On Commending Dishonesty When It Works

Updated.

Division and Fire

 
Luke 12:49-56

Jesus said:

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:49-53)

Oh, boy. 

Last week Jesus was calling us “little flock” and assuring us it is the Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom. (Luke 12:32). This week he’s bringing fire and division to the earth, and he describes a household that sounds like an extended family’s combative Thanksgiving dinner in the age of Trump.

We know Jesus’ life on earth was replete with many opponents and divisions. The devil challenged him in the wilderness, The members of the Nazareth synagogue tried throw him off a cliff. The Pharisees tried to catch him in legal conundrums. His own family thought he was crazy and tried to have him taken away. 

Now he is telling his disciples that the divisions will get worse as he brings fire – presumably a metaphorical fire, but who knows? – to the earth.

How we wish Jesus was still offering words of comfort to his “little flock.”

But if we look back on two millennia of church history we see he has a point. Since the earliest days, division and fire have been the most constant threads in church history.

So it was when his mother Mary realized what God was saying in her womb: “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:51b-53.)

So it was when the baby Jesus was presented in the temple and Simeon declared to Mary, “This child 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 a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” (Luke 2:34-35)

So it was years later when the first of Jesus’ followers came to loggerheads over whether uncircumcised gentiles could be Christians.

So it was in the first centuries of the church when factions and heresies developed over the very nature of Jesus and who he was: adoptionism which said Jesus was a human being who was “adopted” by God as his conception; Nestorianism, which said Jesus had two natures – man and God – which remained separate when he walked the earth; Docetism which said Jesus was not a real human being but only appeared so to those around him; and many more, all declared heresies that had to be corrected by the Nicene Creed adopted by the first Council of Nicaea in the year 325.

So it was during the Catholic Church’s Western Schism in the 14th century when popes and antipopes competed for power in Europe.

So it was when Martin Luther’s 95 theses led to the Protestant reformation in the 16th century, forever dividing the church.

And so it was when Lutherans splintered along ethnic lines: German Lutherans, Norwegian Lutherans, Swedish Lutherans, liberal Lutherans, Missouri Synod Lutherans.

Were it not for divisions and schisms, the church would not be what it is today.

Are these the divisions Jesus promised to bring with flames?

I spent several years on the staff of the World Council of Churches and the U.S. National Council of Churches. For both councils, Christian unity was an idealistic goal. The staffs spent much of their time preparing resources for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, an event that is observed each January in concert with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The prayers for unity have not been entirely successful. It has never been possible for all Christians to sit down together at the Lord’s common table to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Catholic churches will not allow Protestant Christians to receive the Eucharist. Most Orthodox churches, even those who are members of the World and National Councils, will never sit down with other members to receive the blood and body of Christ. And as we all know, many Protestant churches and congregations bar non-members from the communion table.

Too, the churches cannot agree on styles of baptism – dripping or dunking – and Catholics, Orthodox, Pentecostals, and others refuse to ordain women as pastors and bishops, no matter how clear the call of the Holy Spirit may be.

The divisions are exhausting.

But are they exhausting because, as Jesus said, we do not know how to interpret the present time? (Luke 12:56)

It is a maxim of our time that our country has not been so alienated – politically and spiritually – since the Civil War.

What do we make of the rising clouds, the south wind, the scorching heat that are signs of our times?

For many years we have been feeling the scorching heat:

The heat of sisters and brothers in many of our churches who support political views based on lies, white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, and ethnic hatreds.

The heat of white supremacist crowds marching through the streets of Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

The heat of racially motivated attacks and mass shootings aimed at African Americans, Muslims, Sikhs, Asians, Jews, and others.

The heat of persons on the far political right who threaten violence and even call for an armed civil war against properly elected leaders with whom they disagree, and against legitimate law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and local police.

The heat of popular media, including Fox News and a plethora of bloggers and talk radio jockeys, who spread lies so huge and so often that some people come to believe them.

Lies like: the 2020 election was stolen, inspiring thousands of people to storm the U.S. Capitol to threaten to kill the Vice president and other government officials in a violent coup attempt.

Are these facts too political for a sermon?

Many preachers have thought so.

Many preachers have kept quiet about these events in the name of Christian unity. Politics, they say, have no place in church. They threaten to stop giving to the church, they threaten to leave the church. It is better to be silent, many preachers feel, in order to keep the congregation calm and together.

Yet why would we be silent about a political movement based on lies, white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, and ethnic hatreds.

Is this silence consistent with the teachings of Jesus?

