Bitterness and Regret

Good Morning!  Pastor Keven is not here today.  My name is Yehudah.  Pastor Keven talked to me earlier in the week and he felt it best if I got up and spoke to you today.  You see, I am one of the lepers.  Now, Yehuda, I understand that name may be a little difficult for you to understand.  In English, I believe, you pronounce my name Judah and in the Greek of Jesus’ time, you might have called me Judas.  No, don’t look at me like that.  I’m not THAT Judas.  You see, the Jewish people often emulated the people in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Lots of people in my time were called Judas, Levi, Joseph, Miriam (or Mary), and even Joshua, whom you now pronounce as Jesus…or Josh in some cases.  Yes, in my time Jesus’ name was pronounced Yehoshua, his name means “God Saves”, and He did, many, many times.  Pastor Keven asked me to speak today, because this story is the story of my salvation, not once but twice.  My name, however, is my shame.  Yehudah in my language means “grateful to God”, and I wish to Heaven I had been named anything else.

What’s that?  What was it like being a Jew of my time?  A Palestinian Jew in the time of Jesus?  Well… like all of you we grew up with our stories.  We grew up with our religion, of course, the stories of Moses and King David just as you did.  But also like you, we just didn’t have our religious stories, we had our national ones.  Here in America you have The Boston Tea party, the Boston Massacre, the Battles of Yorktown and Valley Forge.  Our experience was a little different.  We had a man, his name was King Antiochus IV.  Antiochus Epiphanes the IV.  Literally, “God Manifest”.  You see my friends, fter Alexander the Great conquered his Empire, conquered Greece, Egypt, Israel, and all the way the Himalayas and India, he died… so apparently he wasn’t that great.  Pretty good maybe, but “Great”?  I don’t know.  But when he died his Empire was left to his top four generals, and Antiochus was their descendant.  I had a great grandfather who lived under Antiochus – and I will never forget the look in his eyes.  Antiochus, did not like Jews very much.  On the rumor of a revolt in Jerusalem, he came.  He came with his armies and his machines of war.  He broke into Jerusalem and he killed our people by the thousands.  He stole our women and our children.  His soldiers murdered our priests and stole all the artifacts of the temple.  But, worse than that, he would do something that would leave a scar in the minds of every Israelite for centuries to come.  He broke into the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the temple, in all of Israel, and erected an idol to Zeus and sacrificed a pig to it on our altar.  From that moment on, my religion was banned.  We were to worship the gods of Olympus.  He burned our scrolls and condemned anyone practicing the religion of our ancestors to death.

That was our national story.  Now, God was faithful to us.  Antiochus may have won that battle, but his actions erupted into an all out war.  Though his armies far outnumbered ours, the Jewish people were united under a man named Judas Maccabeus.  Under his leadership, we were victorious over the armies of Antiochus and we reclaimed our land and our temple.  We were free!  We rededicated the temple to Yahweh, and we called the celebration Hanukkah.  And Antiochus Epiphanes, he died pathetically of bodily inflammation and madness.  Hmmph, God Manifest (pretend spit).

But that was our story.  It was the narrative that explained who we were as Israelites, just as your Revolutionary War or your Constitutional Convention does for you.  But whereas you kept your freedoms, your ancestors kept watch to ensure their freedoms were passed on to their children, mine did not.  We did have independence for a time, but the Jewish kings proved only marginally better than the Gentile ones and when their greed and in-fighting reached its height, we were all but sold to Rome so one of our princes could depose his brother and gain the throne.  That is why shame was not new to my people.  We had independence, but our faithlessness and violent evil bought us exile.  First, came Persia, then Babylon, the Persia again, then Greece, and finally Rome.  We are a conquered people, and the only freedom we ever tasted we traded away. 

We longed for a good king.  A Jewish King from the line of David to protect our people.  We longed to return to the Golden Age of Israel, to the times of David and Solomon and we cried out to God day and night for a king that would set us free.  Free from the gentiles, free from our own corrupt leaders, and, though we did not know it, free from a backbreaking Judaism that hurt more than it healed, and most of all freedom from our sinful natures.  That king came, he came right when our desperation reached its peak, but there were many who did not recognize him.  That was to our shame, too.

