What happens next?

In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s autobiographical musical, “In the Heights,” there is a poignant scene in the second act. The characters have just survived a night of looting in the midst of a Fourth of July blackout. Usnavi, the main character, has lost his bodega because of vandalism, but his main concern in the sweltering heat is the health and safety Abuela Claudia.


USNAVI:
Abuela

ABUELA CLAUDIA:
Are you okay?

ABUELA CLAUDIA/USNAVI:
Paciencia y fe!
Paciencia y fe!

USNAVI:
So we survived the night, what happens today?

What happens today? The question crosses all our minds, but there is no answer. We can’t predict the future. It would be futile to try.

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money,’” writes the Apostle James. “Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.” (James 4:13-16)

In the musical, so much happens after Usnavi asks the question, “What happens today?” The musical is no longer on Broadway, but it is on tour, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t like spoilers. Before the day is over, Abuela will split her lottery winnings of $96,000 with Usnavi and his cousin, Sonny. Before the day is over, Abuela will die of heart failure in her bedroom. Before the day is over, Usnavi will make plans return to the Dominican Republic, the home of his parents. But before the day is over Sonny will arrange a special tribute to Abuela Claudia that convinces Usnavi to stay in the Heights. None of these events were likely when Usnavi began the day with the question, “So we survived the night. What happens today?”

Our lives unroll uncertainly before us. Maybe today will be much like yesterday, and perhaps yesterday was much like the day before. On the other hand, no one can suppose there will not be catastrophic changes in the soothing routine. When a family in Connecticut went to bed for a long winter’s nap late last month, they had no inkling that the smoldering embers left in a bag by the fireplace would burst to life and, before the night was over, claim the lives of three children and two grandparents. 

We tell ourselves that tomorrow is promised to no one but, in fact, nothing is promised to us. My Sociology Professor Tony Campolo – who, when I had him in class, did not know that in a few tomorrows he would become an evangelical superstar – used to say how scared he was by evangelists who sought to frighten you into salvation with familiar taunts: “You don’t have to come forward to be saved now, you can put it off until tomorrow or the next day. You can walk away tonight with hell fires crackling around your ankles and wait until some other time to be saved. But – But! – what if you walk out that door tonight and get hit by a bus?” We’d ask Tony, the existential sociologist, if the sermon made him afraid of hell fires, and he’d reply, “No! It made me afraid of buses!”

As we look around us today, at those we love, at familiar surroundings, common items we hold in our hands every day, are we missing invisible signs that might shed light on what happens next?

Some historians have said that one of the eeriest images of the television age took place on the morning of November 22, 1963, as cameras captured the crisp, full-color images of President and Mrs. Kennedy descending the mobile stairway from Air Force One. Mrs. Kennedy beams as brightly as the Dallas sun as she models her pink suit and trademark pillbox hat, and a Dallas newsman who has never seen JFK in person marvels at the charismatic young chief. “He’s taller than I thought,” he reports, “he’s tanned and lean in a well tailored suit and a light green shirt. He’s the prince of America.” In this glistening moment, the future seems secure, God appears to dote on the United States, and the unwary President bares his teeth in a grin of grace and domestic tranquility.

But as we know so well a half century later, these happy moments are fleeting. Within minutes of the grinning descent from Air Force One, as the motorcade heads into downtown Dallas, the President will be gone.

JFK.
Blown away.
What else do I have to say?

I’m inclined to think it would be terrible if we knew how our lives will evolve, if OuiJa boards and botanicas provided spoilers of what lies ahead.

Who needs it? My maternal grandmother got it into her head that she would die on February 6, and all her life she would greet each new year with dread anticipation that this would be the fatal year. She passed so many years safely – more than 80 of them – that the rest of the family lost patience with her morbid annual observance. Then she died, on February 6. Perhaps Grandma had some divination of the day, if not the year, of her death. But what good did it do besides making her miserable every January and February?

As I write this, I’m flashing back to an old Mutt and Jeff cartoon I saw decades ago in the Syracuse Herald-Journal:

Jeff:  I Wish I knew where I was going to die.
Mutt: Why? What good would that do you?
Jeff: I’d never go near the durn place.

All of this prognostication gives power, perhaps, to the story of the ancient woman and man encountered in the temple by Mary, Joseph and Jesus when they went there to designate their first born male as “holy to the Lord,” and for Mary’s purification as a woman who had recently given birth. (Luke 2:18-40)

Simeon and Anna had gifts of divine discernment, and when the young couple and new baby boy came to the temple, the old ones knew exactly who they were.  They also knew what the future held for them, and it was not all good news.

Before she met Simeon and Anna, Mary’s knowledge of her prospects was that they were spectacular. The angel said she was with child by the Holy Spirit, and the shepherds tramped down from the fields to tell her what the angels said about the birth of the messiah, the Christ child. And “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)

But while Mary was treasuring the future in her heart, a harsher reality awaited her and her family, and the old folks knew it. Because the messianic franchise is not all bliss and glory.

Both Simeon and Anna had taken up residence in the Temple, and both of them knew for whom they were waiting. When she saw the baby, Anna “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Simeon discerned God’s promise that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah, and he, too, recognized the baby immediately. He held the child tenderly in his arms, and praised God:

“Master, now you are
dismissing your
servant in peace,
according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your
salvation,
which you have prepared in
the presence of all
peoples,
a light for revelation to the
Gentiles
and for glory to your
people Israel.”

But it was to Mary that Simeon turned on a more somber note.

“This child,” he said, “is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”

And then:  “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”

This is a spoiler about events to come that had yet to be revealed to Mary, the teen-age mother who was still pondering the glory of being the mother of God’s son. God, who had kept this information from her until now, called upon a kindly old man in the temple to tell the whole truth: blessed are you among women; but an anguish of spirit akin to a sword in your soul is your fate as well.

The agony that ameliorates the ecstasy follows shortly afterwards, when Joseph, Mary and the boy Jesus are forced to leave behind everything they know in order to escape the death sentence imposed on all newborn boys by the murderous King Herod. There are few hints, in canonical scripture, what it may have been like to raise an adolescent Messiah, but the attitude of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple is suggestive. Jesus had gone missing amid the Passover crowds in Jerusalem, and Mary and Joseph searched frantically for him. “Child, why have you treated us like this?” Mary demanded. “Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”

Clearly an apology is in order, but the boy’s response is slightly arrogant, or would have been if he had been your kid: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must have been in my father’s house?” (Luke 2:48-49).

A few verses later, Luke reports that Jesus “was obedient to them,” but perhaps this only meant he was turning over a new messianic leaf. Disappearing from one’s parents is not an act of obedience.

At this point, the future still held many incidents of soul-piercing intensity, including the adult Jesus’ departure from Mary’s home, the sermons that convinced Jesus’ own siblings and friends that he was nuts, the angry crowd that followed him with the intent of throwing him off a cliff, the hostility of the religious authorities who felt threatened by his authority, and, ultimately, the arrest, flagellation, and crucifixion. Mary, who had once pondered God’s goodness and her son’s glory in her heart, ultimately sat at the foot of a Roman cross and watched her son die a slow, excruciating death by asphyxiation. The only pain that could have equaled that was the figurative sword thrust so cruelly in her soul.

