November 10, 2019
Luke 20: 27-38
There is something that has always fascinated me about most the way most children encounter the world around them and the people who makeup that world. Most talk about the innocence of children and I believe innocence is a pretty good word choice. The truth of the matter is that most kids during the early part of their earthly lives are, in fact, innocent. That innocence we applaud is present because those children trust the people surrounding them. These innocent children trust those around them to such a degree that you can now find videos of children doing something to him/herself multiple times even though the very first time caused them pain. Whatever that child has just done to themselves, though, made the surrounding adults first laugh followed by telling the child to do it again, which the child does. When talked about in this way, what once seemed funny shouldn’t, in my opinion. It should be seen as manipulative, and that is the aspect of innocence that captures my attention even more. You see, the innocence we so applaud in children is primarily present because those same children have yet to be personally introduced to, and personally hurt by, manipulation.
Let’s not be fooled into thinking children are the only innocent people susceptible to manipulation. My own life’s experience has taught me otherwise. I think about Adel and Shaima Hamad, members of mine and Amy’s extended family - now US Citizens, but first having arrived in this country as Political refugees from Sudan. I think about discovering that they were paying $600 per month to live in one room of a single-family house that they had made into 2 rooms by hanging a curtain in the middle. Which in and of itself may not sound so bad, but the fact that this house didn’t have running water and didn’t have electricity should sound horrific. I think about the conversation Adel and I had when Amy and I brought his family to our house so they could wash clothes and bathe for the first time in months. This conversation came after Adel overheard me talking on the phone to the man who owned that house the Hamad’s and six other families were paying each month to live in. A conversation, a young Emma Grace also overheard without me realizing it. A conversation in which I told the owner that he would not be receiving anymore rent from the Hamad family among other things I won’t share. I think about that conversation because of what Adel said to me after my phone call with the owner, Adel simply looked at me and said, “I didn’t know any better.”
I also think about the countless artists, entertainers and professional athletes who made millions of dollars and lost it all. I think about the way we parade them and the collapse of their American dream in front of everyone as a new way to be entertained. I think about them because having known some of these once wealthy, famous people, I hear the same the same five words, “I didn’t know any better.” Manipulation is cruel like that and while we might like to think that all adults should know better, the reality is not all do, and it’s not their fault.
Lastly, I think about my own children. One I don’t worry about so much in terms of being manipulated. Jacob has a way of navigating his world that is extremely perceptive to what is being said and what is really being meant by those same words. I believe that perceptiveness is beneficial to him in this regard. My other two carry with them their own sense of the world and how they fit into it. One’s view is so dual minded, right-wrong, good-bad, that I worry about him seeing the grey areas, and by missing the grey areas I worry. The other is so vulnerable, all the time. So open to believing the best about others that she unknowingly walks herself into the manipulation of others and for that I worry.
The thing is, to one extent or another, I worry because I personally know something about all three of their approaches to the world. And because I know something about all three, I continue to struggle with, though, is why people seek to manipulate others in the first place. I struggle with it for many reasons, and my struggle really just leaves me with more questions than answers. Questions like, “What does the manipulator actually gain?” And in a world of people so desperate to be consider winners, do the manipulators really win? Or does no one win?”
*********************************
Maybe that is why stories like the one told in our scripture text today both encourage me and frustrate me. If it’s not clear already, then I want to make sure that everyone here knows, the Sadducees were not being sincere in their questioning of Jesus. In fact, this group of was just the latest in a string of insincere questioners according to the gospel writer Luke. This string started with the Chief Priests and Teachers of the Law and then included “spies, who pretended to be sincere” and now a group of Jews known as the Sadducees. All of these people came with questions, but they really weren’t questions in the truest sense of the word. These questions were traps. Traps being set for the purpose of capturing prey. These questions were manipulative, and in that sense I believe the question bearers were manipulators.
Now initially, Jesus met such questions with his own questions. A back and forth that might continue for a while. Here, though, Jesus does something altogether different, he takes their manipulative, ridiculous question about the ancient tradition of levirate marriage and uses it to teach about God’s justice and God’s love for God’s creation through resurrection. This ancient tradition of levirate marriage, a patriarchal institution that claimed to protect women by passing them from brother to brother, was being presented to Jesus as a test of Torah and the law, and it was being presented by a group of people who relied only on the first five books of the Torah known as the Pentateuch and this is important because those first five books don’t speak to resurrection. So, their entire premise is limited by their own understanding of how the world works, as is often the case with insincere questioners. Jesus, though, doesn’t fall victim to their trap and is able to teach about a more expansive understanding of everything, especially in the sense that in the age to come, in the resurrection age, women shall not be seen as nameless property to be passed along by others. Jesus takes the ridiculous scenario of a woman being passed among seven brothers and says in the age to come, in God’s age the whole idea of women as property doesn’t exist. According to Luke, Jesus understands the age of resurrection and restitution to be an age that does away with the entire patriarchal structure that makes the possessing of women as property possible or as something that is necessary because of our mortality. Taking an insincere question and teaching a new expansive understanding of what the world can and will look like should be received as Good News.
