May 29, 2007 by djackson.

Great sermon last night.  (We have Sunday evening worship at my church, and I go, and my pastor, Grover Pinson, comes prepared.  I realize that the second half of the Lord’s Day double-header has fallen out of fashion because seekers aren’t all that sensitive, but I like being one of the youngest people in the room and we sing out of the hymnal.) 

Anyway, the message came from 1 Samuel 21-22 where David takes it on the lam and winds up lying his head off in church to con the pastor out of a handful of Lord’s Supper wafers and a second-hand sword.  The camera picks up the shadowy figure of Doeg the Edomite, complete with waxed mustache and black cape, as he lurks in the background and snaps a few incriminating photos with his cell phone.  Later he turns state’s evidence and ride’s Saul’s spoils system to a job as executioner-in-chief. 

Most sermons I’ve heard on this passage take one of two approaches.  Some preachers cough nervously about David fibbing to God’s mouthpiece, quote Mark 2.23-28 to provide immunity, then say nasty things about Doeg.  Others rail on the son of Jesse for his failure of faith, smirk at the irony of him taking the shootin’ irons of the man he himself slew in a showdown, and harrangue the congregation with the need to trust God in a tight spot.

Grover took Ahimelech’s point of view.

The high priest’s calling landed him in a no-win situation.  First, one of Saul’s personal staff of rat terriers gets religion.  Standard translations call Doeg “the chief of Saul’s shepherds.”  Grover pointed out, however, Eugene Peterson’s contention that some textual studies amend this to “head of Saul’s secret police.”  Ahimelech didn’t fall off a leaks and garlic truck; he knew something was up when the head of Homeland Security suddenly turned church-goer.  The text tells us he was “detained before the Lord,” an obscure phrase which may very well express the obscure account he gave of himself when he showed up for church that day.  He probably wore a suit and tie and packed a Sunday school quarterly and gilt-edged King James Bible with the little thumb tabs.  Any pastor worth his pulpit is smart enough to know that when power gets religion there’s dirty work afoot. 

Next, David shows up in a muck sweat with a wild story and a sword sheath as empty as his belly.  Saul, he claims, has entrusted him with a mission so important that it merited no ordnance and no supply.  David stammers out his cover story like a character in a sitcom who is obviously making it up as he goes.  “My mission is so secret that I couldn’t requisition MRE’s lest the supply sergeant catch on.  I have to fight a battle so crucial that I didn’t have time to grab my spear.  My soldiers?  Uh…oh, yeah!  Now I remember:  I sent them somewhere else so that even they wouldn’t know where they were - in fact, I’m not sure myself.  This is top-secret stuff, alright.  Got anything to eat?”  I can’t agree with Walter Bruggemann that Ahimelech has no reason to doubt David.  This story wouldn’t fool a FOX news crew, let alone pass muster with a minister who carried out his career under a military dictatorship.

So what does Ahimilech do?  He ministers, which is what ministers are called to do. 

He doesn’t eighty-six Doeg, though he surely doubts the sincerity of this sudden conversion.  He provides the proper rituals and instructs this suspicious seeker in the right way to slaughter a sheep.  And he doesn’t slam the door on David with a quick blessing and a polite lie about making an appointment for next Tuesday.  He welcomes both men into the same house of God and tends to their felt needs whether spiritual or physical.  He knows full well that he’s perched atop the powder magazine of an explosive situation, but his call dictates that he facilitate contact between God and Israel.  Motives and machinations he leaves up the the Lord.  He welcomes both worshipers because that’s what priests do.

And it doesn’t turn out well.

Doeg’s report gets Ahimilech and his whole staff summoned to Gitmo without warrants or habeus corpus.  Saul promotes his favorite fink to the office of executioner-in-chief and Ahimilech’s priestly line never recovers.  David takes full responsibility for the debacle but in the end via his son Solomon he sides with the house of Zadok (2 Kings 2.26-27).  Ahimilech bets his whole heritage and the future of the family business on a couple of insincere worshipers with ulterior motives - and loses.

Or does he?