On that day so long ago, when Mary took her infant son into the temple for his dedication to God, would she have been better off if there had been no Simeon to warn her about the future?

Perhaps not. She would have discovered the truths about life soon enough. She was still a teenager when she gave birth to Jesus, but as a young girl in a family oppressed by a malicious foreign rule, she must already have known life has equal portions of joy and pain. As she grew older and experienced more of life, this reality would have become more certain.

But Mary was also witness to the fact that there is more to life than joy and pain and the finality of death. She also played a major role in the decision of the Creator of the Universe to experience the misery and agony of human life in such a way that pain might be forever expunged from the soul’s eternal essence. Because Jesus suffered on the cross, the sword that pierced Mary’s soul – the swords that pierce all our souls – are forever removed.

It is always tempting, as we live out our lives, to want to know when the inevitable pains of living will come, or when death’s sting will come to us, or where. Some of us would welcome the spoilers, the mystical predictions, which will lay it all out before us. And others will be just as glad to go through life never knowing when that belligerent bus will put a quick end to all we know.

But none of that really matters. It’s enough to know that pain and death will come, whether we know how or when.
But just as certain, as made clear to Mary by Simeon and Anna, the ancients of the temple, is that God has a plan to take away our pain, and the day will surely come when we can praise God for a long-promised blessed release,

for my eyes have seen your
salvation,
which you have prepared in
the presence of all
peoples,
a light for revelation to the
Gentiles
and for glory to your
people Israel.

Shock and Awe

The first 20 verses of the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel are sheer poetry, and many of us don’t get into the Christmas spirit until we hear them read aloud in the King James version:

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shown round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

The words make our spirits soar as much as any Christmas carol and most of us can recite them by heart.

Perhaps Luke, the dear and glorious physician who wrote these words, is using a little poetic license.

The shepherds who, with their ancestors, had been expecting God’s Messiah for generations, were probably not expecting it to happen in quite this way. They were expecting God to intervene in human history with dramatic timing, certainly with angels and trumpets, probably with earthquakes, presumably with wind and fire. And then would come the Messiah on a gargantuan fire-breathing steed, his brawny hand grasping a glistening sword, slashing heads and limbs from their Roman oppressors and hated polytheist neighbors. They were expecting something akin to the way Donald Rumsfeld predicted the opening salvos of the Iraq War: shock. And awe.

But no. Nothing like that. No earthquakes, no fire, just an ordinary night sitting downwind from the scent of the sheep. Most scholars believe it wasn’t even December, a date arbitrarily chosen by the early church because it fit in with other feast days.

And hidden from the shepherds’ gaze, in a small barn, redolent of animal droppings and compost, an ordinary woman in labor crouches over the hay. In one of the humanity’s most common functions, this woman pushes out a baby boy.

How many other babies were born that night within a 50-kilometer radius of Bethlehem? Tens? Scores? Hundreds? Whatever the volume of natal activity that night, one more birth would hardly have been noticed. The incarnation of the Creator of the Universe into human flesh took place in a manner no different, perhaps even less dramatic, than the manner in which you and I were born. Did persons outside the barn even hear the cries of a newborn struggling to fill his lungs with unfamiliar air? Did the lowing cattle quickly lose interest in the human drama and resume the bored chewing of their cuds? Was there ever a night so quiet, so devoid of drama and astounding events?

This is where the angels come in. The heavenly host awakens the shepherds in the middle of the silent night and scares them to the brink of infarction. While the shepherds are clutching their chests and catching their breath, the angels point to a malodorous hovel which the shepherds knew well. 

“Behold!” the angels say. “This is not the hut you think it is! This is delivery room of Christ the Lord.”

I can’t begin to imagine what the shepherds must have thought. No doubt they were frightened out of their wits, and no wonder. How often does one encounter even one angel, let alone the whole heavenly host. And how disorienting, how counter-intuitive it must have been for the shepherds, transfixed by heavenly fireworks in the sky, to follow the angels’ orders to avert their gaze to a crude little shed at the edge of town? Were they too frightened to say aloud what they really thought? “What? This lousy little lean-to is where you want us to seek the Messiah?”

One suspects that without the angel chorus, humanity might have entirely missed the big event. The sheer ordinariness of the occasion was one reason the early church went out of its way to exalt the importance of the Messiah’s lowly birth.

In addition to angel choruses, the church also stressed the significance of the affair by tracing Jesus’ ancestry back to some major players in Jewish history.

Matthew – famous for the “begats” which many Sunday school students were forced to memorize – begins the family tree at Abraham, moves on to King David and King Solomon, follows the royal line through Jeconiah, and ends up with Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus. Luke’s more audacious genealogy goes all the way back to Adam and includes the Prophet Nathan and also leads to Joseph.

This is the point at which some wise ass seventh grader in Sunday school raises his hand to point out that Joseph was not a blood relative of Jesus, so what difference does it make?

The point, perhaps, was to persuade us that the incarnation of the Creator in a baby boy in Bethlehem was a bigger deal than it looked on the surface. But one also has to wonder – as wise ass seventh graders often do – why the lineage would make a difference.

Many of us are aware of notable ancestors and we drop their names to suggest that we, too, are bigger deals than we look. My paternal grandfather, eager to prove he was more than an Oneonta bureaucrat, meticulously probed his family tree to identify impressive antecedents. His main goal was to prove he was a Mayflower descendant, which many Euro-Americans can do by tracing the elaborate web of the millions of people who were connected by endless marriages and intermarriages to the 102 souls who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. My grandfather concluded the Jenkses were descended from Mayflower pilgrim Elizabeth Tilley, who married her fellow passenger John Howland. The inscription on Auntie Elizabeth’s grave gives hope to all would-be lineage enhancers:

Here ended the Pilgrimage of
ELIZABETH Tilley HOWLAND
who died Dec 1687 at home of her daughter
LYDIA & husband JAMES BROWN
in Swansea - ELIZABETH married
Pilgrim JOHN HOWLAND who came
with her in the Mayflower Dec 1620.
From them are descended a
numerous posterity.

I’ll take Grandpa’s word for it that the Jenkses are indeed among that numerous posterity. A less obscure ancestor (because we share his surname) was Joseph Jenks, Jr., the Royal Governor of Rhode Island Colony from 1727 to 1732, and a Baptist benefactor of Roger Williams. One would have thought that would have made me Baptist royalty when I worked for the American Baptists in Valley Forge, but that honor had by then been relegated to bureaucrats who traced their ancestry to Sweden.

Actually, Governor Jenks is my favorite ancestor because he literally stands out among his peers. He was reportedly 6 feet 7 inches tall – freakish in 1727 – and none of his American-made clothes seemed to fit. According to one legend, Grandpa Joseph sent a hand-written note to England to order a 6 feet 7 inch cloak befitting his office. Months later, a package arrived at the colonial mansion: a 6 feet 7 in clock. Clearly I was not the first in my line with illegible handwriting.

