Proper 23
Sermon
GOOD GOD, WHERE In The WORLD Are YOU?
Sermons for the Last Third of the Pentecost Season
Atlas, Hercules and Tantalus; a Powerful and Deadly Fruit; All About War and Rape and Divorce; Laziness and Guilt Trips and Punishment for All The Above But Don't Despair: a Touch of Salvation Too.
As a boy, I was facinated with those Greek myths, the stories of Hercules and Atlas, Zeus and Mercury, Narcissus and Neptune. Let me tell you one of those - one which brings together the familiar words "Nectar", "Ambrosia", and "Tantalize".
It was King Tantalus of Phrygia whose birth, as often is the case in these tales, was questionable. He was said to have been fathered by Zeus on one of Zeus' amorous escapades to earth. Zeus, the king of the gods, Zeus-pater, god-father which in Latin, became Zhu-pater - Jupiter. At any rate, this relationship, illegitimate though it was, did apparently give Tantalus some kind of access to the banquet halls of the gods. There he ate and drank the food of the gods - ambrosia and nectar. So good and pleasing was that, that he determined to bring this delectable fare to earth so that his fellow humans could enjoy it and perhaps become more god-like themselves. And so he stole some and brought it down from Olympus.
But the deed was discovered and Tantalus was cast into Hades where his eternal punishment was to be up to his neck in water while over his head hung branches loaded with luscious fruit. But whenever he tried to drink the water, it would recede, and whenever he tried to reach the fruit, it would bend away. Thus our word "tantalize."
The Greek poet, Pindar, put that story into writing around 500 B.C. That means it comes perhaps 500 years after the biblical narrative of the eating of forbidden fruit which we read as the Old Testament text today - that text generally considered to have been put down in writing in roughly its present form during the latter part of David's reign or at the beginning of Solomon's. I'm not suggesting that Pindar did any copying here, but there are a few rather striking parallels, are there not? There is a forbidden fruit, and there is a punishment.
Yes - parallels, but also some highly significant differences. In the Greek story, Tantalus is attracted to and is taken in by the pleasures the gods enjoy. And the gods punish because they want to keep those pleasures to themselves.
Our biblical narrative is considerably more subtle and more profound, and I think more frightening as to its implications. The biblical theme is not pleasure, but power. Remember what it was the serpent said as the temptation began, "You will die, for God knows when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5) Knowing good and evil does not mean being able to distinguish right from wrong. Already they could do that. The phrase "good and evil" meant "everything." And in the Hebrew mind to "know" a thing was to control it. That is linked back earlier in Genesis where the newly created man names all the creatures. To name was to define and to assert authority over. When a king conquered another king and allowed the defeated king to remain as his regent, he would change his name. That would indicate his subordination. Thus, also, the background of Abram becomes "Abraham" and Saul becomes "Paul." There was a new authority, a new power over them.
Thus the serpent was suggesting that to be like God, "knowing good and evil," was to be like God having power over everything. It is not something so understandable and mildly forgivable as the attraction to pleasure, which is humanity's root problem with God as might be suggested in the myth of Tantalus. Our biblical narrative would tell us the root problem is a lust for power, the desire to control. Yes, that is a much more profound and frightening interpretation of the human condition, of why the world and life are not what God wants them to be and what they ought to be. Look at the wars that have wreaked such suffering on us, perhaps culminating in Hitler's holocaust. It was not in pursuit of pleasure, but in the lust for power - control. If it should go to nuclear holocaust, through a combination of that nuclear winter and clouds of radiation killing literally every living thing on the planet (and they tell us that would be the result if we were to detonate merely 1/100th of the nuclear devices stockpiled either by Russia or the U.S), if that were to be the fate of humanity, that would come not from the thirst for pleasure but from the lust for power. "You will submit to me or I will destroy you." "I will not submit to you - rather I will destroy you, me and everything that is." Not pleasure - power.
On the more personal level, the crime of rape, our psychologists tell us, is not to be understood in terms of desire for the pleasures of sex, but as an act of violence and a desire to humiliate, to crush and control. It is power.
