And Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning he returned to the temple. All the people gathered around him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The legal experts and Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery. Placing her in the center of the group, 4 they said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of committing adultery. 5 In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone women like this. What do you say?” 6 They said this to test him, because they wanted a reason to bring an accusation against him. Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with his finger. 7 They continued to question him, so he stood up and replied, “Whoever hasn’t sinned should throw the first stone.” 8 Bending down again, he wrote on the ground. 9 Those who heard him went away, one by one, beginning with the elders. Finally, only Jesus and the woman were left in the middle of the crowd. 10 Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Is there no one to condemn you?” 11 She said, “No one, sir.” Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on, don’t sin anymore.” (Common English Bible)
“The Son of Man: When
Poetry Testifies to Christ,” Week Two
In
her right hand is the power and accuracy to hurl a baseball faster than I could
as a grown man, and with much more precision to boot. In her voice is a story that captured the
hearts and attention of an entire nation.
And in her heart is, well, an awful, awful lot of forgiveness.
Back
during the Little League World Series, Mo’ne Davis became a household name for
her heroic pitching performances in a mostly male-dominated sport. But she also seriously bucked the
meathead-jock stereotype in interviews with her incisive and insightful
quotes—to the point that she already has a memoir out. By contrast, at her age, I was content with
beating Ganondorf over and over again in the final level of The Legend of Zelda.
Sadly
and perhaps inevitably, Mo’ne Davis also attracted trolls and jerks who wanted
nothing more than to make themselves feel taller than by putting this
adolescent girl of color back down, calling her “trash” and saying things like,
“the real question is, can she cook?”
The worst, though, came from a college baseball player, Joey
Casselberry, who, incredulous at the attention Mo’ne was attracting, tweeted,
“Disney is making a movie about Mo’ne Davis?
WHAT A JOKE. That slut got rocked
by Nevada.”
This
wasn’t a peer of Mo’ne calling her a slut—this was a college man, quite a few
years older than her and legally an adult.
The reaction from Casselberry’s college was simple and swift: they
kicked him off their baseball team. But
Mo’ne, once again taking the media pedestal with both hands and standing upon
it aloft, said this:
Everyone makes
mistakes. Everyone deserves a second
chance. I know he didn’t mean it in that
type of way. I know a lot of people get
tired of seeing me on TV, but sometimes you’ve got to think about what you’re
doing before you actually do it. I know
right now he’s really hurt, and I know how hard he worked just to get ot hwere
he is right now. I was pretty hurt on my
part, but I know he’s hurt. He’s hurt
even more.
Holy
fastballs. Somebody, nominate this kid
for a Nobel in something, anything.
And
I tell this story not because it is merely one about forgiveness, or advocating
for second chances. I tell it because it
is a story of someone who, when publicly shamed with the label “slut,”
recognized that it was in fact her harasser who was far more wounded and broken
than she would ever be. As is the case
here, in John 8, with the woman caught in adultery and her fervent accusers.
This
is a new sermon series for us, to begin a not too terribly new season...it is a
few weeks old, at least: Easter. Just
like Christmas and its 12 days, Easter is much more than Easter Sunday itself,
and it lasts for much longer: fifty days, in fact. That’s fifty days of hearing, bearing, and
proclaiming the good news of the resurrection, long after the Easter Bunny has
come and gone and the egg dye has been put back into the pantry for another
year.
As
a part of my own work and ministry in proclaiming to the world a risen Savior,
this sermon series will take a new tack for me: talking with all of you about
Jesus as He is revealed in poetry, of all things. If you’ll recall my sermon series from a
couple of years ago that I centered around several of the writings of C.S.
Lewis, well, this series will be structured fairly similarly, except instead of
C.S. Lewis’s books, it will be around Khalil Gibran’s poetry about Jesus
Christ, of which there is a great amount, in the volume Jesus: Son of Man, from which this series derives its name. Gibran was a Lebanese poet during the early
20th century who was raised Christian but was also influenced by
Sufi mysticism, and that mysticism, much like that of many Christian mystics
throughout history, comes through in his poetry about Jesus. Jesus:
Son of Man tells the stories of the gospels, but in Gibran’s often soaring
word choice, through the eyes of various supporting characters: the individual
disciples, the female followers of Jesus, even some of Jesus’s opponents
(although Gibran reserves his best poetry entirely for Jesus’s adherents).
We
begin this series, then, two weeks ago with Gibran’s retelling of the Sermon on
the Mount made famous in Matthew’s Gospel, and of how Gibran tells the story of
Jesus teaching His disciples how to pray.