My mother, Mary Emerson, traced her line to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it would be nice to imagine that a corpuscle or two of his transcendental genius courses through our family veins. Every Thanksgiving I think of his succinct and eloquent prayer,

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

What a cool guy, that Uncle Ralph. It’s fun to think my family swims in his gene pool and, who knows, maybe yours does, too. But I can assure you, there isn’t a weaker pick-up line than, “Hey, Babe, I’m related to Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

And when you come down to it, what difference does it make? The late mystic George Carlin rightfully chastised those who are prideful of attributes they had nothing to do with, such as being Irish or having red hair or being descended from Zulu chiefs. It’s all good, but it has nothing to do with how you use your own life for better or ill. You can’t blame your larcenous tendencies on being descended from John Dillinger, or attribute your virtues to being a scion of Baptist royalty. How you live your life has nothing to do with those who came before you, and everything to do with you.

In the same manner, it didn’t matter a whit that Jesus was descended from King David, and I’m sure his royal line didn’t add a mite to his stepfather’s livelihood as a wood worker. It may have pleased some early church bureaucrats to claim Jesus was the latest in a long line of Jewish monarchs and prophets, but it doesn’t seem entirely relevant. The only familial relationship that really mattered was God, and it was God Who Jesus addressed as Abba, Father.

Into the feeble human flesh of the frail babe in the manger was poured all the power, authority, creative energy and omniscient power of the Creator of the Universe. Isn’t that shock and awe enough? The host of angels was a nice touch, and the impressive genealogy is interesting (so long as we are not required to memorize it). But the most breathtaking development here is that on one ordinary night, the Creator of the Universe was born in a barn without a perceptible whimper.

It makes you pause to catch your breath.

But it is truly something to celebrate, an event that brings all of us to our feet for a rousing chorus of “Joy to the World.”

Christmas Day has come, and soon it will be gone for another year. But let’s not allow the season to depart without reflecting on the quintessential quietness of the incarnation.

Amid all life’s challenges, stresses, sorrows and pains, we will occasionally find it tempting to call on God for dramatic intercessions, miraculous visions, stellar signs that we will be rescued from the travails that plague us. Like our ancestors who yearned for the dramatic rescue of a mighty messiah who would be attended by earthquakes, wind, and fire, we will pray for clear solutions and unambiguous remedies.

But the God in the mundane manger seems to prefer a more subtle approach. The ordinariness of God’s entry into human history is a powerful reminder that God is with us constantly, even on the most run of the mill days.

And when we need to cry for help, we know God will be there in time of trouble, too.

We may just have to listen very carefully amid the tumult to hear God’s still, small voice.

Getting a Head

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”, John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ -- Mark 1:1-8.

Where have we heard the following story before?

An angel of the Lord appears to an old man and declares, “O Zakariya! We give thee good news of a son: His name shall be John: on none by that name have we conferred distinction before.”


The old man replies, “O my Lord! How shall I have a son, when my wife is barren and I have grown decrepit from old age?”


The angel replies, “So thy Lord saith: ‘That is easy for Me: I did indeed create thee before, when thou hadst been nothing!”

The old man insists, “O my Lord! Give me a Sign.”

“Thy sign,” the angel answers, “Shall be that thou shalt speak to no man for three nights.”

The scenario rings a bell, but from which of the four canonical Gospels is it? Or perhaps it is from the historian Flavius Josephus who wrote Jewish Antiquities in the first century of the common era. Or could this be the dialogue of one of thousands of Christmas plays and gospel movies that have been produced since the invention of film?

Actually, the passage is from the Qur’an – sura 19 (Maryam), verse 7. The only thing I held back, to make it harder to guess, is the name John. The baptizer – the precursor – the forerunner – is named Yahya in the Qur’an, but he is the same figure who came to proclaim the coming of Jesus.

It’s surprising how John’s influence has so profoundly affected Muslims and Jews as well as Christians. More than any other figure of the gospels except Jesus himself, John the Baptist has permeated our culture. He is the subject of plays, movies, books and operas. Actors such as Charleton Heston and Michael York chewed up the scenery with their portrayals of John as an eccentric, wild-eyed and bellowing fanatic calling hoarsely on sinners to repent.

As the centuries passed, even the artists who portrayed John became legends on their own. Karl Perron, the German bass-baritone who sang the role of John in Richard Strauss’ Opera Salomé, was a life-long hypochondriac who believed harmful germs would enter his body through his ears. During rehearsals of Salomé, Perron would stuff balls of cotton in his ears and quickly retreat to his dressing room between acts. He would turn his head away from cast and crew members as if they were disease-carrying pariahs. This was an annoying habit to some of his colleagues, and it led to a disastrous denouement on opening night. In a climatic scene after Salomé’s dance, when the platter bearing the plaster head of John the Baptist was carried on stage, the head had cotton balls stuffed in its ears. The stunned singers and musicians dissolved into laughter, and it was several moments before the opera could proceed.

Art has not always provided a useful rendering of the story of John the Baptists.  The 1953 movie Salomé, starring Rita Hayworth in the title role and Alan Badel as John, is best known for Hayworth’s dance of the seven veils (which, in the interest of research integrity, I watched several times in succession last week). Hayworth’s dance is breathtaking, as is evidenced by the possibly feigned but convincing heavy breathing of Charles Laughton in the role of Herod.

The scene may have created a fitting emotional illusion of what it was like in Herod’s palace when Salomé began dripping veils, but it is otherwise inaccurate. Director William Dieterle’s film version would have us believe Salomé is a Christian who thinks she’s dancing to save John’s life. That’s not only un-biblical, it takes all the fun out of it.

So what was John really like? If you grew up Baptist – or Babtist – you may have heard a Sunday school teacher try to convince you that we trace our roots back to John. But – as satisfying as it may be to tell our Presbyterian friends that our founder predates John Calvin by 1500 years – there’s no truth to the claim. Our 18th century origins had nothing to do with John.

Only in the Qur’an, it seems, is John Yahya known for his kindness:

“And piety (for all creatures) as from Us, and purity: He was devout, And kind to his parents, and he was not overbearing or rebellious. So Peace on him the day he was born, the day that he dies, and the day that he will be raised up to life (again)!” —Qur'an, sura 19 (Maryam), ayah 13-15.

Other ancient views of John raise questions about our stereotypical image of him as a raging prophet dressed in animal skins and eating locusts. According to Bart D. Ehrman in Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, the records of the contemporary Ebionites portrayed John as a fellow vegetarian. He did not, the Ebionites insist, eat locusts, and he preferred his honey in the form of honey cakes, or manna. If John were a vegetarian, that would also raise doubts about his propensity to dress in the skins of dead animals. The image of John that emerges looks more like the dapper, purple-clad gentleman in the Tiffany stained glass window that illuminates North Baptist Church in Port Chester, N.Y. (above, right).

So who was John?

No doubt he was not a raging maniac, and Mark did not believe he was an esthetic vegetarian. “Now John,” Mark says, “was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.”  Okay. Not my cup of tea, but there it is. One can only hope the locusts weren’t still buzzing when he bit into them. Probably not. He was surely a discrete eater, or he would have scared away more crowds than he attracted.

But his culinary habits don’t really matter. What we do know about John is clear enough.

