new discoveries have been made of a respected ancient writer known for biblical commentary and advice on human behavior. Much of the unearthed text still remains to be translated, but portions have become available and may be viewed online. One such section relates to the text found in today’s gospel. According to the translators, this is a rough translation, and some of the phrases may seem awkward and misplaced for authorship that they place approximately in the second century A.D. There is growing speculation that, like the early letters of the Apostles, these were circulated among various local churches for teaching and formation in the faith. This excerpt is what appears to be an early catechism—which is really exciting for scholars—and adopts a question-answer format as follows:
Learned Governess of Custom,
Several days ago I had brought into my dwelling one who was known to me to be a teacher of growing reputation who has, it is said, healed many and even raised the dead. I wished to know more of him and when my religious duties did not conflict, called on him to break bread with me and my whole house. At first all was as one would have wanted and we began to speak, one with another. Yet, there came a woman of poor reputation who intruded upon my house and there came to weep upon his feet with much noise, dried them with her hair, and finally anointed his feet with ointment. My guest behaved most shockingly by allowing this sinner to defile him before me and my whole house. As I was reflecting how tasteless and fowl were her behaviors—and his response to them—he proceeded to teach me, a man of learning myself, about forgiveness.
How should I have responded?
The commentator replies:
Gentle Reader,
The Governess wonders what to make of your omission of the common courtesies of greeting a guest with a kiss, offering them water with which to bathe their feet, let alone some oil that might anoint their head? She believes that where there’s washing most likely there’s dirt also. How forgetful of you. Given the dishonors that your account implies, The Governess marvels that the teacher was so patient with his “host.” She also thinks there is something different about this teacher and she means to learn more about him.
At this point the manuscript ended.
Simon needs help. Simon is lost and looking in the wrong direction. He is a model of piety and embraces the trappings of purity as a Pharisee but does not genuinely know his own impurity. So accustomed to his own smell he doesn’t know that he skinks. At best, Simon may have an idea or grasp the concept of his own sinfulness but has come to trust in externals, and in ritual and dogma to keep the feeling and awareness of sinfulness far away. Or, perhaps he may believe that through his pious acts in obedience to the Jewish Law, he might very well have less to forgive. The nameless women, however, had seen clearly that she was a sinner. Not blithely as part of “human kind” or generally as a consequence of the “human condition’ but her specifically. And, she recognized that Jesus had the power to redeem her from herself. Her demonstration of love in verse 47 is explained by Jesus to be evidence of gratitude for what He had already done in the presence of her faith in Him. Her actions were the effect and proof of his forgiveness, not the cause. In this example, Jesus also ministers to Simon. He responds compassionately to this Pharisee by using a story about debtors and forgiveness. He even compliments the Pharisee upon his answer. No scolding or “tisk, tisk”, rather Jesus searches out Simon in order to show him something glorious—God’s forgiveness.
We are called to reach out to others just as our Lord did. It’s a nice model for responding in different situations represented by the woman and, conversely, Simon. All of us need salvation and there is no end of the list of things from which we desperately need redemption. Some of us recognize our need, but some don’t. I must confess to you my brothers and sisters, that as a therapist, I have sometimes found it easier to reach out to those who acknowledged their need for help than to those who denied that anything was wrong in the first place. This is so unlike the example Christ gives us in today’s Gospel. Yet you and I are called to minister to and heal the Simons of this world and not just the openly penitent and grateful. We must reach out to those who are suffering, even when they themselves deny their pain and blindness. I expect no “thank you” came Jesus way from Simon. Even the others began to question Jesus as he demonstrated that the Kingdom of God was here, now, and open all. Still, Jesus ministered to them anyway, inviting them to realize how love of God was real, available, and in their very midst. It seems to have been less important that they would doubt or resist or even reject his teaching. Many did and do so today. Instead, Jesus simply ministered in love. So will we being loved so incredibly by Jesus.
And there we are, it’s not just the poor Simons or King David’s that miss the point at first. It’s the poor Bruce’s and (feel free to fill in your own name here) who can miss the truth of the matter even when it is right under our noses. We, you and I, are in need of forgiveness and a redemption that cannot come by our own hands. This salvation is not secured by our membership in this or that denomination, or pious works like caring for the poor, weak, sick, and lonely, or even losing our lives for noble causes. These may be the evidence that we have embarked on changed life in Christ but they are not the source of our redemption. Position and power won’t help either, though they may be useful anesthesia for our guilt. We can only find forgiveness and redemption through faith in the Christ we worship this evening. In the prayer of consecration we will once more be reminded how again and again we, like David, and Simon, and Paul, have been sought out by our Creator to return so that we might know in the deepest and most profound way possible, that the Kingdom of God is Now and able to transform all of our lives in love. In this moment Christ calls you once more.
What will be your reply?