So much of the irreconcilable differences in a marriage gone bad are a matter of power. Who will control this relationship? "I will show you who's boss." "You will not control my life." It is power.
A job situation where everyone loafs, reading magazines in the restrooms, doing fingernails, socializing on the phone with friends and relatives - that can be aggravating to someone who thinks work should get done. But that does not compare with the boss who uses power to humiliate.
We need law and order. But most of us have had an experience or two with cops who just enjoy pushing people around. The lust for power does not necessarily have to be that blatant and open either - humanity's root problem. This lust for power can creep and snake its way even into what seem to be the most caring and tender relationships. It can be in that social worker or that pastor who lovingly counsel with the distraught, those barely coping. How those in the so-called "helping professions" must guard against that "Messiah complex," where we feel with our competence as superior to their incompetence. We cope, they cannot. Surely in any counseling situation it is important, even necessary, for the one being counseled to have confidence in the counselor. But how attractive, how exhilarating, how inflating to the ego of the counselor it can be to have all these people dependent upon and worshiping the counselor. And how subtly the cultivating of all these dependent people can be an expression of a hidden lust for power.
You have felt it when people have tried to send you on a guilt trip. Sure you have. The guilt trip can be an exercise of power. That can come out of even the finest, most dedicated, most humble moral leader in humanity's history. Count Leo Tolstoy gave up all his privileges as a Russian nobleman. On his estates he and his peasants lived on the same level. Yet an admirer who visited came away unsettled, because this one she had considered almost a saint so seemed to want to make her feel guilty, simply because her clothing was warmer than his.
I don't want to impugn the reputation of one who probably was a saint, but it surely illustrates the subtlety, complexity and depth of the problem. Even moral leaders can be playing subtle power games with the people they lead. Say! You've heard it in sermons, sermons you have regarded as exceptionally good, sermons which may have left you reeling, sermons you have later described as "What was the word you used? Could it have been 'powerful' "?
And let's perhaps have some turn-around here that can be fair play. Every counselor knows how these dependent people he or she has been subtly cultivating can then begin to be manipulating and demanding, particularly of the religious counselor. "You've got to be here for me, whenever it may be that I want and need you." And suddenly power is being exercised in the other direction. Even this can become a power game.
The tree and the fruit are incidental. As we read Genesis, we can't really tell whether there were one or two trees. It is called the "tree of life" at one place, and at another the "tree of knowledge of good and evil." Most scholars would say two versions of the one story were combined and this is one of the rough edges. It doesn't matter - the tree is incidental. The problem is the desire to be like God, to have power. There is our sin. Ugly and frightening word, isn't it? Sin. There is our sin - the desire for power over each other. In its blatant form it is war and rape. But in its subtle forms it comes into play even in the most intense and tenderest of relationships and in the most dedicated acts of good. There is our sin.
And so we are punished. Here our biblical narrative weaves in fascinating bits of material. "Why doesn't a snake have legs?" "Why does it hurt to deliver a baby?" "Why is it so hard to get the lettuce and spinach to come up and so easy for all these lousy weeds!" Again, these specifics are incidental. The point is: it is the sin of this human race of ours that throws and leaves all creation on its belly, in pain, bruised, and eating dust, and leaves our human life, instead of a sharing with, a striving against; leaves us, instead of in cooperation, in contention.
Seeking power over each other, we infect and destroy community, infect and destroy ourselves, we disrupt creation, and creation itself turns on us. Look at the results. That's what our biblical writer is telling us. This world and life just somehow are not what we know they ought to be - what they are intended to be. It is not what a good God, at creation, intended them to be. This just isn't what we want, not any of us.
Yes, there is a certain momentary thrill to the exercise of power. But no called minister of Christ wants to browbeat people in sermons. Tolstoy, caught as he was in the subtlest exercise of power, wanted justice. Read "War and Peace." You can't fail to see that. Counselees don't want to be Hitlers over their counselors; they really would much more prefer to be on their own two feet, if only they could experience it. And when a counselor can experience what it really is to help another, that's so much better than dependency. The boss wants to be liked and have his workers fulfilled. No political leader wants to be the one that will push the button that will end it all for all of us. In our marriages we want love, not war. I'm not even sure Hitler wanted to be Hitler.
