30-aug-09

Telling Stories The Rev. Joseph Winston August 30, 2009

Sermon Grace and peace are gifts for you from God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.1 We all have stories that we treasure. Some of us clearly recall our days in the classroom. It really does not matter if these precious memories occurred during kindergarten or even if they happened during college. Education brings change and we want to remember what happened: a photograph of the teacher captures a personal hero that influenced our child, a yearbook signed by all of our friends reminds us of all the good times we shared, a dried mum from that homecoming game tells us of the bittersweet life we have led. Others of us have fond memories of hunting with our father. The ever so long wait until the opening of deer season proved almost too hard to bear. The endless miles that passed before arriving at the hunting lease. The excitement tinged with 1

Romans 1:7, 1 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 1:2, Galatians 1:3, Ephesians 1:2, Philippians 1:2, 2 Thessalonians 1:2, Philemon 1:3.

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the unfamiliar surroundings that made it difficult to fall asleep on that first night. The smell of bacon and eggs cooking before dawn that called you out of the warm sleeping bag. The long walk out to the stand. And then the wait until that first buck walked into your sights. Everyone knows exactly what happens when we leave out key parts of our recollections. Our memories change. Loosing that yearbook with all the signatures means that you can no longer see what your friends looked like in high school. Misplacing your father’s favorite hunting jacket takes away all of those smells associated with the lease. To prevent us from forgetting, we carefully protect what is dear to us. We arrange the awards from school in a shadow box we hang in a place of honor in the living room. We clean Dad’s favorite rifle so that we can use it this year. We do the same thing to the stores that we tell. We practice them over and over until they become second nature to us. Jack and Jill went up the hill, To fetch a pail of water; Jack fell down and broke his crown. And Jill came tumbling after.2 Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run. 2

The earliest known publication of the lyrics occurred during the 1760s by John Newbery’s Mother Goose’s Melody. Anonymous, Jack and Jill, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jack_and_Jill_checkedonAugust30,2009.

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They all ran after the farmer’s wife, Who cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see a such sight in your life, As three blind mice?3 The special place on the wall for our mementos from school, the care we lavish on Dad’s old hunting equipment, and our ability to recall both the words and the melodies of these two nursery rhymes show us how much we cherish all these memories. We do not want anything to change. One might expect that we take the same pains here in the church to ensure the story of God’s love for the world is accurately passed down from generation to generation. Today’s Gospel lesson shows us how wrong this assumption really is. The missing verse numbers in today’s Celebrate insert tell us what we have changed what was first given to us. The Revised Common Lectionary suggests that we leave out verses nine through thirteen along with sixteen to twenty. The first part that our leaders believe we should skip reads, 9

Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the com-

mandment of God in order to keep your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honour your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’4 3

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But you say that if anyone tells

The original lyrics are from 1609 and they were found in Deuteromelia or The Seconde part of Musicks melodie edited by Thomas Ravenscroft.Anonymous, Three Blind Mice, http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice. The words entered children’s literature in 1842 as a part of a collection published by James Orchard Halliwell.ibid.. 4 The two quotes found in this verse follow are almost identical to the LXX’s version of Exodus

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father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God)5 – 12 then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother,

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thus making void the word

of God through your tradition that you have handed on.6 And you do many things like this.” (NRSV) The second omission, which we will not discuss today, tells us, 16

(Missing from the best texts – Let anyone with ears to hear listen.)

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When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples

asked him about the parable. 18 He said to them, “Then are you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile,

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since it enters, not the heart but the

stomach, and does out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.” (NRSV) The modifications from the original account in found in the Gospel according to St. Mark shifts significantly our understanding of the text. It is like carefully cutting out that page in the yearbook so you can forget everything about that per20:12 and 21:17. John R. Donahue, S.J. and Daniel J. Harrington, S.J.; Idem, editor, The Gospel of Mark, Volume 2, Sacra Pagina, (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002), p. 223. When this verse is included in the reading for Sunday, it along with verse 8 says that the law is not abolished. ibid., p. 228. Rather, the followers of the L ORD need to be careful how they use the law. 5 The Greek word is κορβᾶν and it is used in Leviticus 2:1, 3, 12, and 14. Ibid., p. 223. There it is translated as “offering” or “oblation” (KJV, NRSV). 6 Making void is a legal phrase (ἀκυροῦντες) found in places like Josephus Antiquities 18.304, 20.183. Ibid..

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son who did not take you to the prom. In the first omission, Jesus clearly shows us His concern about what the religious leaders are allowing to happen. The commandment to honor your father and your mother does not just mean to obey them when you are a child but it also requires that you support your parents as long as they live. Observing this law was costly in Christ’s time and it is the same today. That is why people of all social standings wanted to ignore the law by playing the following game. Before the death of their parents, the man of the house would present the religious leaders with a gift, a Corban.7 At all costs, he would say, this money must stay in the temple. Then when his parents or parent’s-in-law required assistance of any type, the giver could truthfully say something like this. “Mom/Dad, you know that I would love to help you but I am hurting right now since I have given the L ORD what He so rightly deserves. You would not want it any other way, now would you? If I am richly blessed by the L ORD sometime in the future, I will be more than happy to see what I can do for you then.” This change, tacitly approved by the religious leaders, undermines the fourth commandment. The cash in the temple’s bank does not honor the man’s parents in any way. Instead, the gift makes them laughingstock because a devious person can work his way around the law. All that the Corban does is provide him with a religiously acceptable excuse for elder abuse. When we omit Christ’s condemnation of both the scribes and the Pharisees for their approval of manipulating the Law for personal benefit and when we cut out 7

Donahue and Harrington, Mark, p. 223.