Sanctuaries, Grover insisted in his sermon, are places where we take people in instead of taking them on, where we take them at face value instead of taking them to task, where we intercede instead of interrogate and absolve instead of accuse.  Sanctuary is the sacred space where we set aside the future in order to purchase the privilege of the present act of ministry.  Sanctuary is the roulette wheel that runs the risk of love with a let-’er-ride spirit that does not define winning or losing strictly in terms of the outcome but rather on the basis of obedience.  Sanctuary is a safe place even for those who put it at risk.

And that’s an important word in a day when churches face the temptation of letting the lawyers dictate our calling.  The kids can’t have  a playground because somebody might sue us if little Johnny splits his lip.  The youth can’t take trips because we don’t have enough licensed chauffers and the vans haven’t been vetted by OSHA apparatchiks.  The pastor doesn’t dare offer counsel because he can’t paper his office with diplomas and degrees. 

And then there are the purists who want to screen out unworthy applicants for entrance to the body.  People who call themselves Baptists concoct membership covenants designed to ensure that only serious disciples wind up in our exalted company.  We’ll get Doeg when we run the DNA evidence and we’ll blow David’s cover on our standard security check.  We won’t be fooled by those who come to church for any reason other than an all-consuming and utterly unadulterated passion to follow Christ.

Problem is, the only certain way to control contamination is to curtail ministry completely.  Proverbs 14.4 says you can clean up an ox stall if you get rid of the ox, but such an action sort of takes away the whole point.  Sanctuaries must by definition be messy places if ministry is ever to occur.  There’s no reliable way to separate the mature from the manure because we invariably find them huddled inside the same hide. 

David’s a liar and Doeg’s a stinker and Saul is just one more paranoid ruler on a rampage.  The only hero in the whole sordid scenario is a harassed and hapless pastor who stayed true to his calling and let God sort it out in the end.  That’s not a bad parable for today’s church to remember.

That’s how I spent my Sunday night.  Beats all heck out of HBO.

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May 9, 2007 by djackson.

Quincy Carter killed last Saturday night.  He fired off six touchdown strikes without a single interception, pilling up points as he led his team to a 62-27 triumph and pushed their perfect record to 5-and-0.  His performance earned a twenty-five percent bonus slapped a’ la mode atop his regular salary.

Only a few small problems blemish the perfect complexion of this triumph:  Carter was playing for the Bossier-Shreveport Battle Wings of the AF2 football league, the minor league outfit of a sideshow sport; they defeated the Corpus Christi Sharks before two thousand fans; his bonus was fifty bucks.

Quincy Carter once deployed his formidable skills for the Dallas Cowboys, playing for big bucks and big fame before sixty-five thousand spectators.  He led America’s Team to their only ten-win season in the post-Troy Aikman era.  He threw twenty-nine strikes into the paydirt and marched his squad nearly six thousand yards in total offense. 

Then Qunicy Carter started falling.  A failed dope test did him in at Dallas.  He jumped to the Jets and lasted one year.  The Montreal Alouettes signed him, then cut him after a month.  To use one of Ernest Hemingway’s metaphors, being cut from the CFL is, for a former big-timer, like being eighty-sixed out of a leper colony.  Now he actually hopes to upgrade to the major leagues of arena football in a climb he hopes culminates with a backup slot in the big show. 

We call what happend to Quincy Carter a “fall from grace;” we are wrong.  Grace isn’t something you can fall out of; it is something you have to fall into.

Carter’s story is compelling as a cautionary tale.  “There but for the grace of God,” we might murmur in a moment of pious pity.  “Don’t do drugs,” we tell your kids.  “Look what happened to him.”  In essence, it becomes for us the poignant story of what should not happen to us, what must not happen to us, what will not at all costs ever happen to us. 

That’s what I thought when I read Carter’s story in the local newspaper last Saturday.  Then I went to church on Sunday.  There I took a one-two punch from my Sunday school teacher and my pastor.  My Sunday school teacher, Kathleen Rodman, is a tiny little woman in the later years of life.  You might not think she could pack much of a punch, but you would be reckoning without her formidable mind and heart.  I once read a comment by an Episcopal layperson who didn’t think much of the Bible teachers of her evangelical childhood.  “I don’t know,” she mused, “how we can expect most amateur teachers to get around simplistic Bible story retelling in order to emphasize the fullness and connectedness of the ongoing biblical story of God’s dealing with mankind.”  Clearly, she never met Kathleen.  Kathleen is the classic example of a Baptist layperson who has absorbed the Bible both with her head and with her heart, who has taken it in at the ears and fed it back with her hands and feet.  I’d gladly hand her my seminary diploma if she needed a tissue:  she’d probably sneeze more theology onto it than I ever got out of it.

