The Place Beyond Punishment
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series III, Cycle B
You can tell a lot about a family by finding out what happens if a child spills something. In some families, spilling your milk is a capital offense. A child can get in a lot of trouble if the milk is spilled. In other kinds of families, spilling your milk is understood as an accident, a thing that happened, and a form of chance or luck. In these families, there is no additional pain or punishment on top of the original pain of spilling.
If you are in a poor family, you may not get anymore milk. There may not be any. If you are in a more secure family, and you are not being punished for your spill, you will get more milk, the mess will be cleaned up, and life will go on.
So what is the difference? One family has one point of view on pain, the pain of the spill; the other family has another point of view. One knows only punishment, the other knows the place beyond punishment, where ruined things are prepared. The milk doesn't "unspill." The floor doesn't automatically get cleaned up. But unlike the milk, we are not ruined.
Today, I want to talk about the issue of pain and punishment. You and I know that there are at least three perspectives on the passion story, the one that spills the wine of Jesus for some reason or another. One is the atonement, now widely theogically discredited, which comes from the family that punishes the spill. God wanted Jesus to suffer to save the world. We'll go into that story more in a minute. The other is the inevitability of love being connected to pain -- when we love something, we open ourselves to hurt. This is the relationship or I/thou interpretation. The third is the mystery approach: Who knows why we suffer, who knows how the milk gets spilled, let's get on with it while appreciating the fact that the floor is a mess.
Listen first to the Life Of Pi interpretation of Jesus. You will recall that this is a great interfaith book about a young man who manages to befriend Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, much to the horror of his very secular parents. Pi both loves each religion and hates each religion. Listen to his interpretation of the death of Jesus and remember that his father is really a zookeeper:
And what a story ... humanity sins but God pays the price? What? I tried to imagine father saying to me, "Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate the camel. The week before it was painted storks and grey herons. And who's to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti? The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them."
"Yes, father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up."
"Hallelujah, my son."
"Hallelujah, my father."1
As you can tell, Pi is not a big fan of the atonement theory. You will find, however, that the people of Mexico are. In fact, they join Bach in the St. Matthew Passion in almost finding suffering beautiful. If you know that part of the music, you will know that there is a phenomenal piece where the girls are asking to behold the pain. Daughters, give ear to the suffering.
When I was in Mexico, I had a lot of time to observe a culture drenched in Catholicism, with a church on every corner. Our tour guide, by the way, at Monte Alban, a Zapotec ruin, was more than a little sarcastic about the churches. He said fortunately the Spanish didn't plop a church on top of the ruins! But believe me they didn't need to. There were plenty of churches everywhere, with dozens and dozens of women and children sitting out in front of each one, weaving palm fronds into crucifixes. I asked one woman why a very unusual conception -- one I didn't see elsewhere -- was so joyful. (Here I hold up the crucifix, with Jesus' arms waved high from the cross.) She said, "El Dolor de Jesus (the suffering of Jesus) es muy hermoso, bonito, bueno, (beautiful, pretty, good) y tambien (and also) El Dolor me ayuda (his pain helps me)." I already knew I was going to preach against the atonement, with Pi, today. But at some point I have to understand what this woman with the "allegria" (happy, joyous) Jesus on the cross means. Is she some kind of new right figure? The kind who love punishment? We know them much too well.
The religious right is interested in protecting pain not life. They believe pain is fundamental to justice ... especially when justice is conceived as nothing more than a system of punishment and rewards. The essence of punishment is pain. Whoever owns pain owns power.The religious right is interested in protecting pain not life. They believe pain is fundamental to justice ... especially when justice is conceived as nothing more than a system of punishment and rewards. The essence of punishment is pain. Whoever owns pain owns power.
Like the religious right, I believe in moral absolutes. At the very least I believe in two that were articulated some years ago by the theologian Paul Tallish, those being the "absolute concreteness of every situation in which a moral decision is required," and "the commandment not to treat a person as a thing." In other words, if a child spills milk or a society spills and wastes Jesus, we don't go out of relationship with them and punish. We stay in relationship.
