The Adventurous Lectionary for October 14, 2012
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
This week’s scriptures deal with suffering, sex, and money – quite a trifecta for an intrepid pastor to tackle. What “wild and crazy” images do this week’s lectionary readings provoke? Whether or not you follow a radical homiletic pathway, it is important to reflect on the roads not taken in your sermons. Quite possibly other people in your congregation are asking the same questions, but feel guilty about raising doubts or seeming to be unorthodox or sacrilegious. A sermon with stature needs to have questions and challenges in the background even if you don’t address them publicly. So, if you could say anything you want, what would it be? You can read my lectionary commentary on Process and Faith at http://processandfaith.org/resources/lectionary-commentary/yearb/2012-10-14/proper-23.
Can you imagine? Job is putting God on trial. He wants God to put God on the witness stand to defend God’s actions. He wants to know God’s reasons for subjecting him to such physical torture, not to forget, killing his children. After all, permitting – as God does in the Book of Job – is virtually the same as perpetrating. God is guilty of involuntary homicide, at the least, if not conspiracy to murder and assault in the case of Job and his family. What questions would you ask God, if you were confident of God’s willingness to respond without punishment? What is unsaid in your relationship with God?
Job is terrified of God. He sees grandeur, but more personally he dreads God’s inexorability. He believes, like Rick Warren, that God determines all the important events of our lives without our consent. Even the crucible of divine testing is hardly just to an innocent like Job. Even if he has sinned, and Job protests his righteousness, nothing could deserve the death of his children and the anguish is currently feeling. Have you felt that anguish and cried out to a god who did not answer? As a process theologian, I believe that God is moving through every moment of experience, seeking the best possible outcomes and providing inspiration and guidance toward the good. But, how does such inhumanity – genocide, holocaust, abuse, murder, and even white collar crimes that destroy the hard-earned savings of millions – occur in a God-filled world? Can God’s best simply not be good enough to overwhelm the dynamics of choice, environment, and unconscious factors?
The Psalm asks the same question. The Psalmist is crying out to the Creator, the God of Israel: Why have you forsaken me? Why have you deserted us? Surely there are kinder ways of death than certain types of cancer and debilitating disease? Is God somehow unable to defeat cancer cells or chromosomes? An all-present God must somehow be hemmed in by even the simplest cells. Do cancer cells have freedom that God can’t overcome? Surely, these questions emerge after a fateful medical appointment or during medical treatments whose best outcome is lengthening life and reducing pain, rather than curing the disease.
Can we imagine God in the holocaust ovens or gasping for air in the final hours of life? The theologian’s “death of God” (Altizer) is, frankly, small potatoes compared to the deaths an all-present and all-knowing God must face every moment of the day.
Recently Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced the existence a second century fragment of papyrus written in Coptic script that contains the words, “Jesus said to them, ‘my wife’.” Could this be a reference to Mary Magdalene? Remember the fuss about the film “The Last Temptation of Christ” and the Di Vinci Code? Would suggestions that Jesus had wife or lover been of surprise to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews? He sees Jesus as like us, having gone through many of our challenges, experiencing our humanity in its weakness and joy. Would it be safe to ponder the ramifications of a married Jesus in church?
Those who object to a Jesus who was married and had sexual relations are revealing something important theologically or trying to protect the tradition of a celibate male priesthood. They want Jesus to be human, but not too human! Marriage, sexuality, and parenting would somehow diminish Jesus’ uniqueness as God’s beloved. Yet, our full humanity – and the glory of God, Iranaeus asserted, was a human fully alive – embraces sexuality, not as a burden solely for childbearing (no Jew in the first century had any notion of original sin or sin as sexually transmitted!), but as joyful uniting human of two loving partners.
Can we dare to ask questions like: Does God enjoy sex? Was Jesus a sexual being and a married man? These are surely provocative given the bias toward a celibate – and dare we say disembodied or Docetic – Jesus.
Finally, if you haven’t had enough, the gospel is clear that wealth is a hindrance to spirituality. There is no way of softening this passage: how hard it is for the wealthy to enter God’s realm! The disciples were perplexed and so are we. Is Jesus advocating “class warfare?” If you’re in a wealthy congregation, preaching the bible can get you fired if for one Sunday out of the year you take the text literally! We don’t know Jesus’ criterion for wealth: we recently heard from one of the Presidential candidates that $250,000 might be considered a middle class income. Just ask the 96%, according to studies, who make less than $200,000 each year if they hold this opinion!
These are hard words for the wealthy and they are clear. Jesus unequivocally identifies the wealthy as kingdom-challenged. Dare we ask why wealth seemed antagonistic, in Jesus’ mind, to God’s realm? What advice do we give the wealthy in our congregations?
There is no lack of potential controversy in the roads most pastors won’t take this Sunday, but if you read the gospel in church, you have to talk about Jesus’ comments about wealth. You can take the easy approach – which is true in many ways – that our attitude toward wealth is what counts. But Jesus says something more difficult, and how shall we address it? If we take the easy route, the congregation will assume that wealth and consumerism really don’t matter much to God, the well-being of the nation, and the future of the planet.
Bruce Epperly is a theologian, spiritual guide, pastor, and author of twenty two books, including Process Theology: A Guide to the Perplexed, Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living, Philippians: An Interactive Bible Study, and The Center is Everywhere: Celtic Spirituality for the Postmodern Age. His most recent text is Emerging Process: Adventurous Theology for a Missional Church. He also writes regularly for the Process and Faith lectionary. He is currently serving as Visiting Professor of Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Lincoln University. He may be reached at drbruceepperly@aol.com for lectures, workshops, and retreats.
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