Schrodinger’s Cat August 5, 2012 Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B 2 Samuel 18.1-33

If I ever have a cat, I will name him “Schrodinger.” I will never have a cat. Which is too bad, because that’s such a great cat name.

In 1935, Austrian physicist Edwin Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment that involves a cat locked in a box with a mechanism that could, under certain circumstances, kill it. His point was that until you open the box, you can logically conceive the cat as both alive and dead at the same time.

And he was taken up between the heaven and the earth.

Two interesting features about this picture: First, Absalom has no mule, and, second, Absalom hangs in a tree. The mule was a royal beast, the limo of ancient Israel. Three times the official ceremony of transferring a throne refers to an exchange of mules. (1 Kings 1.33,38,44) Absalom’s mule abandoned him; his kingdom rode out from under him. Absalom was “hanged” in the tree. (v.10) That Hebrew verb describes the death of the God-accursed. (Dt 21.23)

Schrodinger’s cat: No kingdom beneath, no Heaven above, locked in a man-eating forest with a deadly foe who can kill him or spare him. And meanwhile back at headquarters David sits suspended between hope and despair, his beloved rebel simultaneously dead and alive. “Absalom,” as Walter Brueggemann remarks, “is suspended between life and death, between the sentence of a rebel and the value of a son, between the severity of the king and the yearning of the father. He is no longer living, because he is utterly vulnerable, but he is not dead.”

Then someone opens the box.

“As he entered a village, ten men, all lepers, met him. They kept their distance but raised their voices, calling out, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” (Lk 17.12-13) “And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment.” (Lk 7.37) “The woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.” (Mk 7.26) “And, behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way.” (Lk 19.2-4)

We meet them daily: neglected, rejected, suspected, suspended between the empty air of their own failed efforts and the silent sky of a righteous Heaven. And the Son of David sits on His throne and wonders, because He has trusted us with a set of orders: Deal gently, for my sake. He once dismissed the royal beast that bore him to let His feet dangle above Calvary’s accursed ground. He once bounced a powerless prayer off a brass Heaven which hovered over Calvary’s cross. He satisfied a righteousness wrath in order to purchase a righteous gentleness.

Then He shut up His beloved rebels in earth’s box alongside His trusted servants. What will Our Lord find when He opens that box?

Letting the Cat out of the Bag,

Doug

Additional idea: “The Kojak Effect” – men with shaved heads perceived as more manly, less handsome: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443437504577545163545785108.html

Of Kings and Canyons August 5, 2012 Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a

            “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice,” novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once offered, “and I'll tell you a story.”

            Nathan makes the same offer, except that the chair is a throne and he keeps the precipice up his sleeve for a final flourish. Scholars have seen the prophet’s ploy as an end-run around the formidable anger of an absolute sovereign: David has killed once to cover up his crime; what’s one camel-coated preacher more or less after you’ve wasted a good general? Nathan, this theory runs, lets his center collapse in a feint before the king’s onrushing anger, then rolls his flanks from the ambush of a crafty “Ecce homo!”

            But fear does not drive Nathan. The first time he appears in the sacred narrative he tells this same sovereign “no” concerning a monumental building project – a subject on which despots tend to be fairly sensitive. (2 Samuel 7.1-17) “Thou art the man” holds no terrors for a Hebrew prophet.

            So why the story?

            Nathan’s narrative is not subtle subterfuge that softens the truth but a poetic sucker punch that tells a truth no legal language could contain. Adultery, murder, cover-up: David knew the facts, but David had no idea what he had done. His heart hit the granite-hard and granite-smooth surface of those familiar terms and found no crack for the tendrils of true understanding to grasp.

            Story turned facts to truth.

Nathan’s punch line whipped away the veil and revealed that the king’s throne perched on the precarious fault line of wrath. David knew the facts; now David felt what he had done.

            Facts are no more truth than skeins of yarn are tapestries: The word-weaving of the story-teller transforms atomized data to personalized experience. Kings do not repent when they know, but when they feel. And kings are not so different in this regard from you or me.

Too much contemporary preaching sells its story-telling birthright for a mess of modernist pottage. Preachers practically don the lab coats of reductive science and run the sacred text through the supercollider of analysis in an attempt to isolate the single particle of fact that provides the mass of meaning.

Maybe it would be better if, like Nathan (or Jesus), we told stories.

C. S. Lewis once explained that part of what drove his Narnia books was “a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.” Instead, the great author chose to “steal past those watchful dragons” by telling the same truth using a different set of facts – or falsehoods.