“I came to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus said, “and how I wish it were already kindled. I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:49-50)

When Jesus talks about fire, we know very well he is not referring to the glowing logs in our fireplaces on a cold night. That kind of fire soothes us and makes us sleepy. It lulls us to quiet inaction when we are surrounded by threats and dangers all around us.

Could it be that Jesus is calling us to feel fire in our hearts – a burning commitment to be witnesses for justice?

Professor Jerusha Matsen Neal quotes the poet Mary Oliver in her book, What I Have Learned So far.

The fire Jesus brings “is a fire that, like Simeon’s piercing prophecy to Mary, tests the heart – revealing the thoughts of many and calling for a baptism of commitment.

“Oliver minces no words:

“’Be Ignited or begone.’”

As we strive to represent God’s truth and Jesus’ love amid the divisions and dangers of our times, may God give us the courage to be ignited.

What Will Jesus Find?

In today’s Gospel, Jesus’ message may be a little confusing. Is he telling us to fear not? Or is he telling us to be prepared?

I’ve always thought that Jesus’ assurances in Luke 12:32 are among the most comforting words he utters:

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

But this is followed by a caveat or two:

Sell your possessions so no thief can break in and steal them. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (12:34)

And keep the lights on so you can open the door for your master when he returns from a wedding banquet, and the master will be so pleased he will feed you and serve you. (12:36-37)

And be constantly vigilant against thieves so your house will not be broken into. (12:39)

“You also must be ready,” Jesus warns, “for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” (12:40)

What do we make of these decidedly mixed metaphors?

Jerusha Matsen Neal, assistant professor of homiletics at Duke University Divinity School, offers this observation:

“The movie Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy (2011) is a puzzle of shifting espionage identities and double agents,” Dr. Neal writes. 

“What one sees is rarely what one gets. This week’s passage is full of shifting identities, as well. How else to explain a reading where a thief is described as both a threat (12:33) and creation’s salvation (12:39-40)? How else to account for metaphors that keep shapeshifting from verse to verse—particularly in relation to the Divine? One might call this week’s reading: Shepherd, Master, Servant, Thief.”

My mother, a Presbyterian elder, was determined to be prepared for that unexpected hour when the Lord returns. She kept the beds made, the dishes washed, and floors swept so the Lord would not suddenly appear and catch her with a messy house.

Of course my mother also sought to be spiritually prepared and she made sure her five children said their prayers at night and were scrubbed clean for Sunday worship at the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y.

But my mother’s strenuous preparedness made me wonder if she was anxious about the Lord’s return. Would he enter houses with white gloves to check for dust and untidiness? Would he suddenly appear when my brothers and I were pummeling each other on the living room floor and shout, “GOTCHA!”? What, indeed, were we to expect about the Lord’s return?

Clearly adults are not the only ones struggling with this question I first heard the joke in 1960 as my fellow adolescents were sitting around a campfire at Pathfinder Lodge, a Baptist camp near Cooperstown, N.Y.

“The good news is that Jesus is back.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“He’s pissed.”

This sounded dangerously impious to seventh graders and the counselor’s silent disapproval was accentuated by the snapping firewood and the gyres of sparks in the humid darkness. The censorious face of a counselor looks satanic in the red glow so we’d cautiously tongue our smores until the evening ended with choruses of kum-bah-yah and we could escape to our tents. There, we’d repeat the hazardous joke and squeal with laughter.

Actually, this is more a hermeneutic than a joke. It’s a brief, two-part sermon with yawning theological depth.

It forces us to ask ourselves: what is there in our world to gladden the heart of a returning savior?

Certainly if Jesus came back this morning and beheld the divisions and strife in our country – the proliferation of guns, the political lies, the racial and ethnic hatred - he would be enraged by our rigid inability to put his greatest commandment into practice: love God and love your neighbor. 

It would be a mistake to think Jesus is neutral about this brazen desecration of the great commandment. 

We might glance wistfully at pastel portrayals on our Sunday school walls, of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” the Jesus who tiptoes through the tulips with his entourage of happy children and docile lambs, and tell ourselves that anger is beneath him. 

But scripture makes it plain that Jesus had a temper that he could unleash with a righteous fury in the face of ignorance and hate. He scorned the self-important scribes as poseurs who “devour widows’ houses” (Luke 20:47). He denounced Pharisees and Lawyers as “full of greed and wickedness” (Luke 11:39), called them hypocrites” (Matthew 23:13), “blind guides,” “blind fools” (Matthew 23:16, 17), castigated them as  “brood of vipers” and asked how they could escape being sentenced to hell (Matthew 23:33). He condemned whole villages that rejected him, and predicted an intolerable judgment that would drag them en masse to hell (Luke 10:15). Most famously, he physically drove the money changers out of the temple, calling them “robbers” (Mark 11:17, Matthew 21:12-13).