But we are all fouled up in this power thing; we punish ourselves with it, creation punishes us because of it, we can't disentangle ourselves from it, and life just isn't what we want it or God wants it to be, what it was created to be, what it should be ... That's what the Bible is saying here. Is there no hope for us? Sucked into and infecting everything with our lust for power, is there no hope?
Not in these verses there isn't, not if we stop at verse 14. Many Christians, seeking for that sign of hope, would latch on to the reference to the bruising of the head of the snake as meaning the promise of the ultimate defeat of the power of evil. But even John Calvin thought that was stretching things well beyond what was literally said.
No, to verse 19 there is no real hope for us held out at all. But in one verse beyond, verse 21, there is. "And the Lord God made for the man and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them."
How beautifully, how touchingly, in what simple, down-to-earth terms, the Bible can express and proclaim this care, this grace of God which is there no matter what the sin; the grace of God is there in sin being perpetrated, the grace of God is there in sin bringing tragedy and suffering and the grace of God, there as this whole tangled thing of power that we, at the same time, want and don't want, the grace of God is reaching down, in and with this little sign. He made clothing for them.
Oh, God says that in big, up-front ways too - the Exodus, the Resurrection, Pentecost. He says it in mysterious, backward, twisted ways in the captivity and the Crucifixion.
But here, the small ways. He made clothes for them. In the small ways somehow we grasp that there is grace at work in life. A quiet meal with just you and your mate, that grumpy and irresponsible teenager who can suddenly do a turn-around and say "Thanks, Mom, that was really nice of you," that mockingbird that sings out his lungs for you as you get out of the car in the driveway, that flower next to the lamppost, that wonder and excitement from a small child, "Dad, look what I found!", those first sounds that come from the throat of a baby just discovering that she can control her voice, the little things by which God tells us he is still here and his grace reaches out and touches life with what is good. They reached for power and spoiled life. And He reached down and made clothes for them to restore life.
Lord, what a mess we can make of your garden, your world and our lives with this strange, subtle lust for power. But as we suffer the consequences of that, we are grateful for that mercy of yours which comes to us in spite of it all.
As a boy, I was facinated with those Greek myths, the stories of Hercules and Atlas, Zeus and Mercury, Narcissus and Neptune. Let me tell you one of those - one which brings together the familiar words "Nectar", "Ambrosia", and "Tantalize".
It was King Tantalus of Phrygia whose birth, as often is the case in these tales, was questionable. He was said to have been fathered by Zeus on one of Zeus' amorous escapades to earth. Zeus, the king of the gods, Zeus-pater, god-father which in Latin, became Zhu-pater - Jupiter. At any rate, this relationship, illegitimate though it was, did apparently give Tantalus some kind of access to the banquet halls of the gods. There he ate and drank the food of the gods - ambrosia and nectar. So good and pleasing was that, that he determined to bring this delectable fare to earth so that his fellow humans could enjoy it and perhaps become more god-like themselves. And so he stole some and brought it down from Olympus.
But the deed was discovered and Tantalus was cast into Hades where his eternal punishment was to be up to his neck in water while over his head hung branches loaded with luscious fruit. But whenever he tried to drink the water, it would recede, and whenever he tried to reach the fruit, it would bend away. Thus our word "tantalize."
The Greek poet, Pindar, put that story into writing around 500 B.C. That means it comes perhaps 500 years after the biblical narrative of the eating of forbidden fruit which we read as the Old Testament text today - that text generally considered to have been put down in writing in roughly its present form during the latter part of David's reign or at the beginning of Solomon's. I'm not suggesting that Pindar did any copying here, but there are a few rather striking parallels, are there not? There is a forbidden fruit, and there is a punishment.
Yes - parallels, but also some highly significant differences. In the Greek story, Tantalus is attracted to and is taken in by the pleasures the gods enjoy. And the gods punish because they want to keep those pleasures to themselves.