This Sunday we will sit there again: adulterers by default through bored indifference to the spouses of our youth, murderers in effect by the desire to reduce or dismiss the space others occupy in a world we want for our own, petty tyrants on pew-shaped thrones insulated against conviction by the very bulwark of familiar religious facts. But a great gulf fixed yawns at our very feet; we’ve pulled our pews up to the precipice.

Maybe a story would help.

Once Upon a Time,

Doug

Too Big to Fail July 29, 2012 Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B 2 Samuel 11:1-15

            Jerry Sandusky molested young boys. Jerry Sandusky helped win football games. Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno knew both of these things; he gave priority to the latter.

Paterno and other high-ranking officials knew of Sandusky’s crime in 1998 and did nothing for fourteen years. He molested at least nine more boys before being convicted last month. An F.B.I. report reveals that those in charge decided that potential bad publicity for the university “brand” and its lucrative and legendary football program outweighed justice for defenseless children.

The problem with institutions is that they tend to turn into self-preserving powers. Charismatic leaders morph into iconic abstractions that must be preserved at any price. Somewhere down under the public shell the private human being drifts into despotism without the comforting fear of consequences. And cowardly functionaries deny and enable because justice for one cannot turn the scale against the “greater good.”

Bathsheba was not an underage child but she might as well have been for the powerlessness of her position. The same holds for her husband. David and Joab do all the sending in this story: David because he indulges unwholesome appetites, and Joab because he has to save the system. David doesn’t do a lot of fighting anymore, but he has become a “brand” that holds Israel’s enemies at bay. It is expedient, Joab reasons, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.

Between the lurid crimes of King David and Coach Sandusky stand multitudes of ordinary folks just like us. We don’t molest children and we don’t murder our lovers’ spouses. But we do ask, on a pretty regular basis, the wrong question about sin: not “What is right?” but “What will happen?” And once we admit that some justice – even a small one – deserves to die for some benefit – even a big one – we side with the kingdoms of this world, and with those who sent Christ to the cross.

Former Florida State coach Bobby Bowden has called for Penn State to pull down the statue of Paterno that adorns its campus. Scripture promises that in the end, every idol will fall. Until Christ rules consequences in every area of my own life, I don’t think I can condemn the ancient system or the contemporary one.

Repentantly,

Doug

            

Asleep at the Wheel July 22, 2012 Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B Mark 6.30-34

(Note: We're following the Old Testament lections, but this week's Gospel lesson offered the opportunity for a timely word, so here's a bonus "Sermoneutics" at no extra charge!)

            T. J. Jackson was one of history’s greatest generals – when he was awake.

            His brigade stood like a stone wall at First Manassas. He bedeviled the Yankees throughout the Shenandoah Valley in a campaign that military tacticians still study. He swept the blue-bellies from the field at Fredericksburg and turned the Union lines at Chancellorsville.

            And he stumbled through the Seven Days Battle like a somnambulist.

            Throughout the week of battles that wound up the Peninsula Campaign Jackson failed to show up at crucial moments, issued contradictory orders and failed to follow up on initial victories. In the end the legendary timidity of Yankee commander George McClellan, who followed both victory and defeat by retreating, allowed Robert E. Lee to scrounge a victory and run the enemy away from Richmond, but the Johnnies missed many opportunities for decisive triumph.

            Historian Ben Cleary offers an interesting explanation of Jackson’s uncharacteristic behavior: He stayed up past his bedtime. Sleep deprivation, claims Cleary, explains what cowardice or craziness could not. Some experts estimate that Stonewall got a total of ten hours of sleep over the four days that preceded the week of fighting. At one point Jackson dozed off at the officer’s mess with a half-munched crust of hardtack between his teeth.

“Like his men,” Cleary writes, Jackson “believed he could ‘stand almost anything.’ He couldn't. Jackson may have relied on his will to push himself beyond the limits of human endurance, but those limits are very real, and he encountered them in the hot, swampy lowlands east of Richmond in the summer of 1862.”

            "Come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a while." Or in the lovely old King James, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.” To which the crusty evangelist Vance Havner once remarked, “If you don’t come apart, you will come apart!”

            Come apart, before you encounter your limits in the hot, swampy lowlands of illness and depression. Come apart, before your courage fails in the face of a fleeing foe. Come apart, before you nod off with the half-eaten body of Christ between your teeth and the torches of the enemy picking their way through the darkness of your private Gethsemane.

The “Rest” of the Story

Doug

           

Dancing in the Dark July 15, 2012 Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B 2 Samuel 6:1-19

A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”

 – "Revelation," by Flannery O’Connor

David became angry because of the Lord’s outburst against Uzzah.