Who, then, would escape the fury of Jesus?

We might figure that out by looking at the types of persons Jesus hung around with, some of whom are specifically named and others inferred: Pharisees (there were some he liked), tax collectors, officers of the despised Roman occupation, poor people, blind people, lepers, thieves, scoundrels, whores, adulterers, idolaters, LGBTQ persons, and Samaritans (e.g., persons perceived as having an intolerable religion akin to Muslims, Sikhs or Buddhists). When Jesus returns, we can be sure he will not waste time delineating between indigenous peoples and Mayflower descendants. But he will certainly be annoyed if he finds us arguing over which of us is legal and which is not.

And who made Jesus angry? The rich, the powerful, the upper classes, the religious elite, anyone who posed as superior to or exercised power over the persons Jesus loved most.

It’s a fair guess that when Jesus returns he will be angriest at the staunchly ignorant and hateful: persons who deem themselves to be in a higher class than others, persons who deem themselves to be a superior race, white supremacists who sing songs of hate that invite other ignoramuses to join the battle against people of color, or – the list is interminable – Westboro Baptist Church and its insane homophobia. (Perhaps you’ve seen the widely posted sermonette on social media: “Live your life in such a way that Westboro Baptist Church will want to picket your funeral.”)

Some haters are so whack that Jesus might actually take their dysfunction into consideration. He might be inclined to cut the incredibly ignorant some slack because, well, because of their incredible ignorance. 

But would the rest of us be so fortunate?

Jesus has taught us to love one another unconditionally, as God loves each of us. That does make you worry how Jesus will react to the vast majority of us Christians who can’t quite manage to love one another. For most of us, one of life’s greatest challenges is to tolerate persons we can’t stand. 

In my years as a church and newspaper journalist, I had ample opportunities to observe and participate in activities that must have angered Jesus.

I’ve seen congregations split for all sorts of reasons, most of them stemming from the inability of members to “live in love, as Christ loved us” (Ephesians 5:2). Of course churches come apart at the seams over issues of theology or pastoral leadership, but they have also divided over the color of paint in the sanctuary, the style of choir gowns, the artistic quality of banners, the timing of potluck suppers, the casting of the Christmas pageant, the animals chosen for the crèche, and the temperature of the coffee. 

Some of these childish divisions might actually make Jesus smile. Other foibles of human behavior may be less amusing and more destructive, such as family feuds, relationship betrayals, vicious gossip, rumor mongering, jealousy, office treachery, and condescension toward all. 

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the rowdy Christians at Ephesus, summarized rules for behavior based on the simple command to love one another:

“Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4:29-32)

These are familiar words about niceness, but what if we take them seriously? If this is the standard of Christian behavior Jesus expects, the joke takes on deeper meaning: Jesus is back, and he’s mad.

If you generalize this standard of behavior to recent human history, it gets worse. Let’s pick an arbitrary date that has special interest to Americans and Europeans: 1492. That was ostensibly the year the Americas were discovered by European sailors with a missionary zeal to bring the aboriginal peoples to Christ. On the island of Hispaniola, 90 percent of native Tainos were dead by 1519 because the European Christians brought them the gifts of small pox and slavery. Somehow the Christians, who reputedly traveled with their bibles, missed the bit about being kind to one another.

As time went on, the concept of divine right of kings had effectively squashed any notion of Christian kindness. Henry VIII (1509-1547), after defying the church to divorce two wives who bored him and execute two more who annoyed him, tried to win back God’s favor by making it a capital offense to believe the Eucharistic host was merely bread. Perhaps these out-of-control megalomaniacs had already formed in their minds the excuse Dostoyevsky posited in Crime and Punishment (1866): that God placed some humans so far above their fellows that they need not adhere to biblical standards of behavior. It worked for Napoleon (1769-1841) but, as any literature major knows, not for Raskolnikov. (Read the book.) 

But there’s no point to trying to name history’s worst Christians. The list has no end, and there are days when it includes me.

So I contend the case is adequately made to support this theological syllogism:

Jesus is coming; Jesus is mad.

So what are we going to do when the trumpet sounds up yonder? Hide?