I met him, you know.  I was a leper then as I said.  Now, leprosy then wasn’t what leprosy is today.  Leprosy today is called Hansen’s disease, but back in my day it was not just one but many different afflictions, and that is exactly how we thought of it – as an affliction.  Yes, we understand leprosy today as a disease but in my day leprosy was the worst of all possible curses.  For us, it was literally a living death.  Many of the writers of my time would talk about it, and it was widely known that neither priest nor magician, neither prayer nor sorcery could be rid of this terrible, terrible fate.  Because God alone had the power of life and death, only God could bestow leprosy on a person, and because only God could bestow it, only God Himself could remove it.

You don’t know what it was like, being a leper in those days.  The Jewish law declared us unclean, and so we were exiled - exiled from our families and villages, exiled from our people, exiled from life.  There was nowhere we were welcome, nowhere we could go.  That is why we hung together in groups, you see, for protection.  To be a leper was to be despised and feared, called a sinner and treated as an abomination.  We were told that God was angry with us, angry at our terrible sin, for what other reason would God afflict us so?  We couldn’t even go to the temple to atone for it!  We were lost, afraid, and hated.  Penniless and dying, even beggars could at least go into town and beg.  I cried out to God, “Why?!”  WHAT DID I DO!?  To deserve…this?  And for years, nothing.  God’s answer to me was always … nothing.

We were wandering the countryside in those days, near a village on the road to Jerusalem.  There were ten of us, and we heard of this new rabbi that was in Judea.  Oh, but he was more than rabbi.  Some claimed he was a prophet, some claimed he was a king, maybe even THE King, but all held he was a worker of miracles.  We had heard that he had even cleansed leprosy.  Leprosy!  Many Jews didn’t know how to feel about that.  God alone had the power to remove such terrible things and our stories were rife with warnings about people claiming to be “God Manifest”

I don’t know why we did it.  But we saw him enter the village and we raced after him.  We kept our distance, though; we shouldn’t have chased him into town as it stands.  We didn’t want to either make him unclean by touching him nor did we want to invite violence upon ourselves for coming in.  Not knowing what to do, we all cried out as one person, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  Heh.  We knew what we were asking, we knew that only God himself could remove our affliction and yet we used “epistates” the word for a human overseer. Epistates?  Kurios!  Adonai! Was what we should have called him!  LORD!  Maybe it was because we didn’t want to give the villagers further excuse to hurt us.  Maybe we really couldn’t handle the idea of a Human God, but we cried out just the same.  “Jesus, Master, heal us!”

And that look in his eyes, that look of kindness and compassion.  Here we were, pitiful pathetic wretches, asking Him to do something only God could do, believing that He could do it, and we insult him by referring to him as a mere employer.  But Jesus didn’t see that.  Jesus didn’t see my sin, my terrible affliction and condemnation, he saw only people who were scared, who were forced to bear this terrible weight alone.  In his mercy he spoke to us, knowing the damage it could do to tell us to go against our religion, to act like Naaman the Syrian, he told us to obey our Jewish law, to show ourselves to the priests as people cured of leprosy were supposed to do.  And we did.  We all did.  We had dreamed of this moment every single second of every single day of our lives, when we would finally present ourselves as CLEAN.  Welcomed back into community, to hold a job, to have a family.  To be greeted with words of joy rather than thrown rocks.  We went, just as he said … and we were clean! 

But I had a problem so much deeper than rotting skin, and it took a foreigner, a Samaritan, of all people, to show it to me.  I am not Yehudah.  I was not grateful to God.  I was so concerned with the state of my flesh I didn’t see the state of rotting heart.  I asked God to heal me, insulting the Doctor by calling him an orderly and then daring to ask a favor of him in the same sentence.  He sensed our fear, the damage it might do to our faith, and then in kindness he healed us through that faith, and … I didn’t care.  I was so focused on the rules, the stupid little nuances of my people’s ruthless, discompassionate interpretation of Torah that I failed to see what a thankless, ungrateful fool I had become.  Not the Samaritan.  We traveled with this man, a man who was not just a leper but a foreign leper, and he thanked God every single day for everything he had.  However badly we were treated, however terrible the day, he began and ended it with thanksgiving.  We mocked him for it, and however bad we were treated, he was treated far worse.  And yet, when I turned back, I saw him.  I saw him openly thanking God and in the sight of all the Jews he prostrated himself, kneeling before Jesus as we would before Yahweh at temple. 