And I do believe it is Good News, it also makes me long for those of us so easily susceptible to manipulation to gain the skill and the eyesight to see it coming the way Jesus did. I long for that because I want to protect the innocence of my children. I want to protect my own innocence, at least that which I still possess. And I want to protect the innocence of our collective humanity for I believe that innocence is worth protecting.
********************************
Early this year in the spring, Grimsley High School had its annual Senior Awards. As we sat and watched, we wondered about the possibility of Joshua receiving an award and then my friend, one of Joshua’s vocal mentors stepped to the podium and said this:
“Our oldest and most distinguished award, the Brietz-Hazelman Vocal Music Award was established in 1939 in honor of choral director Raymond Brietz and band director Herbert Hazelman. This award is given annually to a graduating senior in any choir recognized as having displayed the greatest Scholarship, Musicianship, and Character. This year’s 80th recipient of the Brietz-Hazelman Vocal Music Award has demonstrated all three of these characteristics in full measure. SO yeah, he got a big scholarship to Wake Forest University, where he’s always wanted to go. In fact I don’t think he had any other schools even on his list, unfortunately for mom and dad. And yes he’s been a frequently featured soloist and a rehearsal assistant with the Madrigal Singers and was selected to the Mars Hill Festival Honors Chorus. But what has always impressed me most about Joshua, is that he’s just so darn earnest. I don’t know if I’ve ever had another student who was so unapologetically HIMSELF. So open to life and learning. So devoted to understanding. So immune to sarcasm and cruelty and hate. He just has a pure soul and I hope that he never gets corrupted in a world that is often so unkind to that kind of purity. I’m really going to miss having him in my life every day. Congratulations, buddy.”[1]
Its that kind of innocence that I want to protect because I too know what the world can do. Its that kind of innocence we should all seek to protect and hopefully Jesus can be our model.
{PRAYER]
Amen!
[1] Marshall Johnson, Grimsley High School Senior Awards Ceremony 2019
Luke 20: 27-38
There is something that has always fascinated me about most the way most children encounter the world around them and the people who makeup that world. Most talk about the innocence of children and I believe innocence is a pretty good word choice. The truth of the matter is that most kids during the early part of their earthly lives are, in fact, innocent. That innocence we applaud is present because those children trust the people surrounding them. These innocent children trust those around them to such a degree that you can now find videos of children doing something to him/herself multiple times even though the very first time caused them pain. Whatever that child has just done to themselves, though, made the surrounding adults first laugh followed by telling the child to do it again, which the child does. When talked about in this way, what once seemed funny shouldn’t, in my opinion. It should be seen as manipulative, and that is the aspect of innocence that captures my attention even more. You see, the innocence we so applaud in children is primarily present because those same children have yet to be personally introduced to, and personally hurt by, manipulation.
Let’s not be fooled into thinking children are the only innocent people susceptible to manipulation. My own life’s experience has taught me otherwise. I think about Adel and Shaima Hamad, members of mine and Amy’s extended family - now US Citizens, but first having arrived in this country as Political refugees from Sudan. I think about discovering that they were paying $600 per month to live in one room of a single-family house that they had made into 2 rooms by hanging a curtain in the middle. Which in and of itself may not sound so bad, but the fact that this house didn’t have running water and didn’t have electricity should sound horrific. I think about the conversation Adel and I had when Amy and I brought his family to our house so they could wash clothes and bathe for the first time in months. This conversation came after Adel overheard me talking on the phone to the man who owned that house the Hamad’s and six other families were paying each month to live in. A conversation, a young Emma Grace also overheard without me realizing it. A conversation in which I told the owner that he would not be receiving anymore rent from the Hamad family among other things I won’t share. I think about that conversation because of what Adel said to me after my phone call with the owner, Adel simply looked at me and said, “I didn’t know any better.”
I also think about the countless artists, entertainers and professional athletes who made millions of dollars and lost it all. I think about the way we parade them and the collapse of their American dream in front of everyone as a new way to be entertained. I think about them because having known some of these once wealthy, famous people, I hear the same the same five words, “I didn’t know any better.” Manipulation is cruel like that and while we might like to think that all adults should know better, the reality is not all do, and it’s not their fault.