Our biblical narrative is considerably more subtle and more profound, and I think more frightening as to its implications. The biblical theme is not pleasure, but power. Remember what it was the serpent said as the temptation began, "You will die, for God knows when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5) Knowing good and evil does not mean being able to distinguish right from wrong. Already they could do that. The phrase "good and evil" meant "everything." And in the Hebrew mind to "know" a thing was to control it. That is linked back earlier in Genesis where the newly created man names all the creatures. To name was to define and to assert authority over. When a king conquered another king and allowed the defeated king to remain as his regent, he would change his name. That would indicate his subordination. Thus, also, the background of Abram becomes "Abraham" and Saul becomes "Paul." There was a new authority, a new power over them.
Thus the serpent was suggesting that to be like God, "knowing good and evil," was to be like God having power over everything. It is not something so understandable and mildly forgivable as the attraction to pleasure, which is humanity's root problem with God as might be suggested in the myth of Tantalus. Our biblical narrative would tell us the root problem is a lust for power, the desire to control. Yes, that is a much more profound and frightening interpretation of the human condition, of why the world and life are not what God wants them to be and what they ought to be. Look at the wars that have wreaked such suffering on us, perhaps culminating in Hitler's holocaust. It was not in pursuit of pleasure, but in the lust for power - control. If it should go to nuclear holocaust, through a combination of that nuclear winter and clouds of radiation killing literally every living thing on the planet (and they tell us that would be the result if we were to detonate merely 1/100th of the nuclear devices stockpiled either by Russia or the U.S), if that were to be the fate of humanity, that would come not from the thirst for pleasure but from the lust for power. "You will submit to me or I will destroy you." "I will not submit to you - rather I will destroy you, me and everything that is." Not pleasure - power.
On the more personal level, the crime of rape, our psychologists tell us, is not to be understood in terms of desire for the pleasures of sex, but as an act of violence and a desire to humiliate, to crush and control. It is power.
So much of the irreconcilable differences in a marriage gone bad are a matter of power. Who will control this relationship? "I will show you who's boss." "You will not control my life." It is power.
A job situation where everyone loafs, reading magazines in the restrooms, doing fingernails, socializing on the phone with friends and relatives - that can be aggravating to someone who thinks work should get done. But that does not compare with the boss who uses power to humiliate.
We need law and order. But most of us have had an experience or two with cops who just enjoy pushing people around. The lust for power does not necessarily have to be that blatant and open either - humanity's root problem. This lust for power can creep and snake its way even into what seem to be the most caring and tender relationships. It can be in that social worker or that pastor who lovingly counsel with the distraught, those barely coping. How those in the so-called "helping professions" must guard against that "Messiah complex," where we feel with our competence as superior to their incompetence. We cope, they cannot. Surely in any counseling situation it is important, even necessary, for the one being counseled to have confidence in the counselor. But how attractive, how exhilarating, how inflating to the ego of the counselor it can be to have all these people dependent upon and worshiping the counselor. And how subtly the cultivating of all these dependent people can be an expression of a hidden lust for power.
You have felt it when people have tried to send you on a guilt trip. Sure you have. The guilt trip can be an exercise of power. That can come out of even the finest, most dedicated, most humble moral leader in humanity's history. Count Leo Tolstoy gave up all his privileges as a Russian nobleman. On his estates he and his peasants lived on the same level. Yet an admirer who visited came away unsettled, because this one she had considered almost a saint so seemed to want to make her feel guilty, simply because her clothing was warmer than his.
I don't want to impugn the reputation of one who probably was a saint, but it surely illustrates the subtlety, complexity and depth of the problem. Even moral leaders can be playing subtle power games with the people they lead. Say! You've heard it in sermons, sermons you have regarded as exceptionally good, sermons which may have left you reeling, sermons you have later described as "What was the word you used? Could it have been 'powerful' "?
And let's perhaps have some turn-around here that can be fair play. Every counselor knows how these dependent people he or she has been subtly cultivating can then begin to be manipulating and demanding, particularly of the religious counselor. "You've got to be here for me, whenever it may be that I want and need you." And suddenly power is being exercised in the other direction. Even this can become a power game.
