9/25 Lectionary Notes: Judgment and Katrina
For some time now, I've been on our church's worship brainstorming e-mail list. I didn't have much time to respond before I quit my office manager job, but I've really enjoyed putting together a response for the lectionary Scripture texts for both September 18 and September 25. What follows is my response for September 25, which incorporates some things I've been wanting to blog about anyway. I'll try to post the responses here when I'm particularly excited about them.
Texts for Sunday, September 25, the Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32
The Ezekiel passage connects immediately for me to the disaster resulting from Hurricane Katrina. From several statements I've heard, there is a mass misunderstanding of the concepts of judgment and prophecy. Prophets are not "fortune tellers" who possess magical powers to predict the future. Rather, they possess the gift of analyzing human behavior according to past patterns and according to the desires of God for God's people. Their statements are more "If [this], then [that]" statements meant to provoke change in their hearers.
Ezekiel's prophecies emerge from a time of exile, when the community of Israel has fallen apart because of its denial of its identity as people of God's law. That is, they have "prostituted" their power and their allegiances (see ch. 16 for an elaborate metaphor). Many Israelites during this time take up blaming their ancestors for their current suffering, but the particular passage of focus for this Sunday makes it clear that they have the choice as individuals AT ANY TIME to forego the ways of their ancestors and live righteously even in suffering. The judgment of the individual exists in relationship with the judgment of the community, but each type of judgment is distinct.
What then is judgment? Judgment, I believe, is not so much an act of God as it is the natural result of living outside of God's vision for us as human beings. That vision is articulated extensively in the law, but very concisely in the Philippians passage: love. Verses 4 & 5: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others."
To see the results of NOT living by the rule of love, we can look at the current situation following the hurricane. I can hear Ezekiel saying, "Don't you worry about the sins of the individuals who had the ability to flee the city before its destruction--the sexual immorality, the gambling, the greed, the desecration of life. Worry about the role you play in the systemic injustices that have resulted in thousands of displaced people whose hidden pockets of poverty have been exposed. You knew that IF you ignored injustice being done against others, THEN there would come a day when your own excessive comfort would begin to deteriorate." In a way, we judge ourselves, we are the agents of our own judgment. We choose, as communities and as individuals, the paths we will take in full knowledge that our choices reflect our sense of who God is and have consequences beyond ourselves.
The hurricane was not an act of a coldly calculating, retributive God for God has "no pleasure in the death of anyone" and those who died were not those responsible for the core injustices that are being exposed. Rather, we are being judged as a nation (see above definition) in the sense that our selfish ambition has been laid bare and we now must reconcile ourselves not only to rising fuel prices, but also to our corporate responsibility for refugees of this storm and potential refugees of any future disaster as a result of immobilizing poverty.
If the goal of selfless love is what is articulated in Philippians, then what are our obstacles to achieving that goal? I think some of the obstacles are exposed in Philippians, as well as the Gospel text: self centeredness, ego, fear of reprisal, cowardice, destructive "groupthink," and our horrific ability to do lip service to what we know ought to be done. This is what the parable addresses directly, and I'll turn to Robert Farrar Capon for some interpretation:
If you then expand upon the parable, you get an instant application of it to the life of the church in all ages. For no matter how much we give lip service to the notion of free grace and dying love, we do not like it. It is just too...indiscriminate. It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and common tarts into the kingdom, and it thumbs its nose at really good people. And it does that, gallingly, for no more reason than the Gospel's shabby exaltation of dumb trust over worthy works. Such nonsense, we mutter in our hearts; such heartless, immoral folly. We'll teach God, we say. We will continue to sing 'Amazing Grace' in church, but we will jolly well be judicious when it comes to explaining to the riffraff what it actually means. We will assure them, of course, that God loves them and forgives them, but we will make it clear that we expect them to clean up their act before we clasp them seriously to our bosom. We do not want whores and chiselers and practicing gays (even if they are suffering with AIDS) thinking they can just barge in here and fraternize. Above all, we do not want drunk priests, or ministers who cheat on their wives with church organists, standing up there in the pulpit telling us that God forgives such effrontery. We never did such things. Why we can hardly even bear to think...
Are we true agents of God's grace when we offer conditional justice to the poor, even as we hoard (sometimes wrongly referred to as "stewarding') the fruits of our own unearned privilege? Have we, as a nation, prostituted our global status to preserve our reputation as the richest and most secure, even as our foreign and domestic policies leave the most disadvantaged members of the human race struggling for daily survival? Are we individually making excuses for not taking the difficult road because the current burden of judgment is on the community's shoulders?
We need to come to a place where we are so desirous of being transformed by God that we can pray for judgment: for the clarity of our sin, collectively and individually, that will allow us to move forward knowing what we must do to love better and to "work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling."