Offending Eyes

Offending Eyes
A Sermon Preached at the First Reformed Church of Schenectady
September 27, 2009 by Dr. Bill Levering

Mark 9

⁴²“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. ⁴³If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. ⁴⁵And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. ⁴⁷And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, ⁴⁸where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.

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God made you with only one mouth and two big ears, so if you don't listen to me for the next few minutes, your, your, your eyebrows will fall off. This is important because I am going to talk about the colorful, even offensive sayings of Jesus.

When we hear the parables of Jesus we are at a disadvantage because the context is so alien. We are not in a primitive agrarian society that speaks an unusual collection of Greek, Aramaic and a little Hebrew.

Ancient Language was Colorful

More importantly, in a litigious and rational world we have lost touch with prophetic bombast or consider it insane. Strong imagery is left for the political fringe and the religious crazies. Before numbers were the measure of all things, however, people regularly said things like "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" without a disclaimer that they were being symbolic.

The primordial storyteller, Homer, declared that heroes were “speakers of words and doers of deeds” (Il. 9.443). John Marincola writes that "Classical societies were dominated by the spoken word: facility and accomplishment in speaking were, after military achievement, the greatest glories one could win."

Today we measure smarts with numbers: how much people make or what they produce. Then the measure was with words, their quality and effectiveness. And effectiveness often meant a memorable turn of phrase that was as difficult to forget as a iron rod sticking out of your neck.

Jesus and the Family Guy

In the ancient world, speakers couldn't rely on reinforcement from a dozen commercials a day or even the written word. If you wanted to make a pithy point that would be remembered without a transcript or a YouTube video, you would craft a saying that would be remembered clearly. This is why some Old Testement proverbs are so icky. "Like a dog that returns to its vomit Is a fool who repeats his folly." Do we have to say things like that in church?

This way of talking is preserved to some extent by comedians. Al Franken's book "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" uses a kind of bombast that is so surprising it is either hilarious or offending. For the older crowd, remember how Don Rickles insulted people? Sometimes it wasn't so funny, but it was usually memorable. Right, you hockey pucks?

Today's version of pushing the extremes is often found on the cartoon show The Family Guy. Peter Griffen, the family guy, is a completely obnoxious husband and father. The show is known for hitting us over the head with a joke over and over and over and over and over . . . . and over . . . . and over . . .. . . .. and . . . . over . . . again until it's sort of funny somehow.

Outside of comedy, we just aren't used to harsh imagery. Strong language is not used much by preachers today, with the possible exception of Jeremiah Wright. We are mostly in the business of making you all feel better about yourselves so you won't slaughter each other in frustration.

But let's pretend that we took normally inoffensive sayings and made them more striking like an ancient might have. Here is how we might jazz up innocuous modern aphorisms:

• If the shoe fits wear it, but if it doesn't cut off your foot.
• A fool and his money are soon parted like a thanksgiving turkey from its head.
• An apple a day keeps the doctor locked in a Iranian prison.
• When in doubt throw it out into the place of utter darkness and gnashing of teeth.
• Drink eight glasses of water a day or you will develop pancreatic cancer.
• A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down into your seething acidic gut.
• Many hands make light work. Doing it by yourself will kill you like a giant tapeworm.
• Fool me once, shame on you fool me twice, kick me in the head.

This is kind of fun. Maybe Jesus was right. Perhaps we need strong language to break through our complacency.

The problem is, we have such refined sensitivities now, we throw the baby out with the scalding bathwater and don't even try to figure out what Jesus is going for. We need to dial down our reactions to find the meaning. What does this passage say after we are finished being ruffled?

Abandon hurtful things.

This passage is translated in many ways. The old King James translates, 'causes to stumble' as offends. You may remember this passage as "If your eye offends you . . . " The NIV, another popular version translates this "If you eye causes you to sin . . ."

The fact is that there are problematic things in our lives that are all about us that we don't do anything about. Jesus is all about taking care of the log in your own eye and controlling what you can control. Let's put this in more concrete terms.