It was John who was sent by God to give us an important message:

“Prepare the way of the Lord.”
It was John who “appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”

And, most significant of all, it was John who came prepared to turn his back on fame and influence as soon as his cousin, Jesus, arrived on the scene. That’s not a common attitude. It’s like Steve Jobs telling everyone, “but even more important than me is Tim Cook, who must increase as I decrease.” Not bloody likely.

But John said, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Even two-thousand years later, John’s message is too important to be dismissed by speculation that he was a rustic eccentric who ate bugs. It is still John’s message that calls us away from the frenzied chaos of our Christmas preparations and says, stop. Take a deep breath. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Be patient.

Waiting, as Henri Nouwen wrote, is essential to the spiritual life.

“But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting,” Nouwen said.  “It is a waiting with a promise in our hearts that makes already present what we are waiting for.  We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus.  We wait after Easter for the coming of the Spirit, and after the ascension of Jesus we wait for his coming again in glory.  We are always waiting, but it is a waiting in the conviction that we have already seen God's footsteps.

“Waiting for God is an active, alert - yes, joyful - waiting.  As we wait we remember him for whom we are waiting, and as we remember him we create a community ready to welcome him when he comes.”

It is John the Baptist who calls us to create that community of readiness.

It is our job to nurture one another and live in that community with patience and joy, so that when this hectic season culminates with the coming of the Christ child, it will be a happy celebration and not a blessed relief.

GEEPS

Stephen Schwartz’ mystical Godspell, now at the Circle in the Square Theater on Broadway, breathes new life into the Gospel stories most of us know by heart.

The musical has been doing that for forty years, and now the infusion of disco, hip hop, blues and funk brings the parables even closer to home. One of my favorite skits in the show is the separation of the sheep (“baaahhh”) from the goats (“maaahhh.”) As the goats realize to their horror that they are being shut out of the kingdom because of their lack of empathy for suffering people, they taunt the sheep: “But, Lord, if we knew it was you, we would have invited you over – for LAMB chops.” But Jesus – on stage as in the bible – is unyielding. “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And (you) will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Is it possible that Jesus could be so mean? You can hear the pathos in the bleating of the goats: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” But Jesus makes it plain: when we step gingerly over a sleeping homeless person at Grand Central Station, we step over Jesus. There is a story that when First Lady Rosalyn Carter did just that in 1978, her Baptist heart broke. She wept.

But life isn’t always simple for us goats. This week, my niece in Melbourne, Fla., posted this on Facebook: “Doorbell rings at midnight- creepy guy with a sketchy story trying to get in our house. This song is for my husband, who got up and went to the window with a baseball bat and while our daughter and I hid under the covers. He's so brave!” First the guy said there had been an accident. Then he said he had taken a cab but needed help to pay the driver. Finally, with the dog barking ferociously inside the house, the guy disappeared.

Was that guy Jesus? Not bloody likely. But how do we judge the divinity of every panhandler who greets us in the mall with a sob story? The truth is, sooner or later, we’re all goats. Maaahh.

But much of the time, we’re sheep, too. We care for those who are hungry, thirsty and ill clothed. We support the poor. We nurse the sick. We have our prison ministries. Baaahh.

It’s interesting to note, by way of a scientific affirmation of a metaphysical observation, there is such a thing as a goat-sheep hybrid – a geep. This doesn’t happen often in nature. Goat and sheep do cohabit on a thousand hills, and they have been known to cross species lines and do the nasty, although their offspring rarely survive. But sheep-goat chimeras were created by researchers at the Institute of Animal Physiology in England by combining sheep embryos with goat embryos. The offspring were a mosaic of goat and sheep tissue. The parts that grew from the sheep embryo were woolly. Those that grew from the goat embryo were hairy.

It’s puzzling and perhaps a little disturbing to wonder why physiologists would want to do this, but it does make an unusual sermon illustration. When Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, how will he deal with the fact that most of us are geeps?

Actually, I think this is a bigger problem for us than it will be for Jesus. He knows very well that all of us sin and fall short of the glory of God, and there must be some kind of divine formula to protect us from eternal punishment when we miss a deposit at the food pantry. But how much slack is Jesus willing to cut us?

Last week I watched an interesting 2004 European film called, “The Downfall,” directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, which depicts the final ten days of Adolf Hitler's life in his Berlin bunker in 1945. In an unlikely but apparently documented scene, Eva Braun – soon to become Frau Hitler – and Hitler’s young secretary, Traudl Junge, take a cigarette break in the bunker and talk about der fuehrer. “I’ve known him for ten years, and yet I don’t really know him at all,” confesses Eva. The lithesome Traudl takes a deep drag and shrugs. “In private moments he can be so kind and gentle,” she says. “At other times, he is so brutal.”

Hitler is one of those malevolent figures who cannot be rationalized, so monstrous that partisan comparisons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Hitler fall ludicrously short. No one in history, with the possible exception of Caligula or Stalin, was as bad as Hitler. He is evil incarnate.

But I remember reading an essay by entertainer Steve Allen that speculated no one can be malicious all the time, and he used Hitler as an example. “Probably much of the time he was a very nice fellow,” Allen wrote. The speculation seems to hold true in many scenes from “The Downfall,” which are based on eyewitness accounts. At one point Hitler rages at his generals, saying the German people deserve to starve and die because they hadn’t done enough to defend the Reich. In other scenes, he tweaks the youthful cheek of a pre-teen soldier, or pats his secretary on the shoulder, saying, “You need to get some rest, dear.”

I tend to agree that no one is a monster 24-7. Many of the murderers I knew as a newspaper reporter were perfectly nice people. There is as telling scene in HBO’s Treme in which a felon in prison warns a visiting lawyer that a New Orleans councilman she admires is on the take. The lawyer, who believed in the councilman’s integrity, expresses shock, but the prisoner finds her attitude to be naïve. “We’re all nice guys,” he says. “We all love our mothers. We all root for the Saints.”

Even so, it’s not easy to think of ourselves as both good and evil, simultaneously goats and sheep. Our hymnology assures us that faith in Jesus will wash our all our sins away, leaving our souls – in that irksome Victorian metaphor – white as snow. We fervently want to believe that people can be good, that there are those who do not have “an evil bone in their bodies.” We’d like to think this was true of our sainted mothers, our favorite pastors, our idolized teachers. We’d like to believe that, someday, it will be true of us.

We’d like to think that, perhaps, but it’s not good theology or, for that matter, good psychology. The great psychoanalyst C. G. Jung insisted that evil and good do and must exist together in every human heart. In a Southern Cross review of an unpublished essay by Jung, Frank Thomas Smith quoted the great man:

“Evil is the necessary opposite of good, without which there would be no good either. It is impossible to even think good out of existence.” Jung, Smith writes, believed in the “titanic magnitude of evil,” and he believed Christian theologians “consistently and disastrously dwarfed the picture of evil as arising from the unconscious of humanity.” In Civilization in Transition, Jung wrote that evil “is of gigantic proportions, so that for the Church to talk of original sin and to trace it back to Adam’s relatively innocent slip-up with Eve is almost a euphemism. The case is far graver and is grossly underestimated.”

Jung wrote these words before Hitler came to power, so history’s ultimate expression of “grossly underestimated” evil was as yet unavailable. But there is always ample evidence that evil impacts our lives with “titanic magnitude.”

