SERMON Excess

Pentecost 3 (C): 2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15; Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8

Some of you may remember that the comics use to have (and still may have!) a feature called "What's wrong with this picture?" And there would be a drawing where some of things depicted would be wrong -- sometimes very subtly wrong. Maybe the door of a house would open backwards or there would be a maple leaf on an oak tree. Or maybe something would be missing -- something like a tail on a cat or a doorknob. Sometimes you knew something was missing, but you just couldn't put your finger on it. Whatever, it was always fun trying to figure out all the things that were wrong, circling them -- sometimes sending them to the paper, hoping to get a prize.

Oddly enough, the illustrations on this morning's bulletin remind me of those puzzles. In one sense they seem appropriately parallel. We have a prostrate man in the first illustration with King David and Nathan, and a prostrate and repentant woman in the second. And King David did confess to Nathan (and might be the prostrate man), "I have sinned," and Jesus did tell the woman in Luke, "Your sins are forgiven." Yet, as with those old comic puzzles, one senses there is something wrong with these pictures. That there's something missing in each.

And I think one of things that is missing in both is a sense of real excess. And, in the case of David, a real sense of the excess of evil.

This sense of excess coupled with evil is something that Lee and I experienced in a real life "What's wrong with this picture?" in the fall of 1990. He and I had been to the Soviet Union on business that spring when Gorbachev's political star was rising, but the old social order was in place. When we returned that fall, the Soviet Union was on the verge of disintegration. While we were there Moscow's English newspaper had a lead story in which it reported (with some pride) about the country's new elite, the newly rich (the article even used the term "nouveau riche").

Those "newly rich" -- the new elite -- were of course the new extortionists and thugs who were preying off honest entrepreneurs, poor pensioners, and ordinary people. And still are.

The "What's wrong with this picture" occurred that fall when we had arrived back in Moscow with some French statisticians after a long day of no food and an exhausting flight from Armenia. We went to the Hotel of the Academy of the Arts and Sciences. The hotel -- really more a hostel -- was clean but dim and spare and unheated. We were warned that what had been the Academy's restaurant had been privatized and they probably would not serve us. We, of course, were famished. Our French colleagues were not in good humor. There was, however, no other place to eat, so we went to the restaurant.

None of us was prepared for what we saw. We opened the door to see a room -- unlike the hotel -- warm; a room smokey, lighted, with tables enclosed by dividers on three sides. In a city where people stood in line for hours to get (maybe) a few vegetables or piece of meat, there were tables overflowing with foods of all kinds and bottles of wine, cognac, vodka, and champagne. And at the tables were the "newly rich" elite -- thugs and extortionists with prostitutes, perhaps a few girl friends. Everyone was very intoxicated. Some were falling off their chairs; others were in various stages of embrace. The excess of it all, the obscenity of it, the real obscenity, took our breath away. It's almost hard to describe. And we suddenly realized that "What was wrong with this picture" was the real evil, the real abuse of power, that made it possible.

As predicted, the owners of the restaurant did not serve us. For a great deal of hard currency, they made us a plate of bread and cold meat which we took back to the hotel and ate in a dimly lit and cold common room. We all were reflective and spent the evening in broken English and passable French discussing what we had seen.

And it is that excess and that real evil that is missing in our illustration of David. What David has done is, by any standard, excessive, obscenely excessive. He has not gone to battle with his men.

Because he is king and living in a palace, it is possible for him see Bathsheba bathing. Because he is king, he can command her presence. Because he is king (and one might add, God's appointed king), he takes her. When she becomes pregnant, because he is king and commander in chief, he has the ability to call her husband in from the battle. When her husband refuses to disobey God's command that he not have sexual relations when his men are in combat, David arranges that he be murdered in the field. There is nothing mitigating about what David does. Nothing. And what he does he can do only because he is king and commander in chief.

And that's exactly the point that we just heard Nathan so cleverly bring home. As God's divinely appointed king, David both administered justice and protected the poor. The case that Nathan brings to David to judge is in many ways a no-brainer. According to tribal custom, it was permissible to take a neighbor's sheep or goat to feed an unexpected guest -- if and only if -- the host had none of his own. Specifically excluded from this privilege was "[a] sheep that was a pet of the family."