My instinct is to recall those moments of my youth (and perhaps a little older than my youth) when I realized I had really screwed up. I had broken a rule so fundamental, so inviolable, that no forgiveness was possible. 

Dare I confess it? When I was 17, I stole my father’s tractor to haul some discarded wood beams across town to a small cave, where my spelunking pals and I thought we could build a wooden doorway.

It didn’t work. The entrance to this cave was pure mud and bats, and no amount of lumber was going to change that. So we packed up the wagon and I drove the tractor home.

There, waiting for me at the top of the hill, was Dad. He waited for me with a red but expressionless face.

Jesus is back and he’s mad? Big deal. This was serious. This was my dad, and he was clearly annoyed. My impulse was to run. Maybe Dad’s impulse was to slap me upside the face, which – truth be told – would have been justified.

But what I remember about this incident, in addition to the horror of being caught, is that it ended okay. He didn’t kill me. He didn’t slap me upside the face. He just gave me one of those sad, disappointed looks that I remember to this day: the look of a father who loved me so much that his disappointment in my bad behavior was more painful for him than for me.

That, I suspect, is the kind of anger with which Jesus is returning. He’ll be mad. He’ll be hurt at our behavior. But his love for us will be the same.

Henry M. Nouwen wrote: 

“Jesus’ whole life was a witness to his Father's love, and Jesus calls his followers to carry on that witness in his Name.  We, as followers of Jesus, are sent into this world to be visible signs of God’s unconditional love.  Thus we are not first of all judged by what we say but by what we live.  When people say of us:  ‘See how they love one another,’ they catch a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that Jesus announced and are drawn to it as by a magnet.”

It’s not going to be easy. There are still going to be people we can’t stand. There are still temptations we can’t ignore. There is still the potential that we will make terrible mistakes, errors that will make Jesus mad.

But “in a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred,” Nouwen writes, “We have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.”

Jesus is coming. And we sense the possibility that he is coming in anger.

But even more important: Jesus is coming in love. Jesus is coming with the message that God, who prepares a place us, loves us – all of us – unconditionally and endlessly.

May Jesus take loving note of our futile efforts to “put away all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander … and to be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven us.”

And may we never cease our efforts to be seekers of sometimes impossible standards, to be members of a tiny sleeper cell of love amid all the hatred and cruelty and pain that surrounds us.

Fathers

Sermon prepared for Epiphany Lutheran Church in the Bronx, July 24, 2022.

How old were you when you first learned the “Our Father” – the Lord’s Prayer?

I had not yet entered kindergarten when my parents thought it good to teach me the prayer Jesus taught his disciples.

Before that – and this was in the late 1940s – my parents had me kneeling beside my bed each night in my pajamas to pray a nursery rhyme:

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Die?

Before I wake?

That was a confusing and frightening idea for a four-year-old.  My thoughtful parents diluted the prayer to make it less scary.

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. May angels spread protecting wings above my bed.”

Too late.

My parents would have been appalled to realize my pre-K contemporaries had already updated the prayer.

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, Alka-Seltzer’s what to take.”

My parents moved quickly to discard the whole now-I-lay-me theme. They figured that if I was old enough to memorize dialogue from the Howdy Doody Show I was old enough to memorize seven or eight lines taught by Jesus.

My mother would kneel beside my siblings and me and have us quietly repeat each line until we knew the whole prayer by heart. She taught us the Matthew 6 version of the prayer that is slightly longer than the Luke 11 version that is before us today. And she taught the Protestant version that adds a modified doxology after “deliver us from evil; for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.”

By the time my siblings and I were in primary school we were reciting the Lord’s prayer along with the whole congregation of the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. This church had Baptist roots so we said “forgive us our debts.” Just up the street the Methodist congregation said “forgive us our trespasses,” which could be confusing because I had been taught that trespassing was climbing over our neighbor’s fence to retrieve an errant baseball. But it was also reassuring to know God forgives trespassing because our neighbor certainly did not.

Probably Jesus taught the prayer in Aramaic, an ancient language that is rarely heard today except in the Syrian Orthodox Church. I love to hear Syrian congregations recite the prayer in Aramaic, not because I understand it but because I’m hearing the same sounds and rhythms that Jesus used two millennia ago. 

As we know, the Gospels were written many years after Jesus walked the earth. The Gospel writers never heard Jesus say the words of the prayer and no one wrote them down as he said them. If Jesus used the rabbinic style of rote teaching, that is, having his students repeat and repeat lessons until they memorized them, it’s not unreasonable to assume we have a pretty good summary of what he actually said. Scholars will continue to examine this and offer opinions as to which words of Jesus actually came out of his mouth and which were reconstructed best guesses.