Perhaps one of the messages in the parable of the sheep and the goats is that humans must strive to overcome the resident evil in our hearts by conscientiously living out God’s commandments to support the poor, “the least of these,” as Jesus called them. But out best efforts to be Christlike are not always successful. There are times when we will be moved to help "the least of these," but also times when we will step over their sleeping bodies on subway vents. As in many animated features, the angel of our good nature orbits around our heads with the angel of our evil nature, one reminding us we are sheep, the other dismissing us as goats.

It’s not pleasant knowing good and evil are competing for our attention, but the knowledge does keep us realistically balanced. Some people go through their lives assuming they are good and godly, even while they ignore “the least of these” who cross their paths.

A couple months ago, as the nation celebrated Labor Day, many Christians were disturbed that other Christians felt justified in removing government support for “the least of these” in order to move toward balancing the federal budget. As so-called bible believing Christians in Congress were calling for budget cuts in programs that support the poor, others were saddened by the reality that one in five children are raised in poverty and 40 million Americans are living below the federal poverty level.

“Be that as it may,” the National Council of Churches said in its Labor Day message, “it is clear that many politicians, even those who name the name of Christ, will not mention the poor in their holiday rhetoric. If that's due to forgetfulness on their part, let us offer this reminder: poverty exists at unacceptable levels in this bountiful land. While politicians can certainly differ on strategies for helping the poor, no politician who claims the bible as authoritative can ignore the poor. And no politicians who ignore the poor can claim the bible to be their guide – not at any time, and certainly not in this time of great need.”

The National Council of Churches offered to send a free bible to any politician who needed clarity on that point.
The biblical message is stated with particular clarity in the parable of the sheep and the goats. The one in five children and the 40 million Americans living in poverty should make us all think of the face of Jesus, and his declaration that whatever we do to help them, “you have done it unto me.”

That probably won’t remove from us the stigma of being geeps, or temper the issue of good and evil in human hearts.

But it will remind us that when we walk among those who are hungry, those who are thirsty, those who can’t afford a decent set of clothes, those who are persecuted by injustice, we aren’t walking among strangers. We are walking beside Jesus.

We won’t be able to help everyone, perhaps. But knowing who we are walking with should be wonderfully clarifying – and motivating.

Cue Talent

‘For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, “Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master. ”And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, “Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master. ”Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours. ”But his master replied, “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 25:14-30

The Divine M, who is preaching on this parable this morning, notes that the message could be construed to offer clues where Jesus might stand on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Any Keynesian economist would assume that the rich man in this story got rich at the expense of the many who are poor. Yet Jesus appears to approve not only the rich man’s praise of servants whose shrewd investments paid off, but he especially relishes the man’s condemnation of the “wicked and lazy slave” who buried his capital in the ground.

On the surface, this could be the biblical foundation for a Christian MBA program. But let’s not get carried away. It could also be interpreted as a program for keeping your slaves productive and happy. We all know that our Southern Baptist antecedents were skilled at this kind of isogesis when they claimed biblical justification for fact that they and their missionaries owned slaves. (Parenthetically, not all Baptists felt that way; it was on this very issue that Northern and Southern Baptists split in 1845.)

So we are forewarned that it is wise to read the bible carefully to avoid reading into it messages that are not there. In the parable of the talents, is Jesus praising rich slave owners? Or – as we have been taught in our Sunday schools from time immemorial – is he praising people who make the most of the gifts God has given them?

It’s convenient, at least in English, that the biblical word “talent” is the same word we use to describe those human qualities that make us who we are.

A talent (in Latin, a talentum) is an ancient unit of mass. It corresponded generally to the mass of water in the volume of an amphora, a one foot cube. When used as a measure of money, it refers to a talent-weight of gold or of silver. In Jesus’ parable, no one knows exactly how much money is involved, but it’s clear we’re talking big bucks.

Human talent is far more difficult to measure.
When I was in college I took a film course at Shorty Yeaworth’s Cinema Institute (see http://thelittlescroll.blogspot.com/2011/09/god-dont-call-me-at-office.html) and we went to the Philadelphia studio where Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” originated. We went there to learn how a television program was done, and I was deeply impressed by the skills and knowledge of my fellow students: the three camera operators who kept the picture centered and steady, the sound technicians who sat at huge control boards to maintain the intricate balance and treble and bass, the director who watched the show on three screens and sent instructions where the cameras should point and which view should be selected for the main screen. The gifts of many people behind the scenes of a television show are a hidden but essential part of any broadcast, and that day – as key grip – I wrapped a coil of heavy cable around my shoulder and felt privileged to be a part of this electronic miracle.

As the show prepared to go live, a student who said he was from Christian Television, which no one else had heard of, sat in the anchor chair as the technician focused the light on his powdered face and blow-dried hair. The young man, who up to this point had not exhibited any skills beyond a well-modulated voice, squinted into the camera and waited for a signal to do something.

In the control room we could hear the director count backwards. “… three … two … one …”

Then: “Cue talent.”

Suddenly the show was live, and the young man at the anchor desk began reading from a prepared script about the purpose of the program, which was mostly to give film students a chance to learn how to do it.

But the director’s final order stuck in my head. “Cue talent”? This was the first time I had heard the term that is used to describe the person in front of the camera – the anchor, the reporter, the weather guy, the sports woman, anyone whose picture appears on screen. Back in Shorty Yeaworth’s film course, my first reaction was that the phrase was replete with irony, because it referred to the least talented person in the room. In later years when I was a newspaper reporter, I often pondered this irony at the scene of a plane crash or tornado devastation when I was interviewed by late-arriving “talent” from local television stations who begged the print media reporters to fill them in. But that was merely a reminder that “talent” is a relative term, so let me go on record that there are thousands of truly talented television reporters, and I cite two of my favorites: Ann Curry of the Today Show, and my nephew Andy Jenks in Richmond (be his tweep @AndyJenksNBC12.)

Talent is something we regard highly in other people, and those who have a lot of it are objects of sometimes eccentric adulation, as when women scream ecstatically and throw their panties at rock bands. I’ve demonstrated a bit of that kind of fanaticism myself, as those who remember my high school idolatry of JFK will know. My years as a newspaper reporter in Pottstown introduced me to several idols of a different nature, including the late "Smokin' Joe" Frazier, a gentle Christian man with iron fists.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, because I tell the story all the time, but in 1992 I was in National Airport in Washington waiting for a flight. I went to an empty gate so I could read without being jostled and opened the paper. Before long a ground agent escorted a tall, slightly stoop-shouldered man to the same gate. The man obviously had the same aim as mine – to sit quietly alone and read the paper before his flight was called. I looked up and recognized him immediately: it was Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, one of the most talented players in the history of baseball, who had been in Washington as a part of the 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ discovery of America.

The reason we admired Joe, even in his retirement, is his extravagant talent that set him apart from nearly every other player in the game. As Joe sank into his seat, I lowered my paper and stared at the back of his head. Occasionally a passerby my age or older would do a double take as they realized who was sitting at the gate. But we all respected Joe’s privacy, and he sat alone and unbothered for several minutes. Soon, his flight was called and the same ground agent – a woman so young I wondered if she had any idea who he was – came over and to escort to the entryway. He stood and flashed his Mr. Coffee smile and disappeared into the crowd.

