Absurd

Exodus 20:1-17 (JPS)

Elohim spoke all these words, saying: I am I AM, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage: You shall have no other elohim besides Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, I AM, your God, am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep my commandments. You shall not swear falsely by the name of I AM your God; for I AM will not clear one who swears falsely by His name. Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of I AM your God: you shall not do any work - you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days I AM made haven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore I AM blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. Honor your father and your mother, that you may long endure on the land that I AM your God is assigning to you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house: you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s. All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. “You speak to us,” they said to Moses, “and we will obey; but let not Elohim speak to us, lest we die.” Moses answered the people, “Be not afraid; for Elohim has come only in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may be ever with you, so that you do not go astray.”

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

1 Corinthians 1:18-25 (ESV)

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will kill the wisdom of the wise, and the logic of the logical I will frustrate.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?  Has God not made dull the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the absurdity of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and absurdity to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the absurdity of God is wiser than humanity, and the weakness of God is stronger than humanity.

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

John 2:13-22 (ESV)

From the Holy Gospel according to John

Glory to you, O Lord.

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of retail merchandise.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Demolish this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

The Gospel of the Lord

Praise to you, O Christ.

***

The trouble with planning out preaching series and themes for a season is that sometimes after study and deeper preparation the key word for a day turns out not to be the word you want to use. This morning we’ve got the “A” from the word “prAying” to stand for “Amazed,” and I realize the “A” word I ought to have chosen is “Absurd.” Granted, the absurd is often amazing in its absurdity, and we go to the circus to be amazed by the absurd, with those sideshow acts and the like, not to mention the science fiction shows and fantasy stories we share. Translating today’s Corinthians letter included a nod to Spock, Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek character, who was always concerned with the logical, which seems to be wise. Faith, however, is not always wise. It is not logical to give our lives to a greater love without a clear plan of action... but I’m getting ahead of myself. Far, far ahead of myself. 

Because it doesn’t start with our deciding to give ourselves to anything. It doesn’t start with our decision, it starts with that greater love. Remember where we started with the first Sunday of Lent two weeks ago, when I read the creation story from the Jesus storybook Bible and God created everything just by saying hello to it, and then declared ‘you’re good!’ We could find logic in God’s decision to create in the first place, except then we messed up creation when we did the thing that got us kicked out of the garden, and while some say God has a plan, that doesn’t mean we’re living according to that plan. In fact, if God has a plan, we have a long history of telling God where to put that plan while we go off and make our own plans and do our own thing and keep messing up even our own best laid plans.

So we have the first reading here, the Exodus reading, the plan for living outside of slavery and into freedom. Here are the ten words that tell us what it means for us to be the people of God. We’re studying these commandments in the confirmation class currently, so if you have any questions about them, ask Robin or Liz Tucksmith since they’re in class this season. But be prepared to have a discussion about the complexities of these laws - they’re never as straightforward as they seem. Because relationships aren’t simply black and white, are they? Relationships are living and evolving and adapting and learning, and being in a covenant relationship with God means that our life together is also constantly shifting as we learn more about each other.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to observe how often we mess up on these simple ten basic commands, though. And when they’re boiled down to the heart of things, loving God and loving our neighbors, even then we can’t seem to get it right. God is ridiculously in love with us, and we keep turning away, abusing the promises, taking God for granted... who would put up with that in a human to human relationship? Yet God has a lot more patience, a lot more time, a lot more love, than we can imagine, and God just keeps on giving and giving and giving... it’s just not logical. It makes no sense, how often God goes out on a limb for us after all the times we spit in God’s face or ignore God completely.