Back in my Baptist days I occasionally visited a liberal congregation that had its own way of interpreting the Lord’s Prayer. In an effort to degenderize the Creator of the Universe they changed the opening of the prayer to read, “Our Mother and our Father …”

Perhaps their hearts were in the right place, but of all the words in the Lord’s Prayer, the ones deemed most authentic are “Abba,” Our Father. I had a colleague who was greatly amused that this well-meaning congregation had blithely discarded the only words of the prayer that are universally accepted as the true words of Jesus: “Our Father …”

This, of course, was the main point Jesus wanted his disciples to hear: the loving Fatherhood of God who, like a loving parent, desires to meet all our needs and offers us models of behavior in our human relationships.

When the New Revised Standard Version of the bible was being prepared in the 1980s the editors were challenged to publish the most accurate possible translation of scripture. In doing so they took care to note when Jesus was addressing only men (as was often the case with his disciples) and to note when Jesus was addressing women and men together (as when he preached to the crowds). As the editors were wrestling with these issues they heard from many women and not a few men who said they had much difficulty with the loving father metaphor of the Creator of the Universe. Many of these women had been abused by their fathers and husbands and, for them, the concept of God as Father was off-putting and frightening.

Pastor Niveen Sarras of the Lutheran Church of Wausau, Wisconsin, writes that many of Jesus’ contemporaries also had unpleasant views of fatherhood.

As we know, Luke is primarily addressing a non-Christian audience.

“Luke’s Gentile Christian audience’s experience with their fathers differs from their Jewish counterparts,” Pastor Sarras notes.

“The fathers in the Greco-Roman culture enjoyed complete control over their children and grandchildren. For example, a father decides whether his newborn child will be raised in the family, sold, or killed. Luke introduces the Gentiles to God, who is generous, loving, and attentive to God’s children’s needs. Luke changes his audience’s perspective on fatherhood by presenting God as 'the Father who cares for his children and acts redemptively on their behalf.' The father-child relationship is based on the confidence of the child. This relationship is centered on love, not fear. God the Father in the New Testament is a personal, intimate, sacred, and trusted authority.”

God the Father – Abba – is a parent full of unconditional love for us. It’s sad when our human fathers become bad examples of this love, even to the extent of making a mockery of it through cruelty and abuse. If the idea of “father” makes some people cringe, it’s our duty to listen to them, understand their pain, and pray that God’s true love will break through the emotional scar tissue to reveal what Jesus means when he says “Our Father.”

When Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them to pray, his first lesson was this:

Remember God loves you. Never be afraid to approach God in Prayer. And be persistent about it.

These are the footnotes to Jesus’ teaching:

“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Luke 11:9-13)

 Because God is love.

 And when we pray, pray like this.

Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.” (Luke 11:2-4)

God is love.

Bye Piggy Piggy

Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. Luke 8:32-33

We bible buffs have read this passage too often to grasp its full meaning or to realize how appalling it is.

I mean, we’re talking demons and pigs here – a legion of fiends and two thousand filthy, stinking, snorting, disgusting pigs. 

If you think about it, this dramatis personae has the making of a summer blockbuster similar to World War Z  or Dawn of the Dead.  

But this is more than a repulsively thrilling story. It is a reminder that dark forces share our world with us, spirits and demons exist, and Jesus has power over the forces of evil.

Jesus is fairly casual in his response to the man whose soul has been displaced by hundreds of foul demons. 

Frankly, most of us are ambivalent about the notion of demon possession. In the 1973 thriller The Exorcist,  I was horrified by the vivid scenes of a little girl possessed by a hideous demon, but I stepped out of the darkened theater and reminded myself, “Of course demons don’t exist.”

These days, exorcisms are rare and most experts regard demonic behavior as the manifestation of schizophrenia, sociopathic personality, or bi-polar syndrome. 

But to most of us, it’s hard to dismiss the possibility that dangerously crazy people are controlled by demons. How else can we explain why fiends take guns into theaters, elementary school classrooms, or political rallies?

In 1970, a young German woman named Anneliese Michel began hearing voices that told her she was damned and going to hell. As her condition worsened, she saw Satan’s face leering at her several times a day. 

When anti-psychotic drugs had no effect, Anneliese and her parents concluded she was possessed by a demon. They dismissed the doctors and hired two priest exorcists. According to one account, 67 exorcism sessions lasting up to four hours, were performed for ten months. 