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portions of Bible because we feel like it does not apply to us, we are taking the first step in “rationalizing” God’s Word. We make these types of changes so often in our everyday lives that we no longer even notice them. We say to ourselves, “I actually did pretty well in school. Let’s just conveniently forget that ‘C’ I made.” So, we hide the papers and the report cards that would indict us. You know that trophy buck I really wanted. I guess it was not all that important to me. On and on we go, until we cannot separate reality from fiction. The same pattern happens again and again in the church. We firmly believe that as long as it does not bother us, we can do anything that pleases us. For years, the church all over the world has largely ignored her task of educating both adults and children. This was even true during Luther’s time. He had very harsh words for those pastors and parents who would not teach their charges exactly what kind of life they must lead. Luther identified those leaders who refused to instruct their students as the absolute worse enemies of God.8 He went on to say that anyone who acted in this fashion was rebelling against the L ORD and destroying the Kingdom of God. 9 All over the United States, churches sit empty. In our part of the world, onehalf of the ELCA churches have less than one hundred people on any given Sunday. Obviously, there is a reason for this. Pastors have not taught the benefits of Christianity with such clarity that people cannot think of any better place to be on 8

Small Catechism, P REFACE; n. 19-20.; Theodore G. Tappert et al., editors, The Book of Concord, (Fortress Press, 1959), p. 340. 9 Small Catechism, P REFACE; n. 19-20.; Ibid..

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a Sunday morning than worshiping the L ORD. The preachers have also failed to convince anyone that God punishes all those people who know what they should be doing. Right here in this place, pastors have not told you about the benefits of Holy Communion with such passion that the members of the church actually demand that their pastor give them the Lord’s Supper every time they meet. This too was a problem during Luther’s time.10 Luther had very strong words for those Christians that continually refuse to follow Christ’s command to, “Do this.” Luther stated that those people who want a minimum amount of time with their L ORD believe that there is “no sin, no flesh, no devil, no world, no death, no hell” even though ever one of these facts is obvious to anyone who just look around at how they live.11 Luther then goes on and tells us that these people need “no grace, no life, no paradise, no heaven, no Christ, no God, nothing good at all.”12 Only one group in the entire world is responsible for all these problems found in the church: the pastors. We have not taught you what you need to know. We have not conveyed to you the necessity to bring your friends and family to worship. We have not shown you why we must eat with the L ORD. The decline in the church falls squarely on our shoulders. Today’s truncated Gospel lesson is just a small symptom of the terrible disease the body is suffering. We have left out huge portions of the story. And in doing so, we have hurt you. If the future of the church depends on what I or any other pastor can do, then 10

Small Catechism, P REFACE; n. 21-25.; Tappert et al., The Book of Concord, p. 340-341. Small Catechism, P REFACE; n. 23.; Ibid., p. 341. 12 Small Catechism, P REFACE; n. 23.; Ibid.. 11

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you just might as well hang it up and leave right now. You see what the leaders have been doing for generations. We love to take our scissors to the story and cut it up into tiny little pieces that we just absolutely adore. We then pass off these self-made paper dolls as the real thing, the Body of Christ. This mad selfdestruction of trimming this and removing that continues until we reduce the all the self-constructed paper dolls into mounds of confetti. Certainly, this cannot be our hope. Rebelling against the pastors that brought us to this place is not the answer either. We all realize that each of us desperately wants to tell our own unique story to the world and that nothing better get in our way. We pick up our pen and scratch out a bad entry from the start of our play. Dramatic editing continues as we take out a character or two that we do not like. Hastily, we scribble in a few more lines for us to say and we continue doing this until the final curtain calls. A critical review of our plot would be, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.13 We cannot trust our own story either. Jesus came for the pastor and the people who cannot faithfully tell the story. He came for you and for I to save us from our deception. He came to give you life in abundance. And that is no story. 13

Act 5, Scene 5, William Shakespeare, Macbeth,.

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We realize what happens when anyone changes our stories. That is why we carefully pass them on to our friends and family. Our shared knowledge of the nursery rhymes we learned in our mother’s lap show the same thing. We want our children to learn what our parent’s taught us. God’s Word too must be passed down unchanged. “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”14

References Anonymous, Jack and Jill, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_ and_Jill_checkedonAugust30,2009. Anonymous, Three Blind Mice, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Three_Blind_Mice, Last checked on August 30, 2009. Donahue, S.J., John R. and Harrington, S.J., Daniel J.; Idem, editor, The Gospel of Mark, Volume 2, Sacra Pagina, (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002). Shakespeare, William, Macbeth,. Tappert, Theodore G., editors, The Book of Concord, (Fortress Press, 1959).

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Philippians 4:7.

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