Consider the ways we use marketing strategies to ‘grow the church.’ Church is not a place to collect money and look good and make ourselves feel good about being good people. Yet we market all sorts of programs that do just that in an effort to get more people in the doors, and if we fail to get more people in the doors we somehow translate that into feeling like we’ve failed at being a church! The system in Jesus’ day was rigged, too. People came from miles and miles around to worship in the one legitimized temple, which meant they had to give up time and resources to travel, they had to leave their fields and flocks to make the proper sacrifice to make God happy with them after all they had gotten wrong since the last sacrifice they had made. The only trouble was, they lived under a government that traded with different coins, with the images of whoever was the ruler of the hour on the face of those coins, and the law says ‘thou shalt not make for thyself any graven image,’ so they couldn’t use those coins for anything related to their faith. Traveling as far as they did to get to the temple for the sacrifice that would make God happy with them, or at least less angry, they couldn’t all afford to bring an animal or carry a grain offering, or maybe the priest would say it wasn’t good enough, so they’d have to trade the day-to-day coin for a temple-appropriate coin so they could buy the sacrifice-approved animal to offer back to the temple to slaughter and burn so that God would be happy with them, or at least less angry, and maybe this year their crops would grow enough to live on.

Sounds ridiculously complicated, doesn’t it? And of course, where there is money involved there are people who don’t have enough, and people who know how to get more than they need, and people who are afraid, and people who are clueless... If somebody is seriously concerned that they get the best animal for sacrifice and they need only so much temple-approved coin and you’ve got the weights and measures to trade government money for church money and those religious folk just trust you to do what’s right, how long will it be until your weights and measures dip a little heavy or light or generally off-balance? And, worse yet, how long will it be until your connection to the temple is only for the sake of what you can get out of it? What you can do to earn God’s favor or make a bit more money to earn someone else’s favor? What ever happened to God’s promise that ‘my house shall be a house of prayer for all people’? God never said that only the rich and socially deserving would be allowed to be forgiven. God never said that there was an entrance fee into heaven. 

When Jesus arrived preaching in the wilderness, it was to say that the Kingdom of God has come near. It was not to say ‘step right up and get your tickets on the cheap.’ See, it makes a lot more sense, it’s easier to wrap our heads around it, if there are different classes of people, different sorts and types of who is welcome and who isn’t and how we can tell the difference. Expecting everyone to be able to afford to buy the perfectly approved sacrifice at whatever cost the market is demanding is one way we can keep out the ‘dirty undeserving poor.’ But then what happens when we ourselves are somebody else’s definition of the ‘dirty undeserving poor’? Never mind that. It shouldn’t come down to what happens when we are down on our luck. It doesn’t, in fact, come down to that. Even that makes too much sense.

'The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.' Why in the world would a perfect, almighty, strong, eternal, righteous God get so messy as to be angry, fleshy, sweaty, dirty, poor, persecuted, beaten and humiliated, on purpose? What sort of logic is it that the God we try so hard to please, so hard to be ‘good enough’ for, would take on life among the outcast as one we would never deem ‘good enough’? For anyone who has ever met God in an AA meeting or other recovery experience, it might seem that of course there is no other way for God to save us than to be there for us at rock bottom when we land there in all of our broken pieces. But who would want to admit they’ve been there? Who would want to boast about meeting God in their darkest, weakest, worst possible moments? That would be admitting that we’ve had those dark, weak, terrible times in our lives. ‘...but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.’ If we can only find God where life makes sense, then we aren’t looking through the right lens.

Absurd, isn’t it? We try so hard to be successful, to grow our ministries and programs by being strong and exciting and colorful and well-organized, and God insists on meeting us in the weak and boring and plain and messy daily living that far too often wears us down. Even this winter, as long and hard as it has been, as often as it has made us stop ‘normal’ daily routines entirely, is a place where God has been with us. Because the cross, the Savior whom we worship, is not concerned with market values and perfect sacrifices - Jesus IS the perfect sacrifice and has already taken care of that for all of humanity. The foolish absurdity of our salvation is that we are able to look fear and death in the face and find God even there. And if we can’t find God there, God finds us there. If we can’t come up with words or slogans to sell people on coming to church, well, that’s just fine, because God is not a relationship to be bought or sold or marketed. It is in our very failures that God finds us and loves us. And everything we use to prop ourselves up is discarded, everything we use to make ourselves look better than we feel is thrown out, everything that could ever get between our hearts and our God is demolished by the God who wants us and adores us just as we are. It is absurd, that God would seek us and find us and go through hell and back to keep us, but it is what God does, it is the sort of God whom we worship, it is precisely the foolishness of a love so deep and wide and high and long and vast and incomprehensible that all we can do about it is nothing.