The day’s lesson came from Philippians 2, the great kenotic emptying passage.  As Kathleen taught, I thought of Quincy Carter and realized that his story and Jesus’ story describe the same trajectory:  the downward plummet from the highest pinnacle, the dizzying drop from the top to the pits, thirty-two feet per second per second in the terminal velocity from glory to shame. 

 ”Of course,” you object, “there was a difference.”  And of course you are right:  Quincy Carter is guiltless and Jesus is guilty.  Quincy Carter engineered his own demise by putting a toke of marijuana above a dream career.  Jesus engineered his own demise by putting Quincy Carter above equality with the Father.  When Jesus hung on the cross, he died guilty of every joint that Quincy Carter smoked.  If Quincy Carter avails himself of the saving blood, he stands innocent of even inhaling. 

I suddenly saw that I’ve been living the wrong story!  Quincy Carter is not a detour sign on the career path; he is a merge sign which sends me off the superslab of secular thinking straight into the potholed goat track that leads to eternal life.

I staggered out of Sunday school and down the hall to the worship service.  Kathleen set me up with the jab; Grover finished me off with the straight right. 

His current sermon series concerns the five languages of love as outlined by Gary Chapman.  Yesterday’s special was “touch.”  Not content to dish up a few harmless bromides about hugging your wife more often, Grover pushed me relentlessly into a corner and whacked me over the nose with the wet newspaper of Genesis 2.  He pointed out that the word for God “forming” Adam comes from the pottery trade.  It means to mold, sculpt, shape.  He then spoke of the intimacy of the concept of God “breathing” life into Adam’s nostrils.  I shuddered at two uncomfortable images.

Image 1:  “formed.”  I took pottery in college because I figured there would be no homework.  There wasn’t, but I soon ran into something worse:  muddy hands.  I don’t like goo on my fingers.  I was a conscientous objector to finger painting in kindergarten.  I quickly discovered, however, that when a potter works a lump of clay on the wheel, he must keep it slick and slippery, right on the grey borderland between solid and liquid.  You end up slimed to the elbows in something that would make a good catfish condo on the stagnant bottom of a backwater stream.

 Image 2:  “breathed.”  CPR.  I saw Spiderman 3 last night.  At one point in the plot, the hero’s buddy lies near death.  Spidey heroically whams on the guy’s chest in classic CPR fashion but I found myself praying he would forego mouth-to-mouth.  Ask any guy; I’d rather one of my pals just let me go gently into that good night.  Michelangelo got it all wrong, that famous painting of Adam’s finger meeting God halfway at the moment of animation.  Adam lay prostrate like a fat guy who faints halfway up a hillside on a hot day as God administered the kiss of life.

And here was Grover giving me a God who stooped so low as to mire himself to his almighty elbows with the ooze of my essence, then mouth-to-mouthed me until I started sucking wind.  Then Grover administered the coup de amazing grace:  “In Genesis, God made a body.  In the gospel, he became one.”  My soul staggered at the thought:  God no longer just dirtying his hands with me; God enshrining himself in the same six or so feet of dirt.  Blood and saliva and bad breath and acne - Jesus not just dressed up in this as a costume, but fully enfleshed while fully God. 

The body of Jesus hangs on Calvary unable to pass a urine test without coming up positive for weed.  The very blood that falls from his wounded hands would reveal the presence of AIDS.  If they inked his hands they would find those whirls on every crime scene ever dusted for fingerprints.  CSI Jerusalem:  Jesus did it.

Quincy Carter didn’t fall as fast as Jesus: he only started from the top of the human heap; Jesus jumped from the throne of glory.  Quincy Carter didn’t fall as far as Jesus:  the af2 broke his fall whereas Jesus didn’t hit solid ground until he bounced off the bottom of Hell.  Which means that Quincy Carter’s failure is contained in Jesus’ suffering, and his redemption is absorbed in Jesus’ resurrection.  So the gist of the sermon is this:  don’t, in fact, be Quincy Carter - that’s too easy.  Be Jesus - that’s the call of the Christian.

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