–      1 Samuel 6.8

Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin is a fat farm wife. The biblical David is a lithe young warrior. But they share two important traits: They both get angry at the inexplicable outbursts of God, and they both see the dance.

The lectionary skips the story of Uzzah, who grabs the un-insulated live-wire of God’s glory only to fry and die. This is a mistake, because only in light of Uzzah’s death can we understand David’s dance. If Michal disapproved when her husband went all Magic Mike on the main street of Jerusalem, it may have been because she skipped Uzzah’s funeral. Only a deadly God can truly move us to dance.

            Nobody knows for sure why Uzzah died; he was only trying to help. The whole thing left David puzzled. “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?”

            Mrs. Turpin receives her own version of a divine thunderbolt that leaves her comfortable theology similarly devastated. She reads God her religious resume and demands to know, “What do you send me a message like that for?”

            David is the right guy to make his demand. “David,” explains Eugene Peterson, “wasn’t careful with God.” O’Connor says the same about her heroine. “She appeared,” the author explains, “to be the right size woman to command the arena before her.”

She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven.

– "Revelation," by Flannery O’Connor

And David was dancing before the Lord with all his might.

–      1 Samuel 6.14

David hardly makes it halfway down the aisle before he busts a move. “Hey, everybody! God’s here and no one’s dead yet!” As Peterson observes, “All religious sites should be posted with signs reading, ‘Beware the God.’” Michal didn’t see Uzzah die and so she wonders what all the fuss is about. She cannot comprehend the conquest of dignity by the sheer good luck of not getting fried.

Mrs. Turpin finally figures it out. In a moment of clarity she beholds a crazy concatenation of misfits who boogie over the bridge into glory.

And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who , like herself. . .had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away.

            “Beware the God.” The untamed Lion of Judah will incinerate the last shred of Uzzah and leaves only David stripped to his drawers, dancing utterly without dignity in the incomprehensible fact of going to church and walking out alive.

We Can Dance If We Want To,

Doug

Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B 2 Samuel 7.1-14

Gimme the Ball!

July 22, 2012

            Nathan is the Mario Chalmers of religious life. Every pastor is.

            Chalmers’ role as point-guard for the Dream Team leaves him in a tough spot: He has three superstar scorers and only one basketball. LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh all want that ball on every play but in the free flow of the game Chalmers must decide who gets it.

            This makes him, in the apt phrase of sports writer Scott Ciaccola, “the most yelled-at man in the NBA.”

            David steals sovereignty from Saul and pulls of the ultimate fast break: a new capitol, an intimidating palace, and military power. The only remaining incalculable is the presence of the Almighty as symbolized in the Ark. That can be a tricky business: The Philistines already intercepted it once; Uzzah fouled out when he dared to dribble it; David finally got it back only to be posted up by his own spouse just as he hit the paint.

            So he chalks up a new play for his pastor/point-guard: Let’s settle this once and for all. I’ll enshrine the Ark in immovable splendor and establish myself as the top scorer. Nathan nods, trains his gaze down court, and prepares to deliver the final bounce pass. “Go, do all that is in your mind, for the Lord is with you.”

            Then God calls time-out. “But in the night the word of the Lord came to Nathan.” Prophets need a thick skin because MVP’s tend to holler when they don’t get their way.

            For most people the pastor carries a clear job description: Deliver God on my terms and my timing. Establish a set-play theology that lands the Lord’s blessing when and where I want it and I’ll come across with the financial resources and social perqs that insure your comfort. Plenty of pastors are willing to play that role, to formulate spiritual set-plays that guarantee the promised the pass.

            But God’s pastor must respond to the flow of the Spirit. God’s fight song is always the cowboy ditty “Don’t Fence Me In,” never the Broadway ballad “Bird in a Gilded Cage.” “The Lord declares to you that the Lord will build a house for you.”

            God promises David a dynasty not measured in years: not two, not thee, not four, not five, not six, not seven, but “your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever.”

            The Gospel of Mark opens with the fulfillment of David’s dream (Mk 1.14-15) but closes (in its original form) with no corpus delicti, an unseen Jesus, and a gaggle of frightened pastors who don’t dare tell their congregation that they’ve lost track of the ball (Mk 16.1-8). The Church charges down court into the future with a Christus absconditus and no assurance that a sacred day or a holy place can deliver what we desire.

            May God send us courageous pastors with the guts to tell us that the Kingdom of Heaven is a game of street-ball with only one guarantee: a Kingdom that shall endure before the Lord forever.

Slam Dunk,

Doug