But I didn’t care.  I kept walking.  In that moment all that pain, all those years of bitterness and anger, it made me into the most selfish person imaginable.  I walked and I walked, and while walking I heard Jesus off in the distance ask, “Were not all ten healed? Is the only one to come back and give praise to God this foreigner?”  and I still didn’t care.

Don’t be like me!  I understand better now.  When I asked God what I had done wrong to receive my leprosy, when “nothing” was the constant answer, I know that that was what I had done.  Nothing.  I had done nothing to earn my sickness, nothing to deserve the condemnation of my people - it was just a disease.  But I listened to them and not God, I listened to the very people who called me sinner, threw me out into the wilderness, and kicked me like a diseased dog.  I listened to them and followed after religion when I should have been chasing faith!  I let the words of those selfish, stupid fools turn my heart bitter and when the time came to either choose gratitude toward the God who loved me ceaselessly or to obey an interpretation of the religion that beat me endlessly, I chose my abuser.  

DON’T BE LIKE ME.  Be grateful for every little thing you have, sound it out in the morning, voice it at night when you go to bed.  Give THANKS.  How other people treat you, what they say when they try convince you what to believe, dismiss it for the selfish nonsense that it is!  You listen to God!  You be faithful to Him, not obedient to them.  Mere obedience, the blind discharge of duties and human expectations will turn you into something much worse than a leper, it will turn you into a heartless fool.  As a leper I was rotting from the outside in, but as a child of God I was rotting from the inside out.  Be rid of it, be free!  Anything that treats God’s children as garbage is itself garbage.  Don’t believe in it!  I failed at being Yehuda, but that doesn’t mean you have to.  Amen.

Closing Statements

And the conference is tomorrow!  As such, here, in its totality, is my entire case against a so-called Biblical sexuality.

1) In a culture where death by lynching was an accepted reality even 60 years ago, where not only could people opposed to outlawing lynching run for office openly, and where such people who practiced it are called “Grandpa” instead of “inmate”, it is the duty of any Christian in such a culture, indeed any human being with the barest sliver of a conscience, to hold those who declare an entire class of people sinful, evil, unnatural, or condemned by any Divinity, especially in instances where the so-called offenses are consensual in nature and result in no harm to person, property, or the social well-being, to the strictest standards of political, legal, and spiritual accountability.

2) Because of the nature of the current debate over homosexuality and the current culture that the debate is found in, those in a position of leadership or social influence who declare homosexuality to be ungodly and sinful must have the burden of proof.  If they wish to convince the Church that the loving God whom created all of Mankind and its sexuality would condemn an entire people as sinful, tell them their base identity evil, and force them to deny themselves the very happiness and fulfillment that their hetero brothers and sisters have or risk their immortal soul, they must do so under the strictest scrutiny.  As a Church called to enact Justice and Peace, we as followers of Christ have no other moral option but to insist that they must do so by proving beyond all reasonable doubt, yes, all reasonable doubt, that such is and has always been the case within the Christian religion.  The damage and loss being asked of LGBTQ people for no other reason than the personal discomfort of those against their way of life demands no other standard.