• If you eat popcorn everyday and your love of popcorn has lost you loved ones and life in general, never touch popcorn again!
• If your car is a hazard to life, your own included, take the car to a cliff and push it off. It's better to walk that do die in a fiery crash.
• If your life has been destroyed by alcohol, don't go near it. Pour it all out. Don't even try a little bit.
• If being around Democrats causes you to sin, do not talk to Democrats. Move to Alaska.

All this may sound quite simple, but in practice people often do things that are consistently harmful to them. Like smoking. Or eating crispy duck. I love the Chinese dish called crispy duck. Every time I have eaten crispy duck, the high fat content has given me an upset stomach. Every time. Every time. Every time. Every . . . . time. And every time I imagine that this time will be different. This time I won't eat so much of it, or I'll get a different sauce, or I'll have club soda and bitters with it. (sings a la Peter Paul and Mary) When will I ever learn? When will I ever learn?

God is interested in our complete joy.

Discerning the crispy ducks in our lives is not always easy. We rationalize so well. And after all, there is some limited joy in crispy duck. Smoking cigarettes is sometimes a pleasurable experience. Alcohol and drugs do give short term pleasure. But God is not interested in the short term. God is interested in us having the best life possible. Not a halfway thing. Not pretty good. Not purgatory or a McDonald's happy meal, but a banquet, a bounty, an overflowing fountain, something like, well, . . . heaven. If something, ANYTHING, is getting in the way of that, get rid of it.

Some of our halfway joys have become too easy for us. We have harmful habits that seem almost to be a part of us. "You want me to stop smoking? That would be like cutting off an arm." Exactly.

"You want me to forgive him? That is not who I am. You are taking away a part of me." Yes.

You can fly little butterfly, but the cocoon has got to go.

Telling Women What to Do

Telling Women What to Do
A sermon by Dr. Bill Levering
Preached at the First Reformed Church of Schenectady, September 20, 2009

It's a popular enterprise for religious types to tell women what to do.

It's popular in the Bible. Big sections of Levitius tell women what to do in terms of rules for their behavior. In something like schoolyard ethics, women are proclaimed unclean, essentially that they have cooties for a week every month. Imagine a quarter of women's adult life as untouchable, that is unclean. More telling, if a woman had a male child, she was unclean for a month. If she has a girl baby, two months.

Paul loves to tell women what to do in the New Testament. Keep quiet, don't teach, keep your heads covered, be obedient to husbands.

Religions still tell women what to do, usually in the form of what they can't do. Almost every major religion has a part of it that excludes women from leadership. Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and the conservative branch of the Presbyterian church still do not honor the gift of women's leadership. These are usually the groups that are also opposed to having women make decisions of any kind for themselves, domestic, political, or health related.

But it's not just wacky religous types that tell women what to do. In our culture, advertising spends much more time and money targeting women. We tell women how to look, what to wear.

This is never more apparent than at weddings. The list of things that a bride has to worry about is enormous. Something borrowed, something blue, bouquets, veils, trains, makeup, hairdo. The man? He just needs to remember to brush his teeth. Tuxes don't even use cufflinks anymore.

Last year, American women spent 8 billion dollars on cosmetics to keep up with the beauty standards set for them by the advertising industry.

Let's not forget that women only got to vote one lifetime ago and that the abortion wars are all about controlling what is going on in women's bodies. It is not coincidence that the loudest voices in the anti-abortion movement are men's.

But it is not just American culture. If fact, it is worse around the world. A March 2009 report from the British medical journal The Lancet reports that over 100,000 women died in fires in India in a single year, many of them from domestic abuse. The Lancet reports that many of the 100,000 women who died in fires in India in a single year were actually killed in domestic abuse. Hundreds of women are murdered by fire when recent husbands don't get the dowry they expected. Dozens are forced to throw themselves on their husbands pyres. Still. Today. In India, women only own 1% of real property of any type.