In contrast, the right consists of knowing to take its absolutes just far enough, which is to say, never so far as to relinquish the prerogatives of wealth and power. The achievement amounts to an ethical sleight of hand. You work the trick by shifting the domain of moral absolutes to those areas where they least apply. You treat the grey of human existence as though they were black and white, the better to disguise one's self-interested smudging of black and white to gray. You erect castles of rectitude on the frontiers of mortality in the hopes that the murder and raping taking place in the town squares can go on undisturbed. You accept the death of a six-year-old child by aerial bombardment or economic sanction and defend the life of a six-week-old fetus. Think of it as taking the high road in Lilliput.2
Note also how important it is to punish sexuality. It is not just about death. Of course we are to suffer for a long time before we die, in this theory of life.
Enter Turbo Slut, meticulously scheduling her abortions between manicures and sex in the city. To slander their moral courage (of the poor) in defense of moral dogmatism is one of the shabbier tactics of the right.Enter Turbo Slut, meticulously scheduling her abortions between manicures and sex in the city. To slander their moral courage (of the poor) in defense of moral dogmatism is one of the shabbier tactics of the right.
What we have here is the desire of the old and the rich to avoid death at any cost, especially if the cost can be passed on to another generation or another continent.3
What he finally concludes is that the right is "so blithe about illuminating its Gethsemane's with artificial light."
From this punishment-loving world, we end up with deaths less merciful than we allow to dogs. If indeed the defining characteristic of the religious right and the punitive family is to punish spills, what is the defining characteristic of a more progressive view of pain and punishment? I think it is to name life as relationship. That is what Jesus was doing in going to Jerusalem: He was there to create a relationship with it. That will help my Mexican friend as well as help people who need to die, who are ready to die, and who only face suffering as their future. Instead of punishing people for pain, instead of almost liking it, as I said both Bach and my Mexican friend do, there is a way to say that pain is somehow inevitable and that we may dare, by the grace of God, to have a relationship to it. Because we love, we expect pain. We don't like it or appreciate it but we do expect it.
I happened to simply love Mexico, Catholicism and all. The ex-pats are a lot of fun. Women sell grapefruits, sliced and peeled, with cayenne pepper on every street corner. They are delicious. Lime is squeezed on peanuts. Male and female police are the team that defends the city: What a concept in a supposedly sexist society! There is a sensuality about pleasure in a society that also loves pain. Very few have heard in Mexico about the atonement being passé theologically. Simultaneously, there is a level of thought that makes our understandings of post-colonialism very minor.
Consider Mexico Profundo, the name Guillermo Bonfil Batalla gives to freedom he claims, "One world where many worlds are possible." The people of pain and punishment want one theory for just about everything. They love universalism. What we may do instead is love relationship -- and that means a lot of different ways of dealing with Jerusalem. What Batalla advises is "to look at Mexico not from the West, but to look at Mexico from Mexico." This means, of course, that if a woman wants to create a crucifix with allegria that is her choice, not mine. It is odd, at least to me, that the atonement has produced plain palms, all orthodox -- the same, same, same.
Pi wants another kind of God, a different God than I want or the Mexican woman wants.
This is God as God should be. With shine and power and might. Such as can rescue and save and put down evil. [Speaking of Rama.]This is God as God should be. With shine and power and might. Such as can rescue and save and put down evil. [Speaking of Rama.]
This Son on the other hand who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is anxious, heckled, and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don't get it and opponents who don't respect Him -- what kind of God is that? It is a God on a too-human scale, that's what. There are miracles, yes, mostly of a medical nature, a few to satisfy hungry stomachs, at best a storm is tempered, water is briefly walked upon. If that is magic, it is minor magic, on the order of card tricks any Hindi God can do a hundred times better.4
Let me tell you how Farm Share, a project in Florida, handles imperfect vegetables. Farm Share offers the vegetables and us salvation.
While Patricia Robbins was waiting one day outside an office in Homestead, Florida, she watched farm workers dump hundreds of crooked yellow crook neck squash into a dumpster. After the funny looking squash came an equally large number of funny looking tomatoes.