I dropped my paper and walked over to Joe’s empty seat. Hesitating slightly as if I was approaching the burning bush, I sat down. I sat down in Joe DiMaggio’s warmth and gurgled with happiness.

My spouse, the Divine M, thinks that was more than a little weird. It wasn’t like I could absorb Joe’s talent or essence by sitting in his ninety-eight point six for a few seconds. But, I insist, it wasn’t like I was throwing my panties at him, either. It was an expression of manly obeisance to a genuine idol. And I’m glad I did it.

Talent is also the bread and butter of the theater. There are scores of supremely talented people on stage, but, sadly, there are millions of supremely talented people who never get a starring role or even a recall to audition.

One of the barriers to talent in the theater, I think, is that the key to success is often one’s physical appearance. Beauty is often more important than talent, and actors who would be perfect for the role of Evita or Reno Sweeney or Liza Doolittle will never be cast because someone doesn’t consider them pretty enough.

Thank God for high school and local theater, where there is much more leeway. In “Once on This Island,” the character of Ti Moune is a petite girl, a girl of color portrayed by one actor as a child and by another as a teenager. On the Broadway stage, the role was played by the beautiful and petite LaChanze, who fits the image perfectly, and in most big stage productions the same strict casting call is pursued.

In one high school production we saw, the child Ti Moune was portrayed by a lovely African American child, but between scenes she morphed into a tall, 200 pound white woman. This may have been confusing to the audience, but it was a creative way of using the most talented person in a pivotal role. And the equally talented cast was able to sing with a straight face the beguiling lyric, “Don’t you remember your little Ti Moune from the tree?”

Talent is much admired by all of us, but for some of us it is a vicarious admiration. We notice the talents in others but not in ourselves. This is a truth known to every pastor who has tried to recruit people for programs and ministries in the church – greeter, choir, evangelism, Christian education, newsletter, building maintenance – because a dismaying number of people are likely to respond, “Oh, I can’t. I have no gifts. I’m not talented that way.”

Here’s where the parable of the talents slaps many of us in the face. It seems safe enough to demurely turn away from a task on the grounds we’re not skilled enough to do it, and no doubt the pastor will express polite understanding and look elsewhere. But the still, small voice inside us may remind us of another response: “Throw this worthless slave into utter darkness, where there will weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Oops.

One point of this parable may be to remind us that the gracious modesty our mothers raised us to express may not always be the answer God is seeking when he calls us to do something. And another point seems to be that God has given each of us talents in abundance, no matter who we are. And when God calls us to use those talents and make them grow, God does not want to hear humble excuses.

All of us know people who talents are underestimated, either by themselves or others.

Lately I’ve been thinking of a cousin I haven’t seen for a half century or more. She was the daughter of my maternal grandmother’s brother and his wife, Uncle Everett and Aunt Wilma Close. Grace was a little older than my mother and her brother, and the cousins used to play together in Andes when they were children.

Grace still lived with her parents when I was a child and we visited the Closes whenever we were in Andes.

Grace used a wheelchair and she had a severe disability that was never identified. It could have been cerebral palsy She could not control the movements of her hands, which seemed to be constantly wrestling with one another, and she had difficulty forming words.

Aunt Wilma always dressed Grace in a black dress or flower print dress, possibly because it easier to get off and on, but the dress and the wheelchair created the illusion that Grace was an elderly lady. But she must have been in her thirties when I knew her. My mother said one of the games she and her brother would play with Grace when they were kids would be to hold her by the shoulders so she could pretend to walk like normal people. Grace’s hands would push gleefully against each other and she would laugh delightedly until her exhausted cousins had to put her down.

Grace lived quietly in her room in a farm house on the edge of the village of Andes. I don’t know if she could hold a book or read, and there was no television in the house. She may have listened to the radio, but I have no idea how she spent her days.

I do know that when we stopped by for visits, Aunt Wilma would greet us at the door and Uncle Everett go to his chair and the family would sit in silent Yankee taciturnity, which was regarded as polite interaction. But when Grace wheeled into the room, laughing and squealing with delight that visitors had come, the mood changed. Whatever our spirits were, Grace would raise them – by laughter and smiles and undecipherable noises. She didn’t engage in conversations, but when we asked how she was she would nod and smile, making it clear that everything was perfectly fine as far as she was concerned. Given that she spent her life trapped inside a dysfunctional body, her happiness was both uncanny and infectious.

I’m sure no one would have considered Grace to be a gifted or talented person, but this woman to whom nature had given so little invariably gave much to all who met her. She had been given the tiniest of talents, but somehow she reinvested what she had in an attitude that multiplied her gift ten fold.

In my youth I was in awe of supremely talented performers, politicians, and athletes. Heroes like President Kennedy and Joe DiMaggio and Joe Frazier were given substantial gifts by their creator, and they invested them with vigor, multiplying them in ways that would make Jesus proud. That’s why the rest of us, not having received the kinds of gifts they had, enshrine them in halls of champions.

At the same time, most of us were given greater gifts than Cousin Grace. If we’re not investing them as vigorously as she did, we should be ashamed of ourselves. For me, she will always be a reminder that we need not make excuses about our weaknesses, or seek to convince ourselves that, given the overwhelming challenges facing us in life, there is little we can do to make a difference in the church, in our households, in our communities, or in our world.

Maybe we don’t have the skills or the gifts to change the church or the world. But God has given us sufficient gifts to make a difference, just as Grace made a difference in the lives of so many people in Andes.

God didn’t judge Grace for not changing the world. But God does judge her as a good and trustworthy servant because she multiplied her gifts many fold. As her earthly life came to an end, I have no doubt of the Lord’s greeting to her: “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.”

May we all be inspired by heroes like Joe DiMaggio and John Kennedy. But may we base our lives on the faithfulness of people like Grace, who were given so little but turned what they had into manifold blessings.

Situational Commandment

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? ’He said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. ”This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ Matthew 22:34-36

What is the greatest commandment?

For many, the answer requires some thought and no one is better at thinking than our oldest daughter. Years before Lauren was in kindergarten, a Sunday school teacher asked her if she knew God’s law. Thinking carefully, she replied, “Always wash your hands after you go potty.”

What a testimony to parental guidance sending a child down the fastidious path of godliness. I can almost hear Jesus, suffering the children as he did, responding indulgently, “Um, yes, but the second greatest commandment is love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus did us a favor by summarizing the law of the prophets into two simple phrases. As we have noted earlier in this space, there are 613 laws set down in the Old Testament, ranging from huge (don’t kill, don’t steal) to pissante (don’t yoke an ox and an ass together, don’t wear weaves of wool and linen). There are, to be sure, rabbinical and ecclesiastical lawyers who, perhaps lacking a life, can discuss the laws in benumbing detail. But for most of us, a quick digest saves a lot of time.