Around the world, women are under-represented in democracies, including ours. They are, in many ways, the oppressed majority.

Telling women what to do is a popular enterprise in health care as well.

• Only 14 states require maternity coverage. Anthem Blue Cross along with many other insurers has been fighting health care reform. They want to treat pregnancy as an optional condition, therefore uncovered as it is now in many plans.
  
• The vast majority of states allow insurance companies to charge women more than men, even though they statistically make 75 cents on the dollar
  
• In 8 states if your husband beats you regularly and you go to the emergency room you will not be covered because an abused spouse qualifies as a pre-existing condition.

We have been controlling women significantly more than men. But is that a bad thing? Sometimes we should tell different groups of people differing things. Whether they are insurance companies or women or north Koreans, sometimes different conditions engender differing rules.

The prophets were very bossy, but almost always to rulers and the powerful. Jesus was a little bossy on occasion, usually to individuals and to the powerful. "Woe to you, scribes and pharisees" was something Jesus apparently like to shout. When men brought Jesus a woman who they said sinned, he yelled at them first. Jesus shows us a prejudice for the poor, for the downtrodden, for the persecuted. Who are these people? Statistically, women.

So who are the powerful in the world? Who are the arrogant? Who make war? Isn't it obvious? Men.

If we as religious people are interested in telling people what to do, if we are to speak truth to power, we should be actually telling men to bring justice for women.

It is the voices of women we should listen for in the issues of our day, not the voices of power that are usually male. But in fact, men usually do not listen to women. The communication scientist Deborah Tannen documents what we can find out in listening to any conversation between genders: men interrupt women much more than the other way around.

Jesus introduced an understanding that reverses the power structures of the world, but it will take some getting used to. As civilisation has progressed, it may occur to us that just because men are bigger, they shouldn't boss women around all the time.

What does it mean to listen to women's needs rather than dictating their servitude? This means actively working for equal pay for equal work, this means taking child care seriously as a culture, this means letting women make decisions about their own health. This means removing all barriers to leadership and advancement.

In Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free. When shall we believe this?

Wounding Words, Healing Words

Wounding Words, Healing Words
Sermon preached by Dr. Bill Levering September 13, 2009
First Reformed Church, Schenectady, NY

James 3:8-10

No one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁹With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. ¹⁰From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.

Words by Elaine M. Isaacson

The words for a poem
The words we use every day
Words
We grasp for words
Words caught in our throat
Words uttered that should not
But have been spoken
Words thought of too late
Words
Our lives are made up of words
Words that wound
Words that heal
Words we can never take back
Words we should have said
Never enough words of praise
Often too many words of pain
Of suffering
Words.

Sermon by Bill Levering

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." has always been false bravado, since most people clearly remember insults and teasing from their youth but would be hard pressed to remember skinned knees.

This week tasteless personal insults reached a new low when a Congressman shouted at the President of the United States. Unthinking verbal attack has been around as long as we have had speech, I imagine. It was certainly present in Biblical times. The epistles are full of warnings about slander and gossip. The passage from James asserts that is is almost impossible to control the tongue (without God's help, we assume).

Today I would like to talk about the rotten things we say to each other and what God has to say. After a painstaking review of the discourse of my life and after consulting several experts in playground talk, I have come up five definitive categories of rotten things we say to each other. They are Get Lost, Shut Up, You're Worthless, I Hate You, and Die.

While I know at this moment you are scanning your favorite put-downs to see how they fit, I am going to plunge forward anyway.


1. Get lost!

At some point in our life, somebody didn't want us around. We annoyed them or challenged them or simply were in the wrong place. People said, "Go away." "Beat it." "Take a hike." "Vamoose." "Scram." "Make like a tree and leaf." "Don't go away mad, just go away."

But God says to us: "Come to me, and I will give you rest." Isaiah tells of a God who calls to us and says "Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you;"

Even when we feel unworthy of sticking around with the cool people, God welcomes us. Jesus tells of the prodigal son who returns and says to the father, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' "But the father said to his servants, 'Bring out the best robe, and put it on him. Put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. Bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat, and celebrate; for this, my son, was dead, and is alive again.