The case that Nathan brings to David is one where a rich man who has herds takes a poor man's family pet ewe lamb to feed an unexpected guest. And David, protector of the poor and administrator of justice, is outraged at what the rich man has done. And then Nathan says,

"You are the man!" Just like the rich man, you abused your power to do evil to someone who was powerless.

And it is this excess of evil, this abuse of power by the powerful over the powerless that we saw that night in Moscow. It is the evil that we have seen inflicted as torture on prisoners from Abu Garib to Guantanamo and carnage on innocents from Bagdad to Kabul.

Getting carried away with power is not confined to poorly trained guardsmen and women and troops. It is an evil we are all capable of because each of us exercises some sort of power over another. It is the evil that leads to the David on the bulletin cover confessing that he has sinned.

But is this the sin that led to the prostrate woman in the illustration on the bulletin cover? What's wrong with this picture?

Take out your pencils. Here, the answer is "Everything!" Both things in the picture and things not in the picture.

Begin by circling the woman. The woman in today's gospel is never prostrate -- or under a table. We hear that Jesus "took his place at the table." Circle Jesus. The Greek literally translates, "Jesus reclined at the table." Circle the table: The table was close to the floor, and it is Jesus who is horizontal, not the woman, who, as we just heard, stands behind Jesus' feet.

But what is missing from the illustration of the woman on the bulletin cover is the real excess in Luke's account. Here, however, the excess is not an excess of evil but an excess of abundance and of gratitude.

In first century Palestine, people reclined only at what might be called "big deal meals" like Passover seders and sabbath meals. Here we know that the Pharisee has invited Jesus to such a meal because Jesus reclines. Circle the food: not unlike our Moscow tables, there is food and wine overflowing. The very presence of the woman (uninvited as it is) is also excess. Women were not with men at such meals. But this woman is not only there, but she is expressing her complete and utter thanksgiving for Jesus' acceptance of her in gestures of excess gratitude.

An example of the woman's gratitude (one cited by Jesus himself): While the Pharisee has invited Jesus to a most special meal, he has not washed Jesus' feet. The woman not only washes Jesus's feet, but does so with tears of gratitude. To wipe away the tears, she takes off her headdress and unbinds her hair -- gestures so surprising that they elicited the Pharisee's observation that if Jesus were a prophet, he would have known this woman would turn out to be a sinner.

But the woman's unbounded gratitude does not did not stop with washing Jesus' feet. She kisses and anoints his feet as well -- gestures of pure lavishness.

Here then there is excess, but unlike David's excess of evil, here is the excess of love and gratitude. This woman has sinned, really sinned -- she very well may have been a prostitute -- but, unlike the sin of David, hers is a sin of powerlessness. Even so, like David, she, too, has been forgiven. And what Jesus is telling the Pharisee by his unconditioned acceptance of this woman is that in God's kingdom, and at God's table, Jew and gentile, men and women, Pharisee and sinner, powerful and powerless will sit down together as one. And they will do so in a world where there will be no excess of evil, no abuse of the powerless -- in a world of healing and wholeness. In a world of shalom.

And we know that, don't we? We come here male, female, married, single, gay and straight, child and adult, employed and unemployed, educated and not, healthy and ill, black and white and brown. And here in this place, we partake of a meal at God's table that is a foretaste of the abundance and excess of the table in God's kingdom. We know the healing and oneness that is, and that will be, the Kingdom of God.

But before partaking of that meal, we also pray, "Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as in Heaven." In praying these words, we ask for nothing less than the redemption of this world: for its healing and wholeness. But even more. In the words of Bishop N.T. Wright, in praying, "Thy Kingdom come," we are asking God: "[M]ake us Kingdom-bearers! Make us a community of healed healers, make us a retuned orchestra to play the Kingdom-music until the world takes up the song. Make us, in turn, Servants of the Lord, the few with the message for the many."

Through us, the excesses of power and evil can become the excess of abundance and gratitude. Through us, wrongs -- wrongs as near as employers and lenders exploiting and cheating workers because they do not speak English or are undocumented or old and because they are poor and powerless-- through us those wrongs can be identified and righted. Through us, the Moscow tables of excess and evil -- wherever, whenever, and however they are found -- can become the feast of all and the feast for all.

This morning, we pray: "Your Kingdom come." Amen.

June 13, 2010

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church