18 October 2009

Isaiah 53:4-12
Psalm 91:9-16
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

“I decided,” says Luke, “to write an orderly account for you . . . so that you know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

My dear Luke, I find very little in your account of Jesus of Nazareth that even begins to approach true orderliness. Yes, there is some sort of logical beginning and a logical albeit terribly odd ending; there is a chronological order if you will, but the goal you set with your word for “orderly” – well the word you use has nothing to do with chronological order. Rather, you seem to be promising an account about good, right, and proper order, but to be . . . blunt . . . I fail to see any good, right, or proper orderliness in what you’ve given us. Good order is about doing things as they should be done, with good sense, with respect, with accountability – with propriety – and that is sorely absent in your little story. What you tell about with such seeming approval is merely a recipe for chaos.

Let me explain to you, dear Luke, what I mean. Good order is based on contractual, legal arrangements that have their origin in how God and the world relate to one another. If I follow all the rules, then God will reward me. If I fail to follow the rules, then God will punish me. It’s as neat and easy as that. So look around you; the people for whom life is going well – they are the ones who have obeyed, who have done things the right way. And the people who are diseased, tormented, poor, homeless, widowed, orphaned – you name it – they are receiving the just recompense, the just punishment for their disordered lives. And these are the people from whom we must keep our distance, least they contaminate us; they must be removed from the city – even if they were once our family, our friends. Until they’ve mended their errant ways, we shall not see them, nor speak to them, nor dine with them again. And of course most of them will die in their sins, and justly, they will not receive a proper burial. Instead their diseased, disordered, and destitute bodies will be tossed into Gehenna, the ever-smoldering city dump outside Jerusalem. Now that’s orderly, that’s Good Order.

But this story of yours, Luke, ugh. It starts out with the ridiculous claims of an unwed mother, an adultress, from the cesspool town of Nazareth. Nazareth?? By law, she is should be stoned for adultery – pregnant by someone other than to the one to whom she is betrothed. And then you have her singing some absurd song about the rich being sent away empty. Listen, if it weren’t for the wealthy consumer, where would this country be? And to add to the lunacy, you say this infant of hers is God, born in a barn and worshipped by migrant workers, no doubt illiterate; I mean, come on. It’s absurd. Gods aren’t born in barns, nor are they adored by the ungodly.

And then you have this hodge-podge of so-called healing stories. First, far too many of them take place on the Sabbath – even one would be too many. But you have Jesus just blowing off those who hold him accountable; he insults them, and then he tries to make them look unreasonable. The rules are there because the Bible says so. I don’t know who’s to blame, you Luke or Jesus, but somebody has to be held responsible.

But even if Jesus hadn’t done these things on the Sabbath – well, these stories are just going to degrade the moral fiber of the nation. Your “orderly” little tale has Jesus constantly in the presence of the unclean, of foreigners, and of women. You’ve got Jesus breaking the rules just by being near these people in the first place. He comes right up to these intrinsically disordered people and he tells them to turn around and face him, and then tells them to change the way they think about who they are, he proclaims to them that they really are acceptable in the sight of God – and then he touches them or breathes on them (talk about unlawful!) – and he tells them they are healed – even though, Luke, you don’t present much evidence of any sort of change. This Jesus of yours doesn’t get them to promise they’ll stop doing what they’ve done to make God angry, he doesn’t ask the community how they feel about all of this – no he just goes and pronounces them healed so they can go back into the city, back to their families, back to their communities. That’s really sowing disorder, and then Jesus gets angry with the lawyers and the religious leaders who demand, rightly so, that rules be followed. Luke, you’re supposed to be a physician; you should know better than to condone this sort of thing. You of all people should know how things should be done.

It’s difficult to pick out any one of your little tales as being more disordered than any other. But it especially gets my goat that you have Jesus visiting those two sisters, Mary and Martha . . . no chaperone and not out in public where everyone can see what goes on, but in the privacy of their own home. For a male to visit like that with female who isn’t an immediate relative is scandalous enough, but then you’ve got Jesus teaching one of them, this Mary, about the things of God. No! God’s holy wisdom is only for males. And then, when the other sister, Martha, the one who’s attending to all the details, tells Mary to get up off her backside and help with the work, Jesus goes and criticizes Martha. You have Jesus telling Martha that she’s all distracted and anxious for wanting to get some work done – and you have Jesus praising Mary, telling her that the better part is to sit around and study. That’s exactly backwards, exactly upside down, exactly wrong. This whole thing, Luke, is an account of disorder.

Then there’s the whole crucifixion incident. Gods put people on crosses as punishment; people do not put gods on crosses. And if that were by some stretch of the imagination really to happen, then the orderly thing should be for the god to come off the cross and to bring the Roman Empire to ruins right then and there. And the Resurrection from the dead part? Too outside the natural order to even dignify with much comment. And while I think Peter did the right thing in denying he knew this Jesus – if Jesus were really God, Peter would be done for. He commits the worst sin of any – and you’ve got Jesus after this so-called resurrection making peace with Peter. Doesn’t anybody besides me realize how absolutely nuts and disordered this whole thing is???

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Well, some perhaps. Saints and poets maybe. Those who are dangerous and straightway handled with a chain. But somehow, by some untamed wind, this story of God’s order, what we call disorder, goes on, and Luke’s healing story, the story that heals, is told over and over. Generation after generation of children, adolescents, and adults continue to be reborn into the scandal of God’s Upside-down Order. And for all who are here today: no matter how chaotic, crazy, or craven our lives may be – no matter how dull and dark the soul – no matter how dead the spirit or paltry the prayer – God in Christ here to heal the breach. God here to be in community, in communion with all, and without condition. God as Christ, here to disorder our every notion of godly propriety, God entering into our chaos to bless us right where we are. God in Christ to change our minds about the ways of God with a bit of bread, a bit of wine, and a cross with oil on our foreheads. Us, healed, that we in turn go forth from this place, with St. Luke, clothes with power from on high, to tell an orderly tale, to tell the tale of God’s order: that all is forgiven, that all will be well, that God’s new order of doing things is now and ever shall be, outside the order of our own time.