The tree and the fruit are incidental. As we read Genesis, we can't really tell whether there were one or two trees. It is called the "tree of life" at one place, and at another the "tree of knowledge of good and evil." Most scholars would say two versions of the one story were combined and this is one of the rough edges. It doesn't matter - the tree is incidental. The problem is the desire to be like God, to have power. There is our sin. Ugly and frightening word, isn't it? Sin. There is our sin - the desire for power over each other. In its blatant form it is war and rape. But in its subtle forms it comes into play even in the most intense and tenderest of relationships and in the most dedicated acts of good. There is our sin.
And so we are punished. Here our biblical narrative weaves in fascinating bits of material. "Why doesn't a snake have legs?" "Why does it hurt to deliver a baby?" "Why is it so hard to get the lettuce and spinach to come up and so easy for all these lousy weeds!" Again, these specifics are incidental. The point is: it is the sin of this human race of ours that throws and leaves all creation on its belly, in pain, bruised, and eating dust, and leaves our human life, instead of a sharing with, a striving against; leaves us, instead of in cooperation, in contention.
Seeking power over each other, we infect and destroy community, infect and destroy ourselves, we disrupt creation, and creation itself turns on us. Look at the results. That's what our biblical writer is telling us. This world and life just somehow are not what we know they ought to be - what they are intended to be. It is not what a good God, at creation, intended them to be. This just isn't what we want, not any of us.
Yes, there is a certain momentary thrill to the exercise of power. But no called minister of Christ wants to browbeat people in sermons. Tolstoy, caught as he was in the subtlest exercise of power, wanted justice. Read "War and Peace." You can't fail to see that. Counselees don't want to be Hitlers over their counselors; they really would much more prefer to be on their own two feet, if only they could experience it. And when a counselor can experience what it really is to help another, that's so much better than dependency. The boss wants to be liked and have his workers fulfilled. No political leader wants to be the one that will push the button that will end it all for all of us. In our marriages we want love, not war. I'm not even sure Hitler wanted to be Hitler.
But we are all fouled up in this power thing; we punish ourselves with it, creation punishes us because of it, we can't disentangle ourselves from it, and life just isn't what we want it or God wants it to be, what it was created to be, what it should be ... That's what the Bible is saying here. Is there no hope for us? Sucked into and infecting everything with our lust for power, is there no hope?
Not in these verses there isn't, not if we stop at verse 14. Many Christians, seeking for that sign of hope, would latch on to the reference to the bruising of the head of the snake as meaning the promise of the ultimate defeat of the power of evil. But even John Calvin thought that was stretching things well beyond what was literally said.
No, to verse 19 there is no real hope for us held out at all. But in one verse beyond, verse 21, there is. "And the Lord God made for the man and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them."
How beautifully, how touchingly, in what simple, down-to-earth terms, the Bible can express and proclaim this care, this grace of God which is there no matter what the sin; the grace of God is there in sin being perpetrated, the grace of God is there in sin bringing tragedy and suffering and the grace of God, there as this whole tangled thing of power that we, at the same time, want and don't want, the grace of God is reaching down, in and with this little sign. He made clothing for them.
Oh, God says that in big, up-front ways too - the Exodus, the Resurrection, Pentecost. He says it in mysterious, backward, twisted ways in the captivity and the Crucifixion.
But here, the small ways. He made clothes for them. In the small ways somehow we grasp that there is grace at work in life. A quiet meal with just you and your mate, that grumpy and irresponsible teenager who can suddenly do a turn-around and say "Thanks, Mom, that was really nice of you," that mockingbird that sings out his lungs for you as you get out of the car in the driveway, that flower next to the lamppost, that wonder and excitement from a small child, "Dad, look what I found!", those first sounds that come from the throat of a baby just discovering that she can control her voice, the little things by which God tells us he is still here and his grace reaches out and touches life with what is good. They reached for power and spoiled life. And He reached down and made clothes for them to restore life.
Lord, what a mess we can make of your garden, your world and our lives with this strange, subtle lust for power. But as we suffer the consequences of that, we are grateful for that mercy of yours which comes to us in spite of it all.
