The senior sermon of Lisa Stolley Miller, Class of 2007 from the Diocese of Texas, given on October 4, 2006, in Christ Chapel

Psalm 101

Hosea 4:11-19:

Luke 5: 27-39

May Wisdom graciously appear to us in our paths and rise to meet us in every thought. Amen.

I will sing of mercy and justice;

to you, O Lord, will I sing praises.

I will strive to follow a blameless course….

I hate the doers of evil deeds;

they shall not remain with me…

only those who lead a blameless life shall be my servants….

I will soon destroy all the wicked in the land,

that I may root out all evildoers from the city of the Lord.

These words are from Psalm 101, a royal psalm sung by a king upon taking office. In the psalm, the king vows to live righteously, to surround himself with righteous advisors, and to root out all evil from his kingdom. We listen and we nod our heads in approval of this ruler’s resolve. So let’s get started. Let’s review the Ten Commandments, straighten up, and start ridding our kingdom of evildoers. How hard can it be? Given the right leadership and enough determination, we should be able to fashion a society where we can live peacefully and without fear.

In many ways, Psalm 101 is human nature 101. Whether it’s the snakes out of Ireland, the radicals out of the church, the conservatives out of government, or the muggers out of Eastwoods Park, everyone wants their house in order. There’s not a person here who wouldn’t like the evildoers to be banished from the Lord’s city. But a word of caution: before the ruler begins the purge, let’s make certain the ruler is from our tribe or religion or party. If someone is going to judge the righteous from the sinner, let’s make certain he or she is one of us. Many loyal Americans were a bit queasy two weeks ago when the headlines disclosed that in our war against terror, 14,000 prisoners are being retained without charges in secret prisons. And now we are preparing to build a fence along our border and to defend it at the expense of human lives. Judgment is dangerous business, even for the City on a Hill.

Late Monday night as I was going to bed, I learned that a 32-year-old milkman dropped his children off at the school bus stop in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, then backed his pick-up truck down the road to a one-room Amish school house. Armed and provisioned for a siege, he entered the school, and ordered the boys and the pregnant and nursing women to leave. Then he barricaded the doors and took as hostages the Amish school girls, ages 6 to 13. After lining them up facing the blackboard, he secured their feet with wire and plastic ties, and opened fire. The little Amish girls whom he terrorized lived in a world as close to Eden as we can create on Earth. Isolated from television and inner city conflict, they may have never witnessed human violence until the milkman tied them up and shot them before shooting himself. According to the notes written to his wife, he seems to have murdered the children because he was tormented by dreams that he might repeat something he had done twenty years earlier, when he had sexually molested two very young female relatives.

Twenty years ago this American milkman was a 12-year-old boy. For twenty years his guilt and sickness festered until he was consumed with evil. Last month, in Essex, Virginia, in another school, a 15-year-old boy shot and killed his principal because he had been reprimanded. How do we purge our kingdom of the evil of disturbed and guilt-ridden 12- year-olds and humiliated 15-year-olds? We can’t. We cannot banish the evil and violence within us by destroying or violently expelling those whom we identify as evildoers. The post-deluvian Word of God on the street is that purging the population doesn’t work even when the judge is righteous. Occasionally we get a rainbow in the sky as a reminder. So what do we do? How do we begin to free our kingdom and all creation from the grip of violence and despair?

In today’s reading from Luke’s gospel, Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, while the scandalized and righteous Pharisees cluck their disapproval on cue. In the NRSV, we are told that Jesus and the friends of Levi are “sitting at table” together, but the Greek makes clear that Jesus is reclining at table. Think Greco-Roman banquet, with men on couches, drinking bowls of diluted wine and practicing the art of conversation. Someone asks Jesus why his disciples don’t fast and pray frequently like the disciples of John or of the Pharisees. Jesus answers that you can’t make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them. The time to fast is when the bridegroom is taken away.

Some scholars see in this answer a Messianic pronouncement and a prediction of Jesus’ passion, but others recognize the bridegroom as a metaphor for God in the Hebrew scriptures, as in the book of the prophet Hosea from which we read this morning, where God is the faithful bridegroom and his people are like an unfaithful wife who whores after false gods. Under both interpretations, Jesus proclaims to us that the presence of God is cause for feasting.

At the time that Jesus took his place on the couch in the banquet hall, mass crucifixions of Jews were commonplace; their tortured bodies were nailed up along the roadsides, so that their death and humiliation would be very public reminders of the “no tolerance” policy of the Roman Empire for dissent or insurrection. Jesus did not proclaim the bridegroom’s presence in the idyllic landscape of rural Pennsylvania or in a gated City on a Hill purged of evildoers, but in a society filled with violence and degradation -- in a society like ours. This reveler who scandalized the righteous, this healer and wisdom teacher reclining with the backsliders and dropping perplexing proverbs into the dinner conversation, this Jesus, looked over his cup at a group of worldly men and told them the meaning of the moment, that God was in their midst -- the eternal had broken through the oppressive lines of empire, through the gritty struggle of survival, through the wary hearts hardened by disappointment and sin, through the tedium of the ordinary. God’s covenant with Israel and with all creation had been neither forgotten nor shattered. God was with them -- in the wedding feast of the bridegroom and in the banquet hall of a sinner, in the wretchedness of birth and death, in the cross and in the empty tomb.

God is with us. That is where we must begin. Until we begin to live out of that place of rejoicing, we cannot witness to God’s presence. If we can’t feel that God is with us, then it’s time for us to fast, not to stockpile arms and provisions for a long siege until God appears. It’s time to fast, to loosen our grip on the things of the world, to remove ourselves from the demands that our possessions exert upon us, until once again we can lift our eyes and see God. God is with us. We can’t keep using violence to banish violence until we have made it safe enough within our own walls to try it God’s way. Defenseless against the powers that crucified him, Jesus taught us how to live in God’s kingdom now. Love your enemy; do good to those who hate you. Forgive those who sin against you. Live in trust and not in fear. Until we do, we will never experience the life that Christ died to bring us.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

"Earth’s crammed with God

And every bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes --

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

God is with us. The city of the Lord may be filled with evildoers, but we can’t wait until the coast is clear before we begin to walk barefooted. God is with us. Take off your shoes. Amen.