3) Those for Biblical Sexuality cannot remotely meet this burden:

                a) The Bible neither understands itself as a rule book nor the Word of God

b) Jesus the Christ, whom the Bible refers to as the True Word of God, is the final authority within the Christian religion, and his recorded ministry does not involve the subject once.

c) Homosexuality is a modern term important only to a modern world.  Ascribing a 19^th century concept to 1^st century and earlier works would be dismissed as an anachronism in literally any other area of human scholarship.

d) Any and all understandings of the Bible condemning homosexuality come from cultural bias not interpretive diligence, extending even to irresponsible if not deliberate mistranslation.

i) The early chapters of Genesis are poetry and counter-myth, not a chronicle of actual historical events.  Any argument relying on the story actually revealing how God made anything is fallacious.

ii) Homosexual Anal penetration was a common method of shaming in the ancient world, almost always done by heterosexually married men.  Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned because they were xenophobic rapists, not immaculately dressed interior designers or restaurant managers.

iii. Leviticus 18 and 20 lists Old Testament sexual offenses generally, the vast focus being on familial couplings not homosexual encounters.  Even then, “thou shalt not lie with a man as a woman” only covers one sexual position with one gender that mimicked, again, war-time rape.  To say that all homosexual encounters would be outlawed from this verse, and thus an abomination, is at best a stretch

iv. As this is the whole of the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures on the subject at hand, noting that the KJV has triple the texts on unicorns than it does on homosexuality, we now turn to the New Testament.  As Christ, again, had no words on the subject, we must bypass the gospels and, yes, even the Book of Acts for our next text.

v. Paul in his epistle to the Romans does call homosexual acts “para physis” or against nature this has two problems.  The first problem is that nature for Paul’s time is not “all of nature” but “individual nature”.  Also, God goes against nature in grafting the gentiles into the people of God later in the same epistle so it is very difficult to say that going against nature is necessarily an evil thing.  Lastly it fails utterly to understand Paul’s entire argument.  The entire point for chapter one of Romans is found in chapter 2, “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”  That Paul is quoting a Roman speech or oration and then using it to call out the hypocrisy in the Roman church.  The subject literally does not get brought up again.  Once more, Paul is not saying that homosexual relations are sinful and natural, he is saying that Romans say it is sinful and unnatural and yet are doing them anyway.

vi. While other verses in Paul’s letters are translated to talk about homosexuality, the fact is the words in question are largely unknown and have not been proven.  The words in question are incredibly rare and there is no text, either within the New Testament or even the Greek in which the New Testament was written, that shows any connection between those words and homosexual urge, inclination, or practice.

vii. The actual translation of Jude 1:7 is “Sodom and Gomorah and the surrounding cities indulged in gross sexual immorality and went after the flesh of others (or flesh of strangers) are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of era-long fire.”  None of the words used in this verse have any evidence to back their use to refer to what is understood to be homosexual activity.

viii. And all of this ignores the fact Eunuchs were widely understood to have homosexual tendencies, yet they are clearly included to the Body of Christ without question (Acts 8:27-39) and the fact that David is described as having “romantic love” for Jonathan, the same word “ahabah” used to refer to the feelings of the lovers throughout the Song of Solomon.  It also fails to the Church did not have much to say on the subject of same-sex relationships until over a thousand years later and indeed produced same-sex wedding liturgy.

ix.  All these facts show unequivocally that the belief that the Bible supports one and only one sexuality is simply non-sensical.  If an individual community feels strongly that homosexual relationships are bad then we as their loving brothers and sisters in Christ advise them strongly not to have one.  The facts presented here show that the Biblical Sexuality camp cannot meet a burden of clear and convincing proof or even the preponderance of the evidence, let alone the fierce standard of beyond any reasonable doubt as this situation warrants.  As such, the entire church needs to act like it.  No reasonable and ethical person can continue to uphold such draconian, damaging, and unfounded beliefs as this and we as a Church need to reflect this reality.  Anything less is to slander and make base the very Sacrifice that founded us.  Amen

Yeah...I Got Nuthin'

Good Morning!  Before we go into our gospel lesson for today, I feel the need to ask for your assistance.   What I propose is very simple - I’m going to read to you gelled down versions of all the gospel texts we’ve had since the beginning of August followed by who preached on them.  I want you tell me if you notice a pattern.  To begin:

August 7^th : “It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” – Pastor Don

Aug 14^th I have not come to bring you peace but the sword – Pastor Keven

 Aug 21^st The old woman healed on the Sabbath – Pastor Don

Aug 28^th Humble yourself so you may be exalted – Pastor Craig

Sep 4^th Hate your Father and Mother – Pastor Keven

 Sept 11^th Welcoming Sinners – Pastor Craig

…and now this week I get “How to make friends by stealing from your boss.” 

