Biblical Weirdness

Throughout July and August we are listening to stories of “Heroes and Villains.” Last week’s villain was King Saul. As a follow up to that story, I invite you to hear a very weird story about King Saul in I Samuel 19:18-24. I’ll summarize the story, but please read it for yourself so you’ll know that I’m not making this up. 

When Saul had decides to kill David, David escapes with the help of Saul’s son Jonathan (last week’s hero!) and Saul’s daughter Michal, who is also David’s wife. David flees to a town where the great Samuel leads a school of prophets. Those prophets seem to be in a perpetual state of prophetic frenzy. Saul sends messengers to capture David, but when they approach the prophets, the messengers fall into a prophetic frenzy! Upon hearing the news, Saul sends more messengers – one would imagine that these are hardened warriors – and they fall into a prophetic frenzy. But, wait, it gets better. Saul is sick of this nonsense and pursued David himself. And when he arrives Saul falls into a prophetic frenzy! (There’s a Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On!) I would draw you a picture, but according to the chronicler, Saul ripped off his clothes and lay naked all day and night at Samuel’s feet, so I’ll leave it there. 

Yes, it is an odd story. But, it concludes with the purposeof the story, which is to explain the origin of the well-known proverb, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” If you’ve never heard that proverb it’s probably because you live in the 21^stcentury, but in the Ancient Near East it was widely known. (So much so that there’s a competing story about the proverb’s origin in I Samuel 10:9-12. I’ll leave that story for you to read, as well as the choice of which story best explains the origins of the proverb.) 

So, it turns out that the weird story is a means of explaining an odd proverb. But, the proverb’s oddness does not lie in its unfamiliarity to us. It’s odd because of the differing roles of the prophet and the king. 

Prophets were notoriously dedicated to telling the truth. That is why they were also notoriously killed quite often. And while most of us like to say that we want to live by the truth, what we really want is a comforting truthiness that supports and legitimates our way of living. The prophets did not have the luxury of tickling the ears in order to win friends and influence people. Their blessed curse was to tell the truth, come what may. That is why it was common for the priests to accuse them of heresy and the politicians to accuse them of being disloyal. While everyone wants the prophet in their corner, true prophets are beholden to no one and wholly given to the truth.

The king, however, is the embodiment of being beholden. While there is a ton of privilege in the king’s welfare being synonymous with the welfare of the nation, it is also a tether, forever tying the king to the good of the land. That is why the legacy of Israel’s kings is so riddled with problems. They would choose what they felt to be advantageous for their reign and, in doing so, often violated God’s clear direction. This sin was the prophetic contribution of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany when too many Christians were subjecting God’s word to Nazi ideology. The king is beholden, but the free and prophetic voice for God cannot be. Therein lies the crisis of allegiance and the cost of discipleship. 

So, if King Saul is among the prophets, that would be a very odd juncture of the roles of king and prophet. No wonder the proverb is posed as a question. It may offer disbelief when a political leader presumes to be speaking on God’s behalf. It may simply be a way of expressing surprise when an invested political leader seems to do the right thing! Or, it may be a reminder that the relationship between the crown and the prophetic word of God may correspond on occasion, but typically are at odds with one another. 

Sometimes even weird stories about weird proverbs in the Bible offer a wisdom far beyond what most of us can imagine. 

Mark of St. Mark

“Heroes and Villains” as stories of Heroism and Villainy

The title of this essay may look redundant, but it’s not. It reflects a distinction that one of our children reminded us about during a Young Church moment recently. When asked if Superman would still be “hero” if he did bad things, the response was quite different than expected: “He would still be one of God’s beloved children.” It was a perfect Presbyterian response. 

As our children point out, Presbyterian theology has two core commitments that make it difficult for us to speak of “Heroes and Villains.” First, we believe that any good that we might attain is not of our own accord, but something that is empowered by God. Musty old doctrines with titles like “Sola Gratia” (grace alone), Predestination, Sovereignty, and the like were all grounded in the conviction that allgoodness is grounded in God and any participation we have in it is an act of God’s grace. Even Jesus responded to someone who called him “Good Teacher,” with the words, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” So, it is difficult to speak of “heroes” when we live in a tradition that resists attributing goodness even to the Christ. 