She wanted to know what was going on. Her friend told her that he couldn't send anything that is not quite perfect to market and that he has to pay to have the imperfect vegetables hauled away.
Patricia figured out what her new job was that day. She didn't know how she was going to get paid for rescuing the vegetables, but she knew she was going to do it. Today, Farm Share serves over 650 agencies (homeless shelters, soup kitchens, churches, food banks, and the like) that distribute food to over two million families in Florida each year, Founded in 1992 with one volunteer and one phone, it has distributed over 100 million pounds of food since its inception, most of which is fresh food.
Like the squash, many of us are too crooked to go to market. Many of us are the snarled zucchini or the bruised tomato -- ugly and used up -- but Jesus went to Jerusalem for us. Whether we are disabled or hurt by crime or whatever else makes us imperfect, we can go to Jesus to help us deal with the waste and the pain. Like Farm Share, Jesus is peace beyond punishment.
Consider Habitat for Humanity's jail project. It trains prisoners to build houses. A flatbed truck wheels the house into the jail where time and life is being wasted. It teaches electrical work as well as building a house. When the house is done, the truck takes the house to its location. The crucifix hates waste. The crucifix uses used-up people.
That is another thing relationship does. It gleans future glory. It sees in the past a future. It sees in the old something new. It sees in the useless something useful. When wine is spilled and pain happens, we become people who clean up the mess and go on.
Can I tell my Mexican amiga that she should think differently about the pain of Jesus? No. Can she tell me that I should think differently about the atonement? No. Can we have a relationship? Yes. Can that relationship prevent waste and create life out of death? Should a child be punished for spilling milk? No.
Can a garden come from death? Is there a place for crooked squash and bruised vegetables not good enough for market? Is there room for a dozen different kinds of crucifixes? Yes. Is there a way to not be ruined by the pain? Yes. There is a place beyond punishment. Amen.
____________
1. Yann Martel, Life Of Pi (Orlando, Florida: Harvest Books, 2003).
2. Garret Keizer, Life Everlasting: The Religious Right And The Right To Die (New York: Harper's Essay), February 2005.
3. Ibid.
4. Op cit, Yann Martel.
If you are in a poor family, you may not get anymore milk. There may not be any. If you are in a more secure family, and you are not being punished for your spill, you will get more milk, the mess will be cleaned up, and life will go on.
So what is the difference? One family has one point of view on pain, the pain of the spill; the other family has another point of view. One knows only punishment, the other knows the place beyond punishment, where ruined things are prepared. The milk doesn't "unspill." The floor doesn't automatically get cleaned up. But unlike the milk, we are not ruined.
Today, I want to talk about the issue of pain and punishment. You and I know that there are at least three perspectives on the passion story, the one that spills the wine of Jesus for some reason or another. One is the atonement, now widely theogically discredited, which comes from the family that punishes the spill. God wanted Jesus to suffer to save the world. We'll go into that story more in a minute. The other is the inevitability of love being connected to pain -- when we love something, we open ourselves to hurt. This is the relationship or I/thou interpretation. The third is the mystery approach: Who knows why we suffer, who knows how the milk gets spilled, let's get on with it while appreciating the fact that the floor is a mess.
Listen first to the Life Of Pi interpretation of Jesus. You will recall that this is a great interfaith book about a young man who manages to befriend Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, much to the horror of his very secular parents. Pi both loves each religion and hates each religion. Listen to his interpretation of the death of Jesus and remember that his father is really a zookeeper:
And what a story ... humanity sins but God pays the price? What? I tried to imagine father saying to me, "Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate the camel. The week before it was painted storks and grey herons. And who's to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti? The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them."
"Yes, father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up."
"Hallelujah, my son."
"Hallelujah, my father."1
As you can tell, Pi is not a big fan of the atonement theory. You will find, however, that the people of Mexico are. In fact, they join Bach in the St. Matthew Passion in almost finding suffering beautiful. If you know that part of the music, you will know that there is a phenomenal piece where the girls are asking to behold the pain. Daughters, give ear to the suffering.
