Sermon: Biblical Failures

A sermon based on Luke 10:25-37 and Psalm 25:1-10

In the beginning…we denied responsibility.  Adam blames Eve.  Eve blames the serpent.  Cain denies that he is his brother’s keeper.  Only God accepts responsibility, and quite an admission of responsibility it is.  God seems to have had second thoughts about the wisdom of killing all flesh on earth except for the inhabitants of the ark.  God declares in Genesis chapter 9, “Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” (9:11).  Perhaps recognizing a penchant for rash decisions, God creates a reminder to make sure such a harsh action is never chosen again. God creates rainbows as a reminder not to kill everyone.  God says, “I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”  But the sign isn’t a reminder for us, it’s a reminder for God.  God continues, “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh” (9:15-15).  God seems to recognize a need for some anger management, and rainbows become token reminders to keep God from committing really devastating acts of rage.  While we might applaud God’s commitment to not destroying all flesh again and affirm the use of an anger management token, we should still note that God never actually gets around to admitting that the flood was a mistake.  Thus, a real acceptance of responsibility eludes not just Adam, Eve, and Cain, but God, as well.

Let me be clear.  I don’t think God made a mistake with the great flood because I think there never was a great flood.  I do not think Adam, Eve, and Cain ever actually denied responsibility because I do not think there ever was an Adam, Eve, or Cain.  However, I do think that religious reflection on the significance of denying responsibility, and therefore of the absolute importance of accepting responsibility, is incredibly important.  This is what makes scripture sacred, even if it is not even remotely historically accurate or inerrant.  If we recognize ourselves in these biblical accounts, then they are still doing their job as scripture.

 Consider what actually accepting responsibility would mean for the United States.  It would mean admitting that the actions of European settlers led to a holocaust of ninety percent of the Native Americans who were living here.  We would admit this, talk about this, and never try to pretend that it didn’t happen.  It would mean recognizing not just the human horror of slavery, but that cheating has been a prominent way of life in the United States for centuries.  It would mean admitting that three decades of explicit housing apartheid in the 20th century where nonwhites were legally excluded from white neighborhoods, and continuing implicit apartheid to this day, has had unspeakable and incalculable consequences for nonwhite, especially black, residents of this country.  You cannot exclude a group from the single greatest wealth generating social experiment ever devised, namely suburbia, and not expect that to have massive consequences for racial inequality and life outcomes.  You cannot have a history of redlining, a policy of the federal government not of banks, that results in present day concentrations of black poverty in exactly the same redlined communities and not see this as something that requires an acceptance of responsibility, as something that requires reparation.  And yet, responsibility for racial inequality is denied over and over and over again in our country.  The Bible can speak great truths to the United States, but instead of reading it as a text about classic human failures, far too many Christians get caught up in debates about whether or not the events of the stories actually happened.

Before we leave the Book of Genesis in order to consider the story of the Good Samaritan, let’s focus for just a moment on one other figure; namely, Noah.  I am not sure if I have spoken from the pulpit about this before, I know I have in the adult forum, but from the perspective of rabbinic interpretation, Noah is a failure.  I know the story says that God saw that Noah was a “righteous man,” but rabbis reach a different conclusion based on how the story ends.  If you recall, the flood waters have receded and Noah gets really drunk.  I really can’t blame Noah here.  After all, everything, and I mean everything except what came on the ark, is dead.  It probably stinks pretty badly as well.  It would take time for all of those rotting corpses to decay.  Noah gets so drunk that he passes out buck naked in his tent.  Ham, one of Noah’s sons, enters the tent.  Now, remember, tents have flaps.  They do not have windows or storm doors, so poor old Ham could have no idea what he would encounter when he threw open the flap of the tent.  He was surely caught off guard when he came across dear old dad passed out naked on the floor.  Ham goes and tells his brothers what he encountered.  I can hear his words.  “Umm, guys, maybe stay out of the tent for a little while.  Let Dad come to and get some clothes on.  He had a rough night last night.”  Instead, the brothers go in and place an animal skin on Noah to cover his nakedness.  This causes Noah to wake up and ask what is going on.  The two brothers who covered him with an animal skin tell him that Ham saw him naked and they came to cover him up

Now, I have passed out once, just once, in front of my family.  In fairness, it was on my birthday, but I confess that I did not pay sufficient attention to the possible consequences of consuming two margarita buckets, yes buckets, in only 45 minutes.  To make a long story short, I was very embarrassed.  Through the margarita fog, I was able to process that I was responsible for my actions.  So, you might expect that Noah’s first reaction to learning that poor Ham saw him passed out naked would be to apologize to Ham, perhaps noting that dealing with everything being dead was harder than he expected, but apologizing, nonetheless.  But, noooo.  Rather than apologizing to Ham, Noah curses him.  Noah says that from now on Ham and all his descendants must be servants to Ham’s brothers and to their descendants.  Talk about failing to accept responsibility!