When people tell you to get lost, God calls "Come to me!"


2. Shut up!

My father just hated this phrase. I'm not sure why. He would say, "I'll be quiet, but I won't shut up." We have heard many versions: "Keep your mouth shut. "Pipe down." "Shut your pie hole." " Put a lid on it." "Why don't you just be quiet?" As Archie Bunker on that old sitcom said, "Edith! Stifle yourself!"

This is different from "Get Lost." Sometimes people want to keep you around just to use and abuse. "I am more important than you are," these folks are saying. "And I want to keep you around to remind myself of that." It may be that our ideas confuse others at times. But when societies stifle the press or alternative opinions, you know things are bad.

God's response is again the opposite. When people in economic bondage in Egypt complained bitterly, God said, "I have heard the cry of my people." Later when the land was conquered and the people scattered; when the sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept, God said, " I have heard the cry of the afflicted." When Jesus tried to get people to understand how their concerns were heard by God, he said, "Ask, and it shall be given."

When people tell you to shut up, God says, "I am listening."


3. You're worthless!

Although you may not hear this in so many words, it is the basis for most insults. You're worthless because you are stupid or ugly or too tall or short or bald or fat or thin or messy or too sexy or too hairy or too insensitive or too bald or pimply or simple or complicated or bald or uneducated or too loud or disabled or weak or smelly or black or awkward or weird or pushy or self-centered or needy or mean or a Yankees fan or blond or Jewish or redneck or bald or whatever.

Although in debate class they taught us that attacking the character of the speaker was never the way to argue, ad hominem rhetoric is the dominant form of political discourse today. We disagree with each other like we were in a courtroom or a playground. What happened to the idea that two people of good character can disagree about the means to mutually shared goals?

The first chapter of Genesis makes it clear that we were created in the image of God. We are created holy. In the passage today, James points out how our abusive speech makes no sense: "We curse those who are made in the likeness of God."

The parables of Jesus are full of stories of our value. We are the pearl of great price God makes a great sacrifice for. We are the one sheep the shepherd leaves the others to search for. We are the treasure in a field. We have been created holy! Each of us. It is means and false to suggest otherwise with our insults.

When people tell you you are worthless, remember that God says you are holy.


4. I hate you.

Sometimes people's feelings about us, reported with meanness, can be weapons. " I don't love you anymore." "You disgust me." "You make me sick." Even a six year old screaming at her mother "IhateyouIhateyouIhateyou!" gets some emotional traction. We all want to be loved. When it doesn't happen, it's bad enough, but to have it shoved into our ears is a formidable assault.

The most famous verse in the New Testament talks about the feelings God has for us. "For God so loved the world . . ." And at this point, we also talk about not only how God feels about us, but about how we feel towards each other. The mark of our community is the connection we have with each other: As John says " By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

When someone says, I hate you, know that the truly important force in the universe feels differently.


5. Die

"Die sucker." "I hope you rot in hell." Last month on the Internet, we were treated to a YouTube video featuring Arizona pastor Steve Anderson who was praying for President Obama to rot in hell. When facing criticism about this last week, he stepped up his rhetoric praying that God "strikes Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy.’

Our words can belittle and diminish each other and this is not God's intent for us or for how we should treat each other. Jesus said, "I have come that you might have life and have it to the full." Jeremiah writes " For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

This may sound too simplistic, but God does not want us to die. Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live."

Our Choice

So. The people will, in various ways, tell us things about who we are and what they wish for us that may not be in our best interests. Here our basic choice: Who are you going to listen to?

After Jesus had spoken some fairly strking things, he asked the disciples if they were still with him. Peter said, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Our faith may not always be easy or simple, but it is a faith in a God who is rooting for us at every turn. Always remember what God tells us: "Come to me. I am listening to you. You are holy and I love you. I want you with me always."