After skipping a week, we’re back on course, this time with Gibran’s
version of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, which Gibran
assigns to the voice of the apostle Andrew:
And again (Jesus) looked
into her eyes, and He said, “You have loved overmuch. They who brought you here loved but
little. But they brought you here as a
snare for my ensnaring. Now go in peace. None of them is here to judge you. And if it is in your desire to be wise even
as you are loving, then seek me; for the Son of Man will not judge you.”
And I wondered then
whether He said this to her because He Himself was not without sin.
Imagine
that thought crossing through your mind…you believe in Jesus, you have even
felt called to follow Him, but you’re still trying to figure out exactly who He
really is. And honestly, you can’t blame
Andrew if he did in fact wonder that.
None of the other eleven apostles had quite figured out who Jesus was
and what He really meant, never mind that the crowds that followed Jesus got it
just as wrong as well, trying to carry Him off to crown Him as their conquering
king to violently overthrow the Romans.
And
really, this situation would have been so beyond the norm for anyone who
witnessed it, they all would probably be left wondering, “Who the heck is this
guy who stands in the way of executions and forgives the condemned of their
sins?” Honestly, it was kind of what I
asked myself about Mo’ne Davis…who is this girl stands in front of the people
who slut-shame her and forgives them for doing so?
We
ask that about people who so greatly challenge our assumptions of what we
believe to be true that we often cannot help but do a double-take. And the assumption in New Testament Israel,
ever since the Torah was handed down to Moses up atop Sinai some 1,400 years
ago, was that adultery was a capital crime, punishable by death by stoning.
Except
that it wasn’t really punishable by death, at least, not for both culprits. You’ll notice that this anonymous woman’s
dance partner, whoever he is, is conspicuously absent. You’ll also notice that she is treated as a
means to an end, and that end is to entrap Jesus, not to actually strive for
justice.
Now,
let’s be honest with ourselves here: how often have we used a woman as a means
to an end?
How
many of us have used a woman for our own selfishness or gain, to make ourselves
feel better by comparing ourselves to her, or to make ourselves look better by
going out with her, or to make ourselves act bigger by talking down to her?
Because
that is what is happening here. The
woman isn’t being asked what happened, or what should happen to her. Jesus is.
The woman isn’t just talked down to or compared against, she is treated
as a complete, utter non-entity, worthy only of the role of prop in this
ongoing drama that John’s Gospel depicts of the Pharisees and Sadducees
scheming against Jesus, a drama that, at least in John, stretches all the way back to the very beginning of Jesus's ministry, which is where, unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John places the cleansing of the temple and its subsequent backlash.
This
treatment of the anonymous, adulterous woman then gets played out, again and
again, in our own lives, in our own media, and sometimes, by our own voices,
simply because that is what we do when we are so thirsty for validation in our
lives that the only way we think that we can obtain it is by treating someone
else as so unworthy of us that we must cast them away like a used plaything.
But
when someone treats you like that?
That’s the key thing—it’s directed at you. It’s inherently personal. Maybe we should all be able to be like Taylor
Swift and shake it off (I also feel like I might be going to hell for making a
Taylor Swift reference, especially if God is, say, a Katy Perry or Lady Gaga fan instead..."That pastor should have known what my musical tastes were, and he made a T-Swift reference! Smite!"), but we—and I don’t really mean we here, I mean
women—shouldn’t have to shake it off: such insulting names shouldn’t be used to
begin with.
Yet
Mo’ne Davis does, and she forgives Joey Casselberry to boot. She gets called the slut, but still steps out
in front of the stones being thrown at him.
She didn’t have to, and shouldn’t have to, but then again, Jesus didn’t
have to stand in front of the woman caught in adultery and keep the temple
authorities from stoning her—and He certainly shouldn’t have to, and I’ll let
C.S. Lewis explain why:
Though I have had to
speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can
that the center of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard
unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are
the least bad of all sins. All the worst
pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the
wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and backbiting; the
pleasures of power and of hatred…That is why a cold, self-righteous prick who
goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than the prostitute.
Writ
onto this story from John 8, the men who have brought this adulterous woman to
Jesus may well be closer to hell than she is.
And Jesus knows it. But now, so
does the woman. Her sins are forgiven,
and she goes in peace to not sin more.
And here, once more, I pick up where I left off with Khalil Gibran’s
words, as spoken by Andrew, about this amazing teacher who even forgives sin and
who He might really, truly be:
But since that day I have
pondered long, and I know now that only the pure of heart forgive the thirst
that leads to dead waters.
And only the sure of foot
can give a hand to him who stumbles.
And again and yet again I
say, the bitterness of death is less bitter than life without Him.
May
our own thirsts for sin be forgiven by He who has conquered sin. And may we too come to embrace the reality
that such forgiveness makes even death less bitter than life without Him.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
April
26, 2015
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