Lastly, I think about my own children. One I don’t worry about so much in terms of being manipulated. Jacob has a way of navigating his world that is extremely perceptive to what is being said and what is really being meant by those same words. I believe that perceptiveness is beneficial to him in this regard. My other two carry with them their own sense of the world and how they fit into it. One’s view is so dual minded, right-wrong, good-bad, that I worry about him seeing the grey areas, and by missing the grey areas I worry. The other is so vulnerable, all the time. So open to believing the best about others that she unknowingly walks herself into the manipulation of others and for that I worry.
The thing is, to one extent or another, I worry because I personally know something about all three of their approaches to the world. And because I know something about all three, I continue to struggle with, though, is why people seek to manipulate others in the first place. I struggle with it for many reasons, and my struggle really just leaves me with more questions than answers. Questions like, “What does the manipulator actually gain?” And in a world of people so desperate to be consider winners, do the manipulators really win? Or does no one win?”
*********************************
Maybe that is why stories like the one told in our scripture text today both encourage me and frustrate me. If it’s not clear already, then I want to make sure that everyone here knows, the Sadducees were not being sincere in their questioning of Jesus. In fact, this group of was just the latest in a string of insincere questioners according to the gospel writer Luke. This string started with the Chief Priests and Teachers of the Law and then included “spies, who pretended to be sincere” and now a group of Jews known as the Sadducees. All of these people came with questions, but they really weren’t questions in the truest sense of the word. These questions were traps. Traps being set for the purpose of capturing prey. These questions were manipulative, and in that sense I believe the question bearers were manipulators.
Now initially, Jesus met such questions with his own questions. A back and forth that might continue for a while. Here, though, Jesus does something altogether different, he takes their manipulative, ridiculous question about the ancient tradition of levirate marriage and uses it to teach about God’s justice and God’s love for God’s creation through resurrection. This ancient tradition of levirate marriage, a patriarchal institution that claimed to protect women by passing them from brother to brother, was being presented to Jesus as a test of Torah and the law, and it was being presented by a group of people who relied only on the first five books of the Torah known as the Pentateuch and this is important because those first five books don’t speak to resurrection. So, their entire premise is limited by their own understanding of how the world works, as is often the case with insincere questioners. Jesus, though, doesn’t fall victim to their trap and is able to teach about a more expansive understanding of everything, especially in the sense that in the age to come, in the resurrection age, women shall not be seen as nameless property to be passed along by others. Jesus takes the ridiculous scenario of a woman being passed among seven brothers and says in the age to come, in God’s age the whole idea of women as property doesn’t exist. According to Luke, Jesus understands the age of resurrection and restitution to be an age that does away with the entire patriarchal structure that makes the possessing of women as property possible or as something that is necessary because of our mortality. Taking an insincere question and teaching a new expansive understanding of what the world can and will look like should be received as Good News.
And I do believe it is Good News, it also makes me long for those of us so easily susceptible to manipulation to gain the skill and the eyesight to see it coming the way Jesus did. I long for that because I want to protect the innocence of my children. I want to protect my own innocence, at least that which I still possess. And I want to protect the innocence of our collective humanity for I believe that innocence is worth protecting.
********************************
Early this year in the spring, Grimsley High School had its annual Senior Awards. As we sat and watched, we wondered about the possibility of Joshua receiving an award and then my friend, one of Joshua’s vocal mentors stepped to the podium and said this:
“Our oldest and most distinguished award, the Brietz-Hazelman Vocal Music Award was established in 1939 in honor of choral director Raymond Brietz and band director Herbert Hazelman. This award is given annually to a graduating senior in any choir recognized as having displayed the greatest Scholarship, Musicianship, and Character. This year’s 80th recipient of the Brietz-Hazelman Vocal Music Award has demonstrated all three of these characteristics in full measure. SO yeah, he got a big scholarship to Wake Forest University, where he’s always wanted to go. In fact I don’t think he had any other schools even on his list, unfortunately for mom and dad. And yes he’s been a frequently featured soloist and a rehearsal assistant with the Madrigal Singers and was selected to the Mars Hill Festival Honors Chorus. But what has always impressed me most about Joshua, is that he’s just so darn earnest. I don’t know if I’ve ever had another student who was so unapologetically HIMSELF. So open to life and learning. So devoted to understanding. So immune to sarcasm and cruelty and hate. He just has a pure soul and I hope that he never gets corrupted in a world that is often so unkind to that kind of purity. I’m really going to miss having him in my life every day. Congratulations, buddy.”[1]
Its that kind of innocence that I want to protect because I too know what the world can do. Its that kind of innocence we should all seek to protect and hopefully Jesus can be our model.
{PRAYER]
Amen!
[1] Marshall Johnson, Grimsley High School Senior Awards Ceremony 2019