When I was in Mexico, I had a lot of time to observe a culture drenched in Catholicism, with a church on every corner. Our tour guide, by the way, at Monte Alban, a Zapotec ruin, was more than a little sarcastic about the churches. He said fortunately the Spanish didn't plop a church on top of the ruins! But believe me they didn't need to. There were plenty of churches everywhere, with dozens and dozens of women and children sitting out in front of each one, weaving palm fronds into crucifixes. I asked one woman why a very unusual conception -- one I didn't see elsewhere -- was so joyful. (Here I hold up the crucifix, with Jesus' arms waved high from the cross.) She said, "El Dolor de Jesus (the suffering of Jesus) es muy hermoso, bonito, bueno, (beautiful, pretty, good) y tambien (and also) El Dolor me ayuda (his pain helps me)." I already knew I was going to preach against the atonement, with Pi, today. But at some point I have to understand what this woman with the "allegria" (happy, joyous) Jesus on the cross means. Is she some kind of new right figure? The kind who love punishment? We know them much too well.
The religious right is interested in protecting pain not life. They believe pain is fundamental to justice ... especially when justice is conceived as nothing more than a system of punishment and rewards. The essence of punishment is pain. Whoever owns pain owns power.The religious right is interested in protecting pain not life. They believe pain is fundamental to justice ... especially when justice is conceived as nothing more than a system of punishment and rewards. The essence of punishment is pain. Whoever owns pain owns power.
Like the religious right, I believe in moral absolutes. At the very least I believe in two that were articulated some years ago by the theologian Paul Tallish, those being the "absolute concreteness of every situation in which a moral decision is required," and "the commandment not to treat a person as a thing." In other words, if a child spills milk or a society spills and wastes Jesus, we don't go out of relationship with them and punish. We stay in relationship.
In contrast, the right consists of knowing to take its absolutes just far enough, which is to say, never so far as to relinquish the prerogatives of wealth and power. The achievement amounts to an ethical sleight of hand. You work the trick by shifting the domain of moral absolutes to those areas where they least apply. You treat the grey of human existence as though they were black and white, the better to disguise one's self-interested smudging of black and white to gray. You erect castles of rectitude on the frontiers of mortality in the hopes that the murder and raping taking place in the town squares can go on undisturbed. You accept the death of a six-year-old child by aerial bombardment or economic sanction and defend the life of a six-week-old fetus. Think of it as taking the high road in Lilliput.2
Note also how important it is to punish sexuality. It is not just about death. Of course we are to suffer for a long time before we die, in this theory of life.
Enter Turbo Slut, meticulously scheduling her abortions between manicures and sex in the city. To slander their moral courage (of the poor) in defense of moral dogmatism is one of the shabbier tactics of the right.Enter Turbo Slut, meticulously scheduling her abortions between manicures and sex in the city. To slander their moral courage (of the poor) in defense of moral dogmatism is one of the shabbier tactics of the right.
What we have here is the desire of the old and the rich to avoid death at any cost, especially if the cost can be passed on to another generation or another continent.3
What he finally concludes is that the right is "so blithe about illuminating its Gethsemane's with artificial light."
From this punishment-loving world, we end up with deaths less merciful than we allow to dogs. If indeed the defining characteristic of the religious right and the punitive family is to punish spills, what is the defining characteristic of a more progressive view of pain and punishment? I think it is to name life as relationship. That is what Jesus was doing in going to Jerusalem: He was there to create a relationship with it. That will help my Mexican friend as well as help people who need to die, who are ready to die, and who only face suffering as their future. Instead of punishing people for pain, instead of almost liking it, as I said both Bach and my Mexican friend do, there is a way to say that pain is somehow inevitable and that we may dare, by the grace of God, to have a relationship to it. Because we love, we expect pain. We don't like it or appreciate it but we do expect it.