Jesus was not the only religious leader to summarize the law in a few words. The Rev. J. Richard Fairchild, a Canadian pastor whose online sermons are read unaccredited each week from innumerable pulpits, has helpfully isolated some of those abstracts:

“What does the Lord require of you?” inquired the Prophet Micah.  And then he answered with just three commands: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
The Prophet Isaiah based the commandments on just two of them. He wrote: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Maintain justice and do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed.’”  (Isaiah 56:1)
Amos saw one guiding principle upon with all the commandments are founded, He wrote: "This is what the LORD says to the house of Israel: "Seek me and live" (Amos 5:4)
The Prophet Habbakuk, too, expounded the Torah on the basis of a single thought: "The righteous shall live by their faith." (Habbakuk 2:4)
The great teacher Akiba, virtually a contemporary of Jesus, said this when asked the same question that Jesus was asked: “The greatest principle of the Torah is expressed in the command: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Leviticus 19:18)
And Hillel, also from the first century of our era summed up the Torah in this maxim: "What is hateful to you, do not do to others. The rest is commentary: you must go and study it."
Finally, the teacher Ben Azzai found a principle even more fundamental in the words: "This is the story of humanity: when God created us, God made us in His likeness."

The summaries are simple and direct. But life is complicated and oblique. There are times when we have to wonder: is the Golden Rule an adequate guide for all conduct?

I went to a sectarian college where rules were rules and the student handbook recorded almost as many regulations as the Old Testament 613. Alcohol was strictly forbidden on campus, and they meant it: a Korean exchange student was summarily expelled for cooking with wine. Men and women were encouraged not to sit close enough to touch, and the handbook strictly forbade “public displays of affection.” But public displays of animosity, as I enjoyed pointing out to the dean, were not explicitly banned and often erupted on the soccer field.

And, in the necessarily oxymoronic atmosphere that existed on a Christian campus in the psychedelic sixties, the rules were often contradictory. Eastern Baptist College in 1968 may have been the only institution of higher learning in the U.S. where the religion department taught Darwinian evolution and the biology department promoted creationism. I was always proud of that eccentricity, but it was confusing. The Eastern Baptist College disparities made it anyone’s guess how the rules of Christian conduct might be stated in a simple, declarative sentence.

Then at the very end of my senior year, I took my first course in philosophy under Dr. Peter Genco, a black-bearded mensch whose dissertation was rumored to have proven the existence of God. Among the text books we studied was Situation Ethics, The New Morality (1966, Westminster Press) by Joseph Fletcher, a medical ethicist who, more interestingly, was an Episcopal priest turned atheist. The book was, for me, an apotheosis of philosophical discovery because it offered an enticing formula to guide ethical behavior.

Simply put, the greatest commandment of Fletcher’s domain was love. Ethical behavior was measured by the amount of love expended in the process. The more love you showed, the more ethical was your behavior.

The idea made ethics quantifiable and opened doors traditionally shut to nice Christians. I’m talking about sex.

Fletcher offered four situations in which ethical behavior might be contrary to conventional morality but would be okay depending on the amount of love you showed. The greater the amount of love, he said, the more ethical your behavior.

Given the hormones flushing through my 20-something arteries, the idea was most appealing.

One of the examples Fletcher cited (it may or may not have been a real-life story) involved Mrs. Bergmeier, a German woman caught in the cataclysm of the Second World War. She was picked up by a Soviet Army patrol one day while foraging for food for her three children and sent to a prisoner of war camp in the Ukraine. Her husband, after rounding up the children, spent months in a desperate search for her. In the Ukraine, Mrs. Bergmeier learned that her family was looking for her but Soviet rules would not allow her to be released unless she was pregnant. A friendly camp officer graciously offered to help and before long the expectant Mrs. Bergmeier was released to her family.

That worked for me. Here was Mrs. Bergmeier and the generous camp officer, each loving their neighbor as themselves. And wasn’t this extra-marital coitus an expression of the purest kind of love?

Actually, Fletcher doesn’t say. He leaves that to his readers to figure out. Professor Genco, as I recall, was having none of it. “Sex,” he said, “requires three magic words: ‘I take thee.’” Without a lifetime commitment to your partner, sex is a sin. So went the official line of the Eastern Baptist College faculty. But would it also be a sin for Mrs. Bergmeier to remain morally pure but separated from her children? Again, Fletcher doesn’t say. You tell me. It’s an ethical dilemma.

Every Sunday morning before church, I do a quick scan of the New York Times Magazine, especially “The Ethicist” column by Ariel Kaminer. Each week, the ethically challenged seek Ms. Kaminer’s advice. It’s fun to guess what solution she may suggest for each moral quandary.

Not long ago, the following letter appeared:

I smoke a fair amount of marijuana. Sometimes I ask my friends if they want me to pick up weed for them as well, in which case they give me the money upfront. As with any other commodity, prices are usually cheaper when buying in bulk. I will often not give the change to my friends and instead use those few dollars to further my own discount. Is this unethical? I’m the one going through the effort of gathering buyers and conducting the illegal transaction. Or does that just make me a drug dealer? NAME WITHHELD

The letter made me choke on my coffee. Here, under the guise of neighborliness and with a sensible entrepreneurial spirit, this dude was trying to justify illegal activity. How do you rationalize that? Smoking weed doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t love God. But is the writer treating his neighbors as he would want to be treated himself? Is he violating the golden rule?

Ethicist Ariel Kaminer saw right through him:

The size of someone’s commission doesn’t make him a drug dealer. What does? Same thing that makes someone a Toyota dealer: acting as a go-between on a commercial transaction involving a producer and consumers. So you’re a dealer — one with a distinctly mellow business plan but no doubt lots of friends.

She added:

Opinions abound, of course, about the ethics of buying drugs in the first place, based on the right to pursue your own pleasures, the risk of supporting narcoterrorism, the damage that drugs can do, the damage that the war on drugs can do, the duty to obey the law, the duty to oppose the law and so on. But that’s not what you’re asking about. You’re asking about your cut.

If nothing else, this example from “The Ethicist” shows how far some people will go to justify their behavior.

It also suggests how difficult it is to make ethical decisions, even if all 613 biblical laws are digested into that seemingly effortless phrase:

‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. ”This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

On these two commandments, Jesus said, hang all the law and the prophets. But they are not like the cheese cracker commercial in which a plain cracker is magically infused with 613 pounds of cheese so that you get all that cheesiness in one tasty bite. And you know, if you’ve actually tasted the cracker, it’s not that cheesy.

In the same way, infusing 613 laws into a single phrase isn’t going to make it equally potent. You have to know a little bit about the laws that are being summarized. You can’t love God and love your neighbor without some understanding of what that kind of love is all about.

As Fairchild (hereby appropriately credited) once preached:

Jesus loved God - and he loved the world that God made.  All of it. And so he came among us as a servant rather than as a master, as one who forgives and heals rather than as one who judges and destroys; as one who made himself poor so that others might be made rich; as one who was obedient to God - even when obedience meant he would suffer and die; as one who trusted that God would judge rightly and reward those who lived by faith. You know that God first loved us. That God is with you even now to fulfill all his promises. Our response should be to walk humbly with God - and to do justice and love mercy, trusting in God’s great mercy by which we are born anew to a living hope.

The greatest commandment is not a substitute for the law. It is a reminder of what the law and the prophets are about. It is a reminder of what love is all about.