Circling back to the history of racial injustice in this country for just a minute, this part of the story has had massive consequences for how many Christians came to be just fine with slavery.  History, it seems, decided that the descendants of Ham just so happened to settle in Africa.  Thus, they concluded, it was because of the curse Noah placed on Ham that slavery was entirely justified.  This was known as the curse of Ham and was preached from many a Christian pulpit and affirmed in many pro-slavery writings written by Christians.  If the consequences were not so absolutely horrific, this would be downright comical.  The rationalization for supporting slavery given by Christians was that a guy got really drunk, passed out naked, and cursed his son for walking in on him, and this curse, from this single encounter, was why millions of people were properly taken from their homelands, denied their freedom, abused, raped, murdered, and exploited.  All because Noah got drunk.  It is hard for me to find a failure of biblical interpretation of greater magnitude or consequence.

Unlike selfish and irrational Christians, the rabbinic interpretation of the story is far more insightful.  It is because how the story of Noah ends that the rabbis think that there is an important lesson to be learned in the account.  If Noah is intended to be a righteous person that we should admire, the rabbis figure that his story would end differently.  But, instead, it ends with shame and family curses.  What is the lesson the rabbis infer from the story of Noah?  The lesson is that Noah committed some basic failures.  He failed to warn his neighbors of the flood and he failed to advocate on their behalf to God.  I cannot tell you the number of students who have insisted to me that Noah does warn his neighbors, but when I ask them to produce the chapter and verse that demonstrates this, they never can.  They never can because he never does.

Noah can now be contrasted with Abraham who advocates on behalf of humanity when God declares an intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.  Again and again, Abraham asks God to consider that there may be righteous people in those cities who would die because of God’s actions.  Abraham defends human beings before God, even if it means challenging the wisdom of God’s actions directly.  Abraham, conclude the rabbis, is a righteous man who builds a fire, whereas Noah is a righteous man in a fur coat.  What is the difference between the two?  A righteous person who builds a fire keeps themselves and others warm, whereas a righteous person in fur coat only keeps themselves warm.  The lesson of the flood story then is simple: don’t be like Noah.  If you do, you will have a shameful ending to your story.  Be like Abraham.  Always defend human beings, even before God.  Always defend your neighbor…and I would add defend them no matter where they come from, and no matter what hats they wear on their heads.

The writers of Genesis surely encountered many flood stories, most notably the flood account in the Sumerian text the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Ever since it was first discovered scholars have noticed the remarkable similarities between the stories.  Biblical literalists must then go to great lengths to insist that story of Noah was not plagiarized from older stories like the one found in the Epic of Gilgamesh.  But these apologists miss the most important difference between the stories.  The story of Noah was not told to provide the definitive account of a world-wide flood; it was told to make clear how NOT to save the world.  That is an interpretation you will never find in any other account of the flood.  Scripture for the writers of Genesis was much more about getting the relationships between human beings right and about getting the relationship between humanity and God right, than about any concern with history.  Christians who tie themselves in knots to defend the historicity of the biblical account completely fail to understand the point of the story.

There are so many biblical failures that I will not be able to discuss here.  Abraham twice, twice mind you, pretends that his wife Sarah is his sister and lets her get taken for marriage by a king.  Abraham becomes a rich man with lots of camels, slaves, and even an army as a result of these deceptions but never bothers to ask Sarah what she thinks of the idea.  David rapes, yes rapes, Bathsheba and has her husband Uriah killed off.  Both God and the prophet Samuel insist on the slaughter of men, women, children, and even animals.  Even Jesus and Paul get the apocalypse wrong.  Unlike what they insisted was immanent, it never came.  Failure, failure, failure.  When one feels a sense of failure, a great place to go and just sit with this feeling is the Bible.  I am not saying that the Bible will provide any obvious way out of this feeling.  It will, however, make the feeling seem normal.

Let’s move our consideration to the story of the Good Samaritan.  Perhaps the thing most commonly noticed is the failure of the Priest and the Levite to care for the wounded man.  Put a pin in this, as I will come back to it in a minute.  Less often noticed is what it means to make the hero of the story a Samaritan.  Let’s be clear what this means.  Samaria was the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel composed of 10 of the original 12 tribes, whereas Jerusalem was the capital of the southern kingdom of Judea and of the remaining tribes.  When the Northern Kingdom was defeated by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, a process of syncretism and enculturation lead to the Jews who lived to end up with new, and perhaps slightly Assyrian, conclusions about what it meant to follow God.  This understanding was anathema to those living in Judeah.  The Samaritans were despised by the those from Judeah as heretics and sellouts.  Of course, it did not help matters that many from the Northern Kingdom tried to resettle in Judeah creating numerous economic problems.  Anti-Samaritan sentiment was clearly alive and well at the time of Jesus.  In the gospel of Matthew, the most Jewish of the gospels, Jesus instructs his disciples, “do not enter a Samaritan town” (10:6).  In real life, this would have been quite difficult as Galilee, the home territory of Jesus and his followers, was north of Samaria.  In order for Jesus or any of his disciples to get to Judea and Jerusalem they would have had to travel through Samaria and at least some of its towns.