The second commitment that makes it difficult for us to speak of “Heroes and Villains” is the obverse of the first: We believe that all of us are sinners. Paul put it rather starkly with the phrase, “There is none who is righteous,” followed immediately by what I think is an attempt to cut off the person who wants to take exception, “No not one.” The logic of this second commitment flows directly from the first. If God alone is the source of goodness, if grace alone is the only way that we can achieve anything good, then it follows that we ourselves cannot answer to the appellation of “good” any more than Jesus did. 

So, there we have it. As Presbyterians we don’t believe in Heroes or Villains, but in God’s grace and our sinfulness. Right? … (crickets) … I said, “Am I right?” 

Well … sort of. One of the unintended consequences of Presbyterian theology – if we took it at face value – would be that there is really no difference between doing good or doing evil, right and wrong, righteousness or sinfulness. One could – I suppose – take a very fatalistic view of it all: “If none of us is good, then why bother?” Or, if we are all equally sinners, then we might find ourselves relativizing evil with “Everyone does it” or “There are good people on all sides.” And that does notseem to be the point of either Jesus’ words, Paul’s words, or the theological ruminations of our theological ancestors. Clearly in the Scriptures if there is not a clean distinction between “Heroes and Villains” at least there is a distinction between what we might call “Heroism and Villainy.” I invite you to hear our theme of “Heroes and Villains” in that vein, rather than as absolute judgments of one person or another. 

So, for example, last week we saw the heroism of Queen Vashti’s refusal to pose as eye candy for King Ahaseraus and his drunken consorts. That does not preclude that Queen Vashti was part of the system of power and privilege that she ultimately challenged with her heroic resistance. All of the “heroes” that we will visit this summer are flawed persons, just like all of the villains could easily possess some redemptive qualities. What we are seeing are not absolute distinctions that fully capture someone’s whole story. We are seeing glimpses of stories where someone acts heroically or villainously. So, while Paul speaking truth when he says, “There is none righteous, no not one,” the story of Cain was speaking truth when God says, “Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is to have you, but you must master it.” 

What our Presbyterian heritage teaches us poignantly is never to write someone off because of their failure in life. None of us is totally defined by our actions, even our worst mistakes or most abject failures. Likewise, none of us is totally defined by our good accomplishments. Our tradition invites us to see each person as dependent on God’s grace in both our failures and our breakthroughs. Our dependence on God’s grace is a word of encouragement to the disheartened and a word of humility to the arrogant. At the same time, there is evil and there is good and our calling is to respond to God’s grace by doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly before our God. 

“Heroes and Villains,” or, rather, “Heroism and Villainy.” Come explore it with us. 

Mark of St. Mark

Heroes and Villains

Heroes are those who do what is good, villains are selfish and hurt others.

Heroes are those who are faithful and true, while trusting in God’s great love.

If we do justice, love kindness, walk with God in humbleness;

Do justice, love kindness, we’ll be heroes too!

Throughout July and August, we are following the theme “Heroes and Villains” in Saturday and Sunday worship. My hope is to pick up on some of the lesser-known “heroes” of the biblical stories, with the “villains” as their counterparts, to explore what faithfulness can look like. 

Heroism can be messy and unclear at times, just like villainy can be filled with moments of sympathetic doubt. We can take last week’s story as an example. In the story of Cain and Abel that many of us have heard along the way, the villain could be Cain, contrasted with the innocent victim Abel. I invite you to shift the focus a bit and to see God as the hero this story, because of how God’s actions compare to Lamech. (You have to read the whole 4^thchapter of Genesis to get the full story.) God shows mercy when executing justice against Cain. Lamech imitates God’s language but arrogates to himself the right to execute justice without mercy. It raises the difference between imitation and pretense. To imitate God would have been for Lamech to mingle mercy with justice. Instead, Lamech simply embodies the age-old principle of “might makes right” when he kills a young man for striking him. Lamech does, however, invoke God’s words of protection over Cain and even amplifies them as the legitimation of his actions. In doing so, it seems more like a pretense of imitating God than actually imitating God. 