I happened to simply love Mexico, Catholicism and all. The ex-pats are a lot of fun. Women sell grapefruits, sliced and peeled, with cayenne pepper on every street corner. They are delicious. Lime is squeezed on peanuts. Male and female police are the team that defends the city: What a concept in a supposedly sexist society! There is a sensuality about pleasure in a society that also loves pain. Very few have heard in Mexico about the atonement being passé theologically. Simultaneously, there is a level of thought that makes our understandings of post-colonialism very minor.
Consider Mexico Profundo, the name Guillermo Bonfil Batalla gives to freedom he claims, "One world where many worlds are possible." The people of pain and punishment want one theory for just about everything. They love universalism. What we may do instead is love relationship -- and that means a lot of different ways of dealing with Jerusalem. What Batalla advises is "to look at Mexico not from the West, but to look at Mexico from Mexico." This means, of course, that if a woman wants to create a crucifix with allegria that is her choice, not mine. It is odd, at least to me, that the atonement has produced plain palms, all orthodox -- the same, same, same.
Pi wants another kind of God, a different God than I want or the Mexican woman wants.
This is God as God should be. With shine and power and might. Such as can rescue and save and put down evil. [Speaking of Rama.]This is God as God should be. With shine and power and might. Such as can rescue and save and put down evil. [Speaking of Rama.]
This Son on the other hand who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is anxious, heckled, and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don't get it and opponents who don't respect Him -- what kind of God is that? It is a God on a too-human scale, that's what. There are miracles, yes, mostly of a medical nature, a few to satisfy hungry stomachs, at best a storm is tempered, water is briefly walked upon. If that is magic, it is minor magic, on the order of card tricks any Hindi God can do a hundred times better.4
Let me tell you how Farm Share, a project in Florida, handles imperfect vegetables. Farm Share offers the vegetables and us salvation.
While Patricia Robbins was waiting one day outside an office in Homestead, Florida, she watched farm workers dump hundreds of crooked yellow crook neck squash into a dumpster. After the funny looking squash came an equally large number of funny looking tomatoes.
She wanted to know what was going on. Her friend told her that he couldn't send anything that is not quite perfect to market and that he has to pay to have the imperfect vegetables hauled away.
Patricia figured out what her new job was that day. She didn't know how she was going to get paid for rescuing the vegetables, but she knew she was going to do it. Today, Farm Share serves over 650 agencies (homeless shelters, soup kitchens, churches, food banks, and the like) that distribute food to over two million families in Florida each year, Founded in 1992 with one volunteer and one phone, it has distributed over 100 million pounds of food since its inception, most of which is fresh food.
Like the squash, many of us are too crooked to go to market. Many of us are the snarled zucchini or the bruised tomato -- ugly and used up -- but Jesus went to Jerusalem for us. Whether we are disabled or hurt by crime or whatever else makes us imperfect, we can go to Jesus to help us deal with the waste and the pain. Like Farm Share, Jesus is peace beyond punishment.
Consider Habitat for Humanity's jail project. It trains prisoners to build houses. A flatbed truck wheels the house into the jail where time and life is being wasted. It teaches electrical work as well as building a house. When the house is done, the truck takes the house to its location. The crucifix hates waste. The crucifix uses used-up people.
That is another thing relationship does. It gleans future glory. It sees in the past a future. It sees in the old something new. It sees in the useless something useful. When wine is spilled and pain happens, we become people who clean up the mess and go on.
Can I tell my Mexican amiga that she should think differently about the pain of Jesus? No. Can she tell me that I should think differently about the atonement? No. Can we have a relationship? Yes. Can that relationship prevent waste and create life out of death? Should a child be punished for spilling milk? No.
Can a garden come from death? Is there a place for crooked squash and bruised vegetables not good enough for market? Is there room for a dozen different kinds of crucifixes? Yes. Is there a way to not be ruined by the pain? Yes. There is a place beyond punishment. Amen.
____________
1. Yann Martel, Life Of Pi (Orlando, Florida: Harvest Books, 2003).
2. Garret Keizer, Life Everlasting: The Religious Right And The Right To Die (New York: Harper's Essay), February 2005.
3. Ibid.
4. Op cit, Yann Martel.