The question I have to ask here … is it just me?  I mean, I don’t want to name any names, Don and Craig, but if I didn’t know any better I’d say you were pranking the new guy.  Now, I know that would never happen in Chuck Prokosh’s church, and with such pillars of seriousness as Jeremy Webber and Raymond Staffa, I know that can’t possibly be the case.  But, guys, I’m seriously in danger of developing a reputation here!  “Oh, whose preaching today at Eastside?  Uh, oh.  Looks like old “hate thy mother and thy father” Glassel’s preaching from the pulpit again.”  A little variety, please!  I mean the holidays are coming up, I don’t want to preach on Herod’s slaughtering of the innocents over Christmas!

                Now, I’ll be the first to admit our text for this week is extremely difficult, it is by far one of the most confusing things Jesus has ever been recorded as saying.  Would you like to know how difficult this text is?  In preparation for this week, after pouring over the history and the language, after double checking the Greek and looking over Luke as a literary whole, after spending hours and hours letting it all gel …yeah, I got nothing.  This text was really frustrating, it’s oddly placed and the content is just strange.  Even the other gospels avoid this story!  Matthew, Mark, and John are all looking at Luke and saying, “THAT’s the story you put in?” I even looked in the commentaries, both modern and classic, and you know what I found out?  They don’t have a clue either.  I did find a translation that worked well.

                “Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’ “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’ “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors…  “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”

                The translation is nice, much more preachable, but there’s just one problem.  It doesn’t actually say that!  I mean other than the fact you are deliberately misconstruing Scripture, I guess it’s ok.  So, here we have a gospel text that stumps the lawyer/preacher, confuses the commentators, and is so strange that even translators are embarassed by it to the point where they feel the need to cover it up.  That’s how tough this text is.  So, Don, you were busy this week, that’s why you wanted to switch?

                So the question is, what are we supposed to learn from this?  What’s the point of putting this story in the lectionary?  Why preach on it at all?  Well, as it turns out, I think it’s actually here for a very good reason.  Quite a few reasons, to be honest.  And perhaps I am exaggerating things a bit to say, “I’ve got nothing,” but the reality is this text is rather inscrutable.  I do have an interpretation to give but that interpretation is only my best guess.  It’s not going to be any better than yours or anybody else’s and I have no right to pretend otherwise.  I think, though, that is the first lesson our text provides: that when you come to Scripture, be prepared to be humbled.

                Luther himself said that if there be any disagreement between men, that the only godly recourse is to have them both come to the Scriptures as beggars looking for bread.  I find I cannot disagree with that sentiment, for beggars we are.  No matter what job we have, no matter how many protections we have built up, how many insurance policies we pay for, it can all fall apart in a matter of moments.  Though we have had many technological breakthroughs, though we cure diseases that once scourged the ancients, though we fulfilled that ancient human wish of flying with the birds and searching out the mysteries of the deep, we all still exist by God’s grace alone.  It is not by our intellect, not by our power, that knowledge gets revealed to us, and the meaning of every verse in our Scriptures will only become apparent when God wishes it so.  Not before.  So when we come across texts like this, when we read in Exodus that Moses’ wife Zipporah saved her husband from God’s wrath by circumcising him and touching his flesh with the skin, when we read in the book of Kings that God wanted an excuse to be mad at the Israelites so he made King David screw up so he could punish them, we know that the first lesson these texts teach is humility.  The reality is we don’t know their meaning.  Our Scriptures, ladies and gentlemen, are comprised of documents that are at least 2000 years old, all from long dead cultures, penned in three long dead languages, and all authored by very long dead people.  And when I think of that, when I really dwell there, I realize the miracle of the scriptures is that any of these texts should speak to us at all.  That after years of study that this pastor can only think of three difficult portions within a whopping 66 of these ancient books is an amazing testament to God’s providence.