I know I’m rehashing last week’s sermon, but I can’t get away from that contrast. One can imitate God– by taking God’s words and echoing them as the principle of one’s actions. Or, one can pretend to imitate God– by using God’s words to justify actions that are quite different from what God would do. I’m convinced this distinction is at the heart of the prohibition against taking God’s name “in vain,” or using the imprimaturof God for one’s own purposes.  

Therein lies the challenge of anyone who proclaims the gospel. Preachers need to discipline their work to ensure that we are not just using the Scriptures as a pretense to push our agendas or rail about our pet peeves. Non-preachers – as believers who are called to proclaim the gospel also – need to ensure that we are not just invoking “God talk” to justify our actions or sanction our opinions. By contrasting God’s action with Lamech’s pretense, we can identify one difference between heroism and villainy as whether our justice is expressed with mercy, or simply a matter of sheer vengeance. 

This week our “Heroes and Villains” theme brings us to the story in the book of Esther, where we contrast the actions of Queen Vashti and the king’s highest official named Haman. You don’t want to miss it. 

PSA: Tomorrow is our monthly “Meet Me at Muldoon’s” event. Come join us for worship and music! 

Mark of St. Mark

Heroes and Villains: God the Merciful and Lamech the Arrogant

Genesis 4:1-16; Genesis 5:17-26 

July 6^th/7^th2019 

St. Mark Presbyterian Church 

D. Mark Davis 

We’ve probably all heard the story of Cain and Abel. There’s just so much about the story that is captivating, including the fact that it is the first of many stories of violence in the Scriptures. I want to say from the start that the story simply doesn’t work if someone tries to read it from a literalist’s point of view. The questions are simply too many: If Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel were the only living persons on the earth, who did Cain marry? Who are the people that might take vengeance out on Cain as he wanders the earth? If it were only Adam and Eve in the world who might do such a thing, God could have simply gathered them and said, “Hey, Adam and Eve, don’t take vengeance on Cain.” Problem solved. So, on the face of it, this is not a story that works literally and that was just as obvious to the communities telling and writing the story as it is to you and me. When a story is so evidently not literally possible, that is the storyteller’s way of inviting us to hear it otherwise. 

And so, this story opens up a lot of possibilities: 

- We could be reading about an ongoing cultural struggle between agricultural and livestock communities. Those two types of farming communities have often been at odds with each other, particularly in times of land or water scarcity. 

- This story could reflect an ongoing struggle between rural and urban people. Cain goes away and he and his descendants establish cities. If you are an nomadic or rural people, constantly being harassed by city folk – who can stash arms or send out raiding parties or simply bully you away from their own lands – then it would make sense that you see cities as an offshoot of an act of violence. 

- Many early writers reflected the complexity of Cain’s personality and saw him either as an unredeemable murderer or as a repentant sinner. Often Jewish writer who would see him as repentant and Christian writers would see him as irredeemable – let that tendency trouble your minds for a second. 

- Augustine made a typological com­parison between the evil Cain and the Jews. The story seemed to provide an argument that Jews were guilty of killing Jesus and yet should be allowed to exist. 

– And the story introduces something without really spelling out what it is: The “Mark of Cain.” Was it a protective mark or a curse? Some people saw the mark as a physical sign, often depicted as a mark on Cain’s forehead or cheek. Some people have interpreted it racially – although since they were literalists they had to fast-forward to Noah’s son “Ham” who was cursed and re-do their racist argument. 

As you can see, there’s a long history of this story that goes far beyond what most of us have been taught about it – that is, as some kind of sibling rivalry gone extreme. I want to place the story into a different kind of context for us by continuing it with the rest of Cain’s story, making it a less familiar story about true justice. 

The story of Cain reads very much like a scene from an episode of “Law and Order.” Cain murders his brother out of jealous rage and imagines that he can get away with it. When Abel goes missing and he is confronted by God with the question, “Where is your brother?” Cain tries to push away the inquiry by asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Ah, but unbeknownst to Cain, there is an evidentiary witness: The dead Abel’s blood, which God says, “Is crying out to me from the ground!” So Cain’s alibi is destroyed and he is guilty and given a punishment that fits the crime: “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” (In some ways, this may be a commentary about agricultural v. nomadic peoples). Now Cain pleads to the judge for mercy, arguing that the punishment is too severe because he will be liable to others taking vengeance on him. And so God puts Cain into a “Convict Protection Program,” and mingles mercy with justice. God does this by placing a mark on Cain that will protect him with the threat that anyone who exacts vengeance on Cain will themselves suffer a sevenfold vengeance. 

