Tenderness,
Fierceness, Mischievousness
Homily
by The Rev. Marcia McRae
St.
John’s Episcopal Church, Bainbridge, GA; 3 Lent, 8 March
2015
Year
B RCL: Exodus
20:1-17; Psalm
19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John
2:13-22
Jesus did not come &
inflict salvation on us.
He came & lived as one of us.
I
finally got around to tending our backyard pond yesterday to take a
break from writing a draft of this sermon. From all the recent rain & winds,
I found a mess of sludge, twigs, debris. It was like the sermon!
I
intend to tend the pond more regularly, but it's cold & I'm busy.
[I hope the pond & fish excuse my excuses.] One blessing the pond
& I have is my husband, who tends it more regularly than I do.
It's a gift he freely offers that brings healing to the pond &
relieves me of 1 more to-do.
Tending
to one another is one of the healing gifts we have in this Body of
Christ & which we offer beyond our red doors.
We live into God's
stipulation that we love our neighbor as ourself.
We continue Jesus'
work of tender compassion that we see when he feeds the hungry.
Usually,
we are able to express the tenderness
of compassion
for people in need.
Notice:
Jesus doesn't ask people how they got in need or in a mess.
The
Phaisees do ask.
When our level of compassion goes up because we know
something wasn't the person's fault, something is askew in our
perspective.1
Think of how Jesus shows compassion when something is the person's
fault, as we see when he is confronted about the woman caught in
adultry.
[More
of that later.]
We
can learn to see as Jesus sees.
We can enhance our gift of compassion
by developing all 3 types of it that we see when Jesus responds to
hurts & injustices.
Jesus responds with tenderness, fierceness
&
mischievousness.
In
our Gospel today we see Jesus fiercely respond to the mess leaders
have made in the temple. I wonder how the leaders can see that mess &
proclaim to obey the 10 commandments we hear in our first lesson.
We
call them the 10 Commandments. We call them the Decalogue
[BCP
P. 317.],
the
10 statements2.
These 10 stipulations,
as I call them, are
for us to apply in our relationships with God & with each other.
Jesus
summarizes the 10 stipulations in Mark 12:30-31:
love
the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind,
all your strength & your neighbor as yourself.
When
we love our neighbor, we do no intentional harm, no murder. These
arise from anger. There's a difference between anger &
fierceness, as we remember especially this weekend on the 50th
anniversary of Bloody Sunday on the march across the bridge in Selma,
Alabama.
Why
does God give us the capacity to be angry?
Anger energizes us to
pursue safety for ourselves & others. That sounds like a pretty
good ability. There is a fine line between anger & fierceness.
Anger rants against a past perceived injustice. Fierceness confronts
in a single-minded pursuit to transform injustice for a just future.
The difference is,
as commedian Richard Pryor says:
Justice or Just Us
Fierceness
is anger redeemed.
Anger is usually noisy, filled with emotion.
Fierceness can go beyond emotion & be quiet.
Jesus responds in
silence as he stands before Pilate.
Jesus fiercely confronts Peter:
“Get behind me, Satan,”
as we remember from last Sunday.
Today
we see Jesus fiercely cleaning house.
His
energy confronts the religious leaders to whom religion is a
business.5
The leaders ignore the 1st
stipulation: have no other gods except the Lord our God. They have so
much stuff cluttering their relationship with God, so many rules &
distractions:
animals
for sacrifice, money changers to exchange Roman coins with the
emperor's image on them for proper Jewish coins that men can use to
pay the temple maintenance tax required of all men over 19 years
old.6
Being
mired in details, we overlook or fail to embrace God's gifts of Grace
& Love.
In today's Gospel leaders ask for a sign for what Jesus
is doing. Jesus says he'll destroy the temple & raise it up in 3
days. The leaders get literal:
How can you do that?
It's been under
construction 46 years!
The leaders only see this as absurdity, the
foolishness Paul speaks of to the Corinthians.
As
the New Amerian Bible for Catholics says7,
We
find true wisdom & power...where they seem to be missing:
Jesus
on the cross looks like powerlessness & absurdity.
Details
can make it hard for us to imagine how we could possibly forgive, let
alone love, some nefarious person. It's easier to hold them in
contempt.
We can
transform contempt into curiosity &
wonder what fragment/smidgen
of
positive motivation lies behind their bad actions.
On
the cross, Jesus says: “Father, forgive them. They don't know what
they are doing.” The crucifiers are ignorant, not evil.
They see
Jesus as a threat to their way of life. Their positive intention is
to protect stability in life. Their strategy is to kill Jesus.
We
can't affirm the strategy. We can affirm the intention.
Know
this: There are wise, practical, compassionately fierce ways to love
& to forgive someone, even an enemy, & fiercely keep them in
jail, not as punishment but as a compassionate way to protect others
from further injustice.
We
see fierce compassion as Jesus cleanses the temple.
Where do we see
Jesus' mischievous compassion?
Why would Jesus use
mischievousness?
Mischievousness facilitates transformation.
It is
light-hearted teasing to elicit a
new understanding or insight.
Think
of the Syrophonecian woman begging Jesus to cure her daughter. Jesus
says he can't give the children's bread to dogs. She sees herself in
a new way & I think she is a bit mischievous in her response: Let
me have the crumbs.
Jesus
is mischievous when leaders challenge him about the woman caught in
adultery. He doodles in the sand & says go ahead: the one without
sin throws the 1st
stone.
They depart, oldsters 1st,
who catch onto the truth quicker than the youngsters.
I
remember a youngster at Good Shepherd in Swainsboro, who had great
insight. Helping
launch the parish's study of the Rev. Bob Libby's book, Grace
Happens: Stories
of Everyday Encounters with Grace,
I
was chatting with the 7-year-old's mother, who shared the child's
question about our saying the confession week after week:
“Why
should we say this every week?” the child asks. “We should be
better now.”
The child gives us an excellent example of mischievous
compassion.....Well, Beloved Brothers & Sisters,
why should we say
the confession every week?
We
should be better now.
Bibliography
Holy
Bible with the Apocrypha.
New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.
http://www.thesaurus.com/.
Accessed: 7 March 2015.
Jewish
Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation.
New York: Oxford University Press. 2004.
The
New American Bible for Catholics.
South Bend: Greenlawn Press. 1986.
The
New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha.
Expanded Ed. Revised Stantard Version. Eds: Herbert G. May. Bruce M.
Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press. 1977.
Voyles,
Robert J. Restoring
Hope: Appreciative Strategies to Resolve Grief and Resentment.
Hillsboro, OR:The Appreciative Way. 2010. “Teaching Forgiveness”
www.appreciativeway.com.
2014.
1
Paraphrase of Kay Warren quotation P. 49. Voyles,
Robert J. “Teaching Forgiveness”. www.appreciativeway.com.
2014.
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