During the grueling process, Anneliese refused to eat and died at her home. The autopsy stated the cause of death as malnutrition and dehydration from almost a year of semi-starvation while exorcisms were performed. She weighed 68 pounds at death. Both Anneliese’s parents and the priest exorcists were charged with negligent homicide.

But the question won’t go away: was Anneliese possessed like the demoniac Jesus confronted? Or did she have a mental illness that could have been cured by psychopharmacology?

The incident with the demoniac on the Sea of Galilee also stimulates modern skepticism about miracle cures and faith healing. There are those who believe stories of Jesus’ miracles were made up by the evangelists for dramatic effect, or if people were really cured, it was accomplished by Jesus’ charismatic powers of suggestion.

In a bygone episode of  NPR’s Radio Lab  hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich guided listeners through the Placebo Effect. This is a well-known phenomenon in which people are cured by the power of suggestion. Anecdotes included tales of witch doctors who knew they were using trickery in their trade but cured people of their illnesses anyway. The hosts interviewed a woman whose carpal tunnel syndrome was cured – temporarily – by an evangelical faith healer.

But the program suggested the placebo effect also happens outside of faith settings. A physician reported his experience with the electrodes that are implanted in the brain to halt the hand tremors of Parkinson’s Disease. The doctor said he would tell the patient he was sending a mild current through the implants that would cause the tremors stop. And so it would. But when he failed to send the current and didn't tell the patients, their tremors also stopped.

All these accounts are enough to make one downright skeptical. Demons don’t exist. Miracle cures are a psychosomatic, mere figments of the mind. There no mysteries left in life. How boring is that?

]Thank God for the pigs. These disgusting and certainly unwilling players are convincing evidence that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our feeble philosophies.

The story appears in all three synoptic gospels: Jesus converses coolly with a man full of demons.  The eerie scene forces us to face the possibility of eternal damnation, where unredeemed sinners darn socks that smell.

The man’s demons frankly terrify us mere mortals, but it is immediately clear that the demons are terrified of Jesus. Shouting out to him in a monstrous chorus, they beg him not to cast them back into hell.

Instead, they spy a herd of two thousand pigs – as if one could miss a herd of two thousand pigs in Israel – and beg Jesus to cast them into the belching, farting creatures.

Two thousand pigs.

I can’t even imagine a herd that big. Never in my life have I seen so many pigs in one place. 

Even one pig is too protuberant to ignore. In Cuba, many of our relatives and their friends keep a prize hog in a pen behind their tiny houses. The creatures are hard to miss. They serve as a convenient garbage disposal but mostly they are a hedge against starvation. A small family can eat for months on a single swine.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania I occasionally drove past roadside pits where a half dozen enormous porkers submerged themselves in fecal mud, luxuriating in orange rinds, potato peels, corncobs and other items of the compost du jour. You could smell them a mile away.

So cover your nose and try to imagine two thousand stinking pigs scattered across an acre of ground reeking with decaying dung and muck. 

The more I think about it, the more appalling the scene becomes.  

Now close your eyes and imagine two thousand pigs suddenly rousting themselves from their personal stys, shaking off chunks of half-chewed garbage from their sodden jaws. Listen the deafening roar as eight thousand cloven hooves assault the muck and the beasts violently jostle one another as they charge off the precipice into the lake.  Watch as the impact of the monstrous herd churns geysers of fetid water high into the air as pigs drown in the lake without so much as a “th- th- that’s all folks.”

]Is there a more bizarre scene in all of scripture? Certainly no scene in Man of Steel is messier, louder, or more expensive to produce.

But bizarre or not, one has to ask: who could make up such a thing? The story of Jesus, the demoniac and the pigs captured the attention of thousands of people and it was passed down by oral tradition for dozens of years until it arrived intact in three separate gospels.

The reason the story remains unchallenged two thousand years later is that it has the ring of truth. The unmistakable message:

The dark side exists, and it is populated with atrocious demons and hideous fiends.

The thunderous massacre of two thousand pigs got everyone’s attention, then and now.

Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him. Luke 8:37-39.

Two thousand years later, the message is clear: 

God has given Jesus the ultimate authority over us all: the good, the righteous, the weak, the tempted, even the repugnant creatures of the nether regions.

And those who bask in the warmth of that authority will always have Jesus’ protection from the evil one. 

And they will safely reside forever in the presence of the God of infinite love. 

So You Don't Understand The Trinity

Sermon prepared for Trinity Sunday, June 12, Epiphany Lutheran Church, Bronx, N.Y.