By making the hero of this parable a Samaritan, the gospel of Luke, the most pro-Gentile of all the gospels, challenges the anti-Samaritan bias of those who would hear his gospel (gospels, by the way, were not read by individuals, they were spoken out loud, or better performed, within early Christian communities).  We can extend this challenge to our own day.  If I had to retell this parable, I would be inclined to tell it as the story of the Good MAGA Republican, or the Good Capitalist.  The story challenges us not to place human beings in boxes, but instead to be open to the possibility that even those we despise can show us what true compassion means.

There is at least one more failure from this parable worth discussing and that is the failure of the author of the gospel to understand how Jews thought about the law.  The assumption is that Priestly and Levitical preoccupations with Temple regulations and purity laws would have prevented them from showing compassion to the wounded man.  This assumption has had terrible consequences for the portrayal of Jews throughout the centuries.  Jews get characterized as obsessive, perhaps fanatical, rule-followers.  Their fanaticism is seen as blinding them to more important concerns like being a good neighbor and caring for those in need.  Jews are characterized as slaves to the law and so incapable of accepting the gospel of Jesus Christ.  The supposed legalism of Jews so blinds them to the message of Jesus that they even conspire to have Jesus executed.  Thus, the Jewish obsession with the law has been become more than enough justification for Christians to pursue over 2,000 years of massacres, forced exiles, and massive discrimination against Jews.  Jews were often paired with Blacks in the 20th century as the two groups of people Christian Americans agreed never to sell their homes to through the use of housing covenants.

The problem with Luke’s characterization of the Priest and the Levite is that it is just not an accurate characterization how Jews understood and understand the laws of God.  It has long been affirmed by Jews that almost any law of God could be violated in the service of protecting human life.  To paraphrase what Jesus says of the Sabbath, Jews have long understood that the laws of God were made for human beings, not human beings for the laws of God.  Defense and care of human life always takes precedence over following the law.  My hunch is that Luke did not actually know too many Jews.  When we understand that his characterization of the apostle Paul in his second volume of scripture, Acts of the Apostles, bears little to no resemblance to the Paul who actually wrote the letters we have in the Bible, we come to realize that we need to be careful readers of Luke’s gospel, always on the lookout for potentially insidious errors in understanding.  One can only wonder what the history of Christian-Jewish relations would have been like if Christian scriptures had not been filled with so many failures to appreciate what Jews actually affirmed.

At this point, you may be wondering why I think any Christian should be hanging out in the Bible.  You might certainly wonder why I still consider the scriptures to be sacred.  So let me be clear: the scriptures are the vocabulary and even the syntax of Christian life, but they are much more an arena for theological struggle than they are a mindless recipe for Christian living.  When Jacob wrestled with God his name was changed to Israel and that name imprinted the importance of theological wrestling on to Jacob for the rest of his life.  Israel literally means one who wrestles with God.  To be Israel, we must wrestle with God and with each other.  What God wants us to do is not obvious and how we should build our world is not obvious.  But there are some basics to fall back on.  With the Good Samaritan, we can always count on compassion being something God expects of us, especially for those who have had the crap beaten out of them, literally, politically, economically, socially, sexually, or otherwise.  We pick up those who have fallen down, and we don’t ask for papers or credentials before we do so.  We stand with those who are getting beaten up…and.we.never.beat.people.up.

Finally, with the Psalmist from today’s scripture, we rest in God.  I think God laughs with us as we read some of the nonsense in scripture that supposedly reveals God’s will and God’s deeds.  I think God would be disappointed in us if we did not call out the nonsense. I am not positive what God wants from me, but I am positive that my trust in God makes getting through the world sooooo much easier.  If someone tries to mock me, make fun of me, question my worth in any way, I am tempted to reply, “Dude! I am loved by God.  Your silly darts mean nothing to me.”  Instead, I usually just smile.  When I wonder whose side I should be on in a political struggle, I simply ask, “Where does God want healing here?” and I quickly get my answer.  I do not need the world to tell me I am important, God does that already.  You do not need the world to tell you that you are important, God has done that already.  God has done that already and for the rest of your life.  You simply cannot screw up so badly that God no longer loves you.  You are always a beloved guest in the banquet of God’s creation.  It remains for us now simply to build a world guided by this commitment.

I understand this church to be a place where we learn week after week that we are loved by God, and where we are given opportunities big and small to build a world guided by that love.  Do we fail in our efforts to do this?  Well, we would not be a very biblical people if we did not.  Of course we fail, but we fail with hearts always willing to do better.