Theology and Ignorance

Back In these texts in Matthew 21-23, Jesus is like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, engaged in a kind of roundhouse battle with a ring of adversaries. First he's attacked by the pharisees, then the elders, then the chief priests, then the scribes and lawyers, then the Sanhedrin or governing council, then the Sadducees or Temple elite. It's a war of words before the disciples and the crowds. The disciples are growing in faith as well as admiration for their fearless leader. The crowds admire him because he's fearless-but they think he's just a very daring prophet and a wonder-working healer. But in the debates with his adversaries, we see some real intellectual and spiritual jujitsu. Jesus gives them chops of the exegesis, exposes the holes in their positions, and then stuns them theologically, leaving them wordless.

First, we must admit that Jesus has kicked over their tables like Errol Flynn does to Basil Rathbone in that old Robin Hood movie. I'll ruin my analogies to the martial arts, but Jesus is fighting off the king's men with the sword of the scriptures, which he knows outside and-above all - in! Jesus smacks them on their obedience to God, which he says is less than tax collectors and prostitutes. He compares them to time-servers-like some of those clerks at the department of motor vehicles, where you can't tell whether they're working or not. They ask him about Caesar's coins-he points to a God bigger than all the caesars, George Bushes, Saddam Husseins, Ariel Sharons, Yasir Arafats, George Patakis, Carl McCalls, et cetera, than there ever was or will be. They ask him, well, what's the biggest commandment? To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind--- and then love your neighbor as you love yourself....

Jesus came to the Temple to re-distribute the spiritual wealth. It's a bank robbery, he's jumped behind the counter, the alarms are going off, but all the customers are on his side. (Don't worry: I know there are bankers in this room). He's handing out the theological goodies...healing the blind and the lame. One reason they would hang around the edge of the temple begging was because according to some of the laws, they weren't allowed into the Temple. Then the children are praising Jesus-they are actually saying Hosanna to the Son of David again-this is really annoying the authorities, as those stupid kids are moving Jesus from being just a prophet to being Messiah.

So who do you think you are, Jesus, you hick rabbi from Galilee? And Jesus slows it down for a moment, maybe because he has a score to settle on behalf of his dead mentor, John the Baptist. Well, boys, let me ask you a question: where'd John the Baptist get the power for his baptisms-from Heaven, or from the people? And the crowd, who knew John the Baptist lived and died for God's truth, were with Jesus-and the chief priests and elders back off.

Stop that scene, but keep the sick and blind and grieving in mind: In Mount Kisco this morning, there is a church full of grieving people. Their beloved pastor has been accused of improper activity with adolescent boys. He has been suspended from the pulpit. And the media, which ignores the work of all religious bodies most of the time, are up there feasting. But the people who Jack Silvey Miller helped, they are testifying that he was a good man, an effective man, a man who built retirement homes, alcohol and drug treatment facilities, social service centers for Hispanic immigrants, who fought like a tiger for gay rights, who confessed his own bipolar stuff as well as his own alcoholism-who can deny these great works? Jack was the son of a CEO and he has that kind of drive, and I believe there was no one in his life, truly in his life, except that church for 30 years.

Now I will leave it to the church court to determine whether my colleague and older brother, Jack keeps his pulpit and or his ordination. All of this is very close to home, so that the judges and jury are all peers. We all know the stuff about zero tolerance, the pain we have always shared with our RC brothers and sisters, and our absolute duty to protect and give justice to children and vulnerable people. We know that when a holy person is involved in abuse it is like barbs on a fishhook, worsening the wound. We pray healing and the power of forgiveness for any persons who experienced hurt, and may experience more hurt, in that situation.

Yet the power that Jack wielded for good, was it from God, or from human beings? Watch this question: because even if you say, from God, you are only comparing Jack with John the Baptist, not with Jesus: and that is what I would say to the people in that church: don't compare Jack with Jesus. Jesus was not just a wounded healer, he was the crucified Messiah. And, what would be the saddest thing in Mt Kisco is not the healings and wonders Jack performed may be weakened, but the fact that some children's voices are not singing Hosanna with the rest.

However grievous the case in Mount Kisco, we know two things: One act, or one aspect of a person's personality, is not the whole of their personality or their soul. (This is why some of us find it hard to justify the death penalty, for it sums a person-created in the image of God-into one or more horrific acts.) The other thing we know is that old saying, "God writes straight with crooked lines." The minute you say those two things, you are doing theology. Theology is not about making things more complex than they actually are. (Sometimes people like me may abuse it or do it badly, but rightly done it is simply trying to see where God's hand is working and where our hands are working, and to try to keep them together. It is insisting that things and people and the world and history and nature are beautifully complex and full as they truly are.

(Not preached: The enemy of theology is always reductionism-those goofy Soviet cosmonauts reporting back: we don't see God up here in space. Or, more typically for us, those brain surgeons who say, there's no soul here-there's no gland for it.... And, ironically, seeing the earth from space helps our vision of it as a created whole in God's hand, and our awe in the presence of death says much about God's presence in the breath and consciousness of every person. Part of my own theological training was precisely to deal with death and, working in Denver Presbyterian Medical Center, I became friends with a pathologist-one of the more religious doctors in that hospital. I stood through most of one autopsy and parts of two others. So, theology is understanding how and why we come alive to God.)

We see Jesus using theology to cut through nonsense when Sadducees come up with their question about the resurrection. The Sadducees were linked with a priestly party that ran the Temple and the sociey under the Romans. They did follow some scripture, the first 5 books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), but that was it. And there is no belief in the afterlife in those books, except by implication. So one of their guys gives this reductio ad absurdum question: what if this woman was married successively to 7 husbands, who would she be married to in the general resurrection? This assumes the practice of Levirite marriage, where a childless widow would be given to a man's brother to bear children for him, and conceivably a woman might be married to more than two brothers in some rare instances.

But real issue here is that they saw resurrection as the literal resumption of a flesh and blood existence, or in this case, a "one flesh" and blood existence. Jesus does not deny that resurrection is about fulfillment-the redemption of all of life-and that could be the presence and love of seventy seven husbands-in the mysterious, glorious space of heaven. (Sometimes people take great imaginative comfort in the hope that they will be with their loved ones in heaven, but Jesus warns against sentimentality that might limit resurrection to reanimation.) Jesus reverses their attempt at absurdity to the deliberate ignorance it was. And that is to note another danger for us: the deliberate ignorance of the working of the Spirit, the resistance to thinking logically and systematically about faith that is theology. In modern life today, we are starved for that kind of thinking which could free us from so much "bounded rationality." Grounded theology, though-that is what God was doing in Jesus, and what Jesus was doing with these Sadducees, focusing on the presence of God.

Back to Mt. Kisco. Our theological work-driven by love-must put us in the pews with them. No congregation is an island, cut off from the main continent of the Church. Paul says rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep... None of us can cast the first stone-that's not the way justice works in our church-so we pray for everyone involved, people in the pews like us. We pray the God's presence and power will still be felt there, that theology will be done there, that the church will be church there, whatever the outcome. Amen.

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