Maybe he said it, maybe not, but President Kennedy gets credit for it on coffee cups sold at the JFK library:

“There are three things that are real, God, human folly, and laughter; the first two things are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.”

It’s an above average thought for your morning coffee. It also works for Trinity Sunday.

God the incomprehensible.

Folly the impenetrable.

Laughter the consoler.

Today, Trinity Sunday, was devised by the church fathers (I use the patriarchal term advisedly) as a counterpoint to Pentecost Sunday, when the Holy Spirit gets top billing. It’s our liturgical opportunity to think of God in Three Persons:

God the Creator.

Jesus the Redeemer.

Holy Spirit the Advocate.

The doctrine of the Trinity is a basic component of Christianity. A church has to be “Trinitarian” to qualify for membership in the National and World Councils of Churches, and the notion goes back to the fourth century.

The Nicene Creed, which sprung up in the east around 325 A.D., put it like this:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible.And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten, that is of the essence of the Father. God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten and not made; of the very same nature of the Father, by Whom all things came into being, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Who for us humanity and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate, was made human, was born perfectly of the holy virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit …. We believe in the Holy Spirit, in the uncreated and the perfect; Who spoke through the Law, prophets, and Gospels; Who came down upon the Jordan, preached through the apostles, and lived in the saints.

The notion recurs in the Apostle’s Creed around 390 A.D.:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit … I believe in the Holy Spirit.

 The creedal language is metrical and beautiful. It makes you feel good to repeat it.

But understand it? Please. When was the last time you had to explain the Trinity to someone?

We’ve heard the sermons. The Trinity is the way we describe the three basic components of our relationship to God: creator, redeemer, advocate.

For 17 centuries, preachers have been devising ways to explain the Trinity to simple-minded heathens. St. Patrick, with no snakes to drive out of Ireland in the fifth century, is said to have used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity to locals. If so, he didn’t write about it, nor did anyone else until about 1726, so the legend appears to be as false as the analogy is weak.

If shamrocks don’t work, there is the classic cliché about the various roles we play in life. For example, I am a father, I am a son, I am a spouse – three different roles that call for three distinct presentations. Yet these roles do not require a trifurcation into three distinct Persons. The analogy doesn’t really help us understand the nature of the Holy Trinity.  God in three persons? Why not one God with three personalities? That might work if all three personalities were spirit, but one is flesh. That factor tempts one to haiku (which tend to be more fun too write than to read):

Can corporeal

blend incorporeally

as one in the same?

That’s where the concept becomes a conundrum, and because there are no instruments with which to take God’s true measure, the enigma deepens.

I was blessed, growing up, with three excellent pastors who succeeded one another in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. None of them held me accountable for comprehending the Trinity.

That was fortunate because I’ve never been able to fully figure out God or even ask an intelligent question that might bring me closer to an understanding.

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first wrestled with the concept of infinity. I put the question to my mother: “When did God begin?”

I’m sure Mom narrowed her eyes and squinted at me. She always squinted, in part because she loved questions like that and because by 1957 she was legally blind.

“Why don‘t we ask Mr. Irwin?” she suggested, referring to our pastor, Jack Irwin, whose intellect Mom respected.

Jack, who died of Covid last October at the age of 95, was an extraordinary pastor. During his pastorate in Morrisville he was preparing for his doctorate in philosophy at Syracuse University so he probably thought of God in Kantian or Kierkegaardian terms, seasoned with occasional Nietzschean aphorisms.

But all he said to me, when I was 11, was, “God always is. There has never been a time when God wasn’t, and there never will be.”

That is one of two full sentences I can remember from 1957 (the other being a headline from My Weekly Reader that was almost as un-packable as the concept of the Trinity: “Welcome to the International Geophysical Year!”) so it clearly had an impact on my youthful brain.

As I said, Mother thought Jack was an intellectual marvel, which he was, but Dad often said Jack’s sermons went over his head. From my point of view in junior high and early high school, Jack was a matchless communicator. The Youth Fellowship highlight of every year was Halloween when we’d prop desiccated corn shocks in the corners of the Grange Hall, turn out the lights, and sit on the floor in the dark to listen to Jack’s scary tales. In a quiet Philadelphia-accented voice, Jack would combine menacing elements of urban legends with his own chilling adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe themes and scare us to death. His stories, which I am sure he made up as he went along, were amplified with spine-tingling details that placed horrific images in our heads for the rest of our lives.  The three-dimensional zombies of modern cinema do not compare with Jack’s terrifying stories – which, incidentally, were an effective though atypical evangelical tool. Youth Fellowship became an essential place to be for the cooler Morrisville teens.