                The second lesson I think this text teaches is the need to be uncomfortably honest with one another.  This is not something we Americans are good at.  Indeed, in our culture it’s assumed that we hide things, that we deliberately misinform people and we’ll get mad at you if you don’t play this particular game.  The answer to “how are you doing” is not about eliciting an honest response anymore than “how does this outfit make me look!”  And let me tell you, that it is assumed we hide important things from each other gets built even into seminarian education.  It was rammed home to me time and time again how I need to meet perceptions as a pastor, that I must always have an answer, that I must always seem like the expert.  And I thought to myself, “Oh, there’s a resume zinger if I ever heard one.”  “Keven Johnson-Glassel, appears knowledgeable and is really good at seeming like an expert.”  I don’t want to appear knowledgeable.  I don’t want to deceive people into thinking I’m an expert.  My position here behind this pulpit is not pretend to be an expert but to actually be an expert.  And as an expert I am here to tell you there are still lots of stuff in these books we’re trying to figure out.  So when reading your Bibles, it’s okay to be confused.  We get that way, too. 

                And I think that’s the third lesson this text teaches.  That it’s ok to fail.  We don’t need to get awe inspiring wisdom out of scripture every time.  We don’t need to get mystical fulfillment out of scripture every time.  We don’t even need to get a meaning out of scripture every time.  What we need to do is to show God we tried - that we are willing to struggle and wrestle with the words even though we might fail.  Valuing Him enough to put our egos aside and be confronted with our ancestor’s experiences of Him I think means more than any Bible commentary and is far more spiritually fulfilling than any sermon.

                And that’s what we try to model for you up here.  That it’s okay to struggle with this.  Often times, if you just keep at it, it is very rare that you’ll get nothing out of a particular verse or text.  Something profound almost always comes.  So, yes, this text was difficult for me, and it outwitted every single one of my resources: from language, history, culture, and scholarship.  But I asked God for help, the same option you all have, and while I wasn’t given anything like a definitive answer, I was given something helpful that I had never considered before. 

                Now, it’s pretty clear that Jesus doesn’t want you to steal so you can make friends, so you can just calm down right now, but given that there are two things that jump out at me.  First and foremost, the fate of the unrighteous manager is not stated.  While the rich man praises his shrewdness he does not say he can still be manager.  The second thing that jumps out at me, however, is, yes, this man is dishonest.  Yes, this manager is a thief, and when he helps people it is only in the most lazy, self-serving way possible.  So yes, the accusation laid at the manager in this parable is that he is a lazy, dishonest, self-serving sinner who helps people, but the reality is the accusation laid against me might very well be I am a lazy, dishonest, self-serving sinner who doesn’t.  In the upside-down world of the gospel, salvation is an active sought-after thing.  God wants us to be saved, he wants us to give him at least some excuse to come to our rescue.  Now I don’t mean this in a works-righteousness kind of way, we in no way earn God’s grace.  I will not insult the Father by trying to buy what God offers for free.  Rather I believe our actions evidence our intent, and if we want to be saved it means we have to act like it.  Have no illusions, ladies and gentlemen. When the time comes for us to meet our Maker don’t think for a minute that all we didn’t do will be some kind of defense.  I think to a great extent, the unrighteous manager is us.  That’s how God sees us.  We are all lying, thieving, self-serving and lazy.  We can’t help it.  Even when we do good, there is still a part of us that does it for evil reasons.  It’s what we are.  As St. Augustine himself said, I cannot not sin.  The question is not whether I will refrain from sin; that is out the question, but whether I will help others despite my own sinfulness, to give God even a pathetic excuse to come spare my sorry hide.  That, I think, is the point of this text.

                But once again, that is only one interpretation among many that are possible.  So, I invite you as your pastor, read this for yourself!  Go to God and ask him to reveal what you need out of the text, do not let these pages go unturned.  The books of our Bible have frustrated many.  Luther himself is said to have thrown a copy of Revelations into the river.  The words in our Scriptures can be inscrutable, but there is wisdom and purpose there, thousands of years worth of experiences, successes and failures.  You will not find such treasure in any other book on earth.  So go home this afternoon and open these pages anew.  The worst that will ever happen is that you’ll be forced to preach about it, but even then you will still find riches meant only for you.  Amen and Amen.