And, most important of all, it is a reminder that neither the greatest commandment nor the 613 laws it summarizes will be worth anything unless they guide us to the love of Christ, and to the understanding that it is easiest to love Christ when we remember that he first loved us.

Caesar Fever

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, ‘Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? ’But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.’ And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’ They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away. (Matthew 22:15-22)

The first I remember hearing that story was in 1956, when Daisy Jo Morrison read it to our Sunday school class in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. Daisy Jo was nubile and cute and triggered pre-pubescent stirrings in us 10 year old boys. Mostly I remember the way her lips formed the words, “I Would Be True,” which was hymn 180 in our little red hymnals. She’d lead the singing nearly every Sunday and we responded with wistful lisps, as if it were a futile lovers’ pact.

But I digress. The biblical reference to a coin attracted my attention because I knew the value of money. A dime could be exchanged for an thick Superman comic book at Dougherty’s Drug Store, and when I wasn’t absorbed with Daisy Jo’s evangelical tools I was trying to imagine what a biblical coin looked like. The Indian head nickels in the collection plate were possible clues, but I suspected they looked little like the coinage carried by Pharisees. So I wondered.

Naturally, there was no way to Google the Caesarian coin; Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t even born in 1956.

But now we live in an age of instant gratification where a few well-chosen keystrokes will fill the computer screen with pregnant links. Hundreds of photos of 2,000 year-old Roman coins appear to satisfy any numismatist’s curiosity, and so do links to thousands of articles about the Caesar who reigned in Jesus’ time: Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus.

Historians refer to him more simply as Tiberius, to distinguish him from his predecessor emperors whose names he acquired to show his superior pedigree.

Daisy Jo Morrison never went into this kind of detail and perhaps it was just as well. I don’t know how the other kids imagined Caesar, but my image was of President Eisenhower in a toga: ancient, smiling, bald, and good. When Jesus told the Pharisees to “render unto Caesar,” I didn’t consider that to be a bad thing. Probably my parents did the same thing, rendering their offering unto the collection plate every Sunday and unto Ike every April 15. It sounded like a reasonable plan to me.

But – and it’s a big but – Tiberius may have been a soldier-statesman, but he was no benign Ike. Those of us of a certain age learned all that in 1978, when I, Claudius – a BBC television adaptation of Robert Grave’s two novels on the first Roman emperors – appeared on PBS. Tiberius was convincingly portrayed as a paranoid, dispeptic, sadistic and homicidal wacko by George Baker, MBE, a British actor and writer who, in real life, was very nice. (Baker, 80, died October 7.)

Historians generally agree that Tiberius was not nice, although it’s hard to be sure because accounts of the emperors were written by either their friends or their enemies, both of whom were known to distort their anecdotes for devious ends.

Even so, we probably know more about Tiberius that either Jesus or the Pharisees knew when they beheld the Emperor’s countenance on a dinarius. Tiberius was the son of Livia, the second wife of the Emperor Augustus. At Livia’s insistence, Augustus adopted Tiberius, thus placing him among several possible successors to the throne. Livia moved to strengthen her son’s position by convincing Augustus to order Tiberius to marry the emperor’s daughter, Julia. This made it necessary for Tiberius to divorce his wife Vipsania Agrappina, whom he loved dearly. A marble bust of Vipsania, although missing her nose, suggests she was quite beautiful.

But Tiberius hated his new wife, Julia, and the forced marriage appears to have sent him on a downward spire. He declared he had no desire to be emperor, but by the time Augustus expired, all Tiberius’ rivals had been killed or died of what may have been natural causes. The way Robert Graves tells it, Livia arranged to have her son’s competitors poisoned or otherwise removed. It makes a better story, but the historical evidence is unavailable.

Once Tiberius ascended to the throne, he seems to have lost interest in politics. He eventually retired to Capri, where he pursued a life of sexual depravity. He delegated most of his power to a soldier crony, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who ruled despotically in Rome. Sejanus, as admirers of the PBS series know, was played by Sir Patrick Stewart, better known for his later role as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Sejanus eventually plotted against Tiberius so the emperor had him removed and executed. The rest of Tiberius’ reign was a blood bath of debauchery.

When Jesus was shown a coin with Tiberius’ likeness, he was looking at one of history’s most evil villains. In that context, an invocation to “render unto Caesar” sounds like an encouragement to aid and abet.

The question is whether Jesus’ is saying citizens have equal obligations to the church and their government. The problem is, both institutions are equally imperfect.

Once during the Vietnam War I helped prepare a young man to present a biblical case to his draft board to obtain conscientious objector status. “I told (the board) that Jesus said to turn the other cheek and love your enemy,” the young man reported later. “They said, ‘Jesus also said to render unto Caesar, and military service is how you’ll do that.’”

Throughout history there have been good Caesars and bad Caesars, and it seems unlikely Jesus intends us to render unto all of them.

I was born 16 months after Adolf Hitler died, but he was one bad Caesar whose evil impact endured long after he was gone. To my knowledge, no circulating German coins ever bore his likeness, but he did appear on Reich postage stamps. In fact, so many Hitler stamps were printed that they exist as worthless curiosities. It’s gratifying to note that a stamp commemorating a German pastor who opposed him has greater value.

Pastor Martin Niemöller is well known for this Nazi era statement:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

The Nazis came for Niemöller in 1937 after he became the leader of a group of German clergy opposed to Hitler. He was sent to the Sachsenhausen and later to the Dachau concentration camps until he was released by the Allies in 1945. He was charged with “not being enthusiastic” in his support for the Nazi regime. The crime was actually a capital offense. His most famous colleague, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hanged at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. But Niemöller never wavered, and he remained under the constant threat of death at Dachau until he was liberated by the Allies in 1945. He became a president of the World Council of Churches when the ecumenical body was formed in 1948.

One of the most powerful tributes to Niemöller is a play written by Gordon C. Bennett, retired professor of language arts at then Eastern Baptist College: God is My Fuehrer, a dramatic interpretation of the life of Martin Niemöller. Written in the midst of the Vietnam era, the play is Bennett’s testimony that a Christian’s highest authority is God in Christ, not governments and certainly not draft boards.

The play is out of print, but its impact on my life has been long-lasting. I took several courses from Gordon between 1968 and 1970, and I recall his research involved a trip to Germany where he met with Niemöller. Gordon has spent his entire life as a witness for peace, rendering unto God the things that are God’s.

I never met Martin Niemöller, but I had colleagues at the World Council of Churches who knew him well. I think what makes him such an impressive figure is his ordinariness: soft spoken, small in stature, with unexceptional aims. He admitted that he supported Hitler when he first came to power, “mostly because I yearned for a return of the Kaiser.” But once it became clear that Hitler sought to take God’s place at the center of national life, Niemöller turned away from Caesar and never looked back.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus’ statement reverberates throughout history, not only as an ingenious rhetorical device to avoid a lawyerly trap but as a clear affirmation of what Baptists have historically maintained: the state and church must be kept separate.

That way, when the state begins to stray from the commands of God, it is easier to remember that Caesar’s authority is not equal to God’s: not in A.D. 30. Not in 1940.  Not now.

“For it is, and must remain the case,” Martin Niemöller said, “that we must obey God rather than human beings.”