There is no accident in how God is depicted in this story. The actions are very similar to the earlier story of Adam and Eve disobeying God, God asking them questions, they try to push the blame elsewhere, and then they are convicted, punished by the toil of working the ground and childbirth, and finally being evicted from the Garden of Eden. But, here too God mingles mercy with justice by clothing them and, by driving them from the garden, ensuring that they would not eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in their fallen state. I don’t understand everything that is at play here, but it is clear that the eviction is both a punishment and a display of mercy. 

That is who God is and how God executes justice in these stories. For that reason, I invite you to see God as a “Hero” in this story, because even when God is executing justice, God enables the convicted to have a way of making a life with hope.Justice without mercy is vengeance. Mercy without justice is permissiveness. In God’s actions, when justice and mercy are together they fulfill each other. 

So, what would a villain look like in this world where justice needs mercy and mercy needs justice? That’s what the second part of the story of Cain is all about – the part that none of us ever reads in Sunday School. It is the story of Cain’s descendants, particularly the villain called Lamech. [Read Genesis 4:17-26].  

Here’s the particularly devious part of Lamech’s evil: He sounds almost just like God. He uses God’s formula, God’s method, God’s words and amplifies them. But, in doing so, he turns God’s mercy upside-down and makes it a claim of sheer arrogance. Do you see that? This may be the most insightful commentary in all of the Scriptures about what happens when a quest for power takes God’s words in vain. They sound “goddy” enough. They seem to reflect the same sort of principle. It feels religious. But it is nothing but Lamech’s arrogance. And that, the story concludes, is when people began to invoke the name of the Lord. Ho. Ly. Smokes. 

So, what value is there in reading this story, not just as the “Cain and Abel, brother kills brother and gets caught and punished” story, but as the “Cain and his descendants” story, a story of God’s heroism and Lamech’s arrogance? Frankly, the “Cain and Abel” story that we all have heard over and over is just another episode of “Law and Order,” where in the end justice is making sure that the bad guys get punished. If we read it as a “Hero and Villain” story, with God as the hero and Lamech as the villain, it forces us to reckon with who we are, both legally and religiously. 

Did you know that over 2,200 juveniles in our country – people age 17 and under – have been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Dozens of them are as young as 13 or 14. Most of those sentences were mandatory, because of legislation that has been passed forbidding the court to consider a person’s age or life history. Some were charged with crimes that did not involve homicide. In other words, it was a crime like the “young man” of Lamech’s story, who struck and injured him. Many of these teenagers lacked legal representation, and in most cases the propriety of their cases and sentences have never been reviewed. And, of course, a large majority of them are children of color. In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the practice somewhat, ruling that sentencing a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole for a non-homicidal crimewas a violation of the 8^thAmendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But a crime like Cain’s, which was a homicide, has no necessary provision for mercy. 

If we read this story as a “Hero and Villain” story, with God as the hero and Lamech as the Villain, we are able to see how someone can use the pretense of honoring God, using God’s own words, amplifying them even, as nothing more than a religious legitimation for an act of arrogance. The test is whether justice that we tout in the name of God is mingled with mercy, not how loudly or strongly we insist on our religious validation. Do we hear that? As a story of God the Hero and Lamech the Villain, this story raises the question of whether we genuinely want to imitate God or whether we are satisfied with sounding somewhat god-like as we pursue our own ends. 

We’ve all heard the story of Cain and Abel growing up, where Abel is the innocent victim and Cain is the heinous murderer. But few of us have heard the story as a whole, where God is the hero for tempering justice with mercy; and Lamech is the villain, because he dares to execute justice without mercy and to do so in the name of God. When we hear this story this way, it calls us to a live dedicated to keeping justice and mercy forever united. Thanks be to God. Amen.