Back then it didn’t occur to me to wonder where Jack got all those frightening Halloween images. Then in 2002, he published a memoir about his World War II experiences (Another River, Another Town, a Teen Age Tank Gunner Comes of Age in Combat – 1945) that included sobering tales of combat and his eyewitness accounts of the liberation of the Nordhausen Concentration Camp. No doubt his accounts of horror in the old Grange hall paled in comparison to the horror in his head.

One of Jack Irwin’s hobbies was astronomy and Morrisville, with its northern exposure and dark winter nights, was ideal for telescopic stargazing.

One Sunday night, Jack showed the Youth Fellowship slides of planets, galaxies and nebulae he watched through his lenses. We watched transfixed as he showed us Saturn, 794 million miles from earth … the sun, 93 million miles from earth … Alpha Centauri, the closest star, 4.365 light years from earth … and galaxies so far away it would take a beam of earth light millions of years to reach it.

When the show was over and the lights were turned on, Jack leaned back in his chair and looked into our blinking eyes, one by one.

“How many of you,” he asked without drama, “have a concept of God that is as big as outer space?”

We answered with silence. Thanks to Jack, God the Creator suddenly seemed bigger to us than the white-bearded patriarch in the Michelangelo painting. In fact, God the Creator was suddenly beyond our intellectual grasp.

And that’s only one Person of the Trinity! What about the Second Person?

He was in the beginning with God,” writes John. “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. (John 1:2-3).

Here we are talking about Jesus. And the fact that Jesus was human just like us makes John’s observation as inexplicable as the God of unfathomable light years.

A lot of us find it hard to focus on the humdrum humanity of Jesus because it seems disrespectful. It’s like when Pope Paul VI had prostate surgery in 1967. The surgeons were loath to discuss the details, which might have included references to pontifical testicles and anuses, and – God and Onan forbid – might have led to hints that male masturbation could be a useful prophylactic against prostrate problems. That is far too human for comfort.

And if it’s hard to think of the pope as human, how much more forbidding is the humanity of Jesus? Imagine one sweltering Palestinian day you walk from Jericho to Jerusalem with Jesus. The sweat trickles down your cheeks. You and Jesus drink deeply at each waterhole on the journey, belching loudly as the cooling liquid soothes your gullets. And soon you and Jesus are stepping behind cedar trees to hoist your skirts and relieve yourselves. When you sit in the shade of an olive tree to rest, your robe sticks wetly to your back. Pungent underarm odor is rife, and it’s not only you; it’s radiating from Jesus, too.

If this seems a little sacrilegious, keep in mind that these are inescapable essentials of the human condition – and human is the modus operandi of the Incarnation.

Even so it’s not easy to sit next to stinky Jesus and think of him as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

John F. Kennedy was correct when he said God – like human folly – is beyond our comprehension. When you try to figure it all out, perhaps the best analgesic is to simply laugh. It is simply beyond the capacity of our human brains to grasp the nature of the creator of universes, or to comprehend the infinite love with which God assumed mere human flesh as a device for human atonement. Thinking God’s thoughts is simply beyond us.

Thank God, then (so to speak), for the Third Person of the Trinity – the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that relieves us of the burden of trying to figure it all out.

Last week we quoted Father Henri Nouwen: “The Spirit of God is like our breath. God’s spirit is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. We might not often be aware of it, but without it we cannot live a ‘spiritual life.’”

The Holy Spirit does not vest us with answers or give us special insights into the mind of God. Yet it is the Person of the Trinity that dwells within us so intimately that it connects us intimately with God the Creator and God the Redeemer.

]“It is the Holy Spirit of God who prays in us,” Nouwen writes, “who offers us the gifts of love, forgiveness, kindness, goodness, gentleness, peace and joy. It is the Holy Spirit who offers us the life that death cannot destroy.”

Just how the Creator God did it is not for us to know. And just how our brother Jesus, who shares all our glands and bunions, was present at Creation is not for us to understand.

But the Holy Spirit who dwells within each of us is the perfect connector that binds our hearts and souls (and occasionally our minds) with the Triune God.

And perceiving that, as Brother Thomas Merton said, does not require intensive brain power.

It simply requires us to be silent until, in the intimacy of our solitude, the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit will write its wonders on our hearts.

 

Sweet Holy Spirit

 

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