When Misery and Mercy Meet: the Story that almost didn't make it ~ John 8:1-11

¹ but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

² At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. ³ The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group ⁴ and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. ⁵ In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” ⁶ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. ⁷ When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
⁹ At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. ¹⁰ Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
¹¹ “No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and sin no more.”

How should we as Christians address sin faithfully – in the way of Jesus?

To address sin faithfully we need to learn to draw in the dirt.

Most of us know this story fairly well. “What did Jesus write?,” is one of the most fancifully imagined details of any gospel story. I’m less concerned about it because if we needed to know we would know. I am more interested in the “why.” Why is a much more interesting question. Historically, “doodling” in the ancient world was used as a way to think carefully or to contain one’s feelings. Ironically, modern science supports this ancient practice: a recent study on doodling found that it provided the doodler a 29 percent increase in information retention. Contrary to popular belief, doodling seems to prevent people from losing focus by helping them pay attention. We doodle to focus. It gives learners who may otherwise mentally check out an opportunity to check back in. So Jesus is doodling to focus on God – silently and carefully. And if Jesus had to doodle to think carefully about how to respond to a sin? If Jesus learned to wait silently, patiently, even prayerfully before speaking? If Jesus’ first inclination was to focus on God in the face of sin, shouldn’t we?

Sin hides in the cracks and crevices. Our patience, our slowness is needed because sin is often much harder to see than we realize, more difficult to name and easily transferable. We need to wrestle with sins ambiguity, its immense power for deceit, its ability to fuel self-righteousness. We need to remember that faithful, Bible believing men and women have been blinded by it - opposing the abolition of slaves, working to undercut women’s equality, diminishing and exploiting others. Sin longs for us to bear witness of it rather than the gospel, to use it to teach a lesson, to make examples out of others and like the teachers of the law “make sinners stand before the group” in shame and disgrace. And nothing is more deadly to the powerless, the broken, than shame. In my opinion, this is the danger of social media –the new stoning ground where we no longer even address people face-to-face but can condemn them with angry rants from afar. There is something about this image of dirt that is worth pondering. 

Many of us don’t write in the dirt– silently pondering our own sin and praying for God’s mercy to be made manifest in us. Instead, we write with dirt smearing it on the walls for all to see. Never forget – whether intentional or not, you are God’s ambassador and therefore reflect the heart of God to others. So before you go about representing his interests maybe the first thing you should do is be silent before Him. Maybe, just maybe, such silent attention will be the sermon that disarms self-righteousness and challenges sin. Such careful and attentive silence acts as the protective gloves and mask that keep us from succumbing to sin’s self-righteous infections. Maybe it’s silence that will save you, that will save them.

To address sin faithfully we need to learn to take misery to heart. Notice how our story moves from “this woman” of the teachers of the law to the personal address by Jesus and the asking of a question, the invitation of response, the opportunity for dialogue. 

At the end of the story, there stood just the woman and Jesus. As St. Augustine put it. “There remained two, the one in misery and mercy.” At last someone speaks to the woman directly and engages her in conversation. It was a simple one: A polite address, “Woman, has anyone condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on do not sin anymore.” She was not treated as an object but a subject of thoughts, choices, feelings and intentions. He did not call her “adulterous woman,” focus on the lurid details of her sin, or even demand an apology.

Allow me to play with the quote from St. Augustine, for he himself plays on words with misera and misericordia that we can’t see in English. In misericodia there are two words joined together: miseria and cor, misery and heart. Mercy, in other words, is taking person’s misery to heart. And so there remained two in conversation: the one in misery and the one who took her misery to heart, who treats her as a person beloved by God.

The space between not condemning and not condoning is wide - big enough to allow for human conversation, for the truth to be told, for soul-searching, even for confrontation - all the feelings and thoughts that would tumble into a person’s heart in a moment of crisis. But Jesus’ few words should give us pause even as we seek to name sin’s destructive power. The NIV translation has Jesus say, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” However, this is not what the text says – Jesus’ words are far simpler “go and sin nor more”. The NIV wants to make sin her life, Jesus’ actual words want to defuse sin’s destruction of her life. There’s no name calling, no sermon about unworthiness or the fires of hell, no guilt biting glee, and no labeling her entire life as sinful. In fact, Jesus’ offer of no condemnation occurs with no response on her part – no repentance, no verbal confession.

Always remember that sin loves for us to focus on it rather than the person. It wants us to ferret it out like exterminators who use a wrecking ball to get rid of rats in a house. I once heard a Vietnamese proverb that said, “What good is getting the thief out of your house by destroying the house.” We thwart sins power by listening to God in silence and realizing that to talk about sin is to talk about what destroys people. And to talk to people in love in all honesty is God’s gracious way of destroying sin.

To address sin faithfully we need to remember why this story almost didn’t make it into the Bible.

Many of you learned in the Preparing for Worship this week that this story is not found in our oldest biblical manuscripts allowing some commentaries to skip over this passages as if it did  not exist. But if this story was an ancient story about Jesus, as many scholars argue, why did it not immediately become part of the accepted Gospels? Why was it only inserted in John’s Gospel later? 

This is a delicate point because it’s an attempt to determine the intent and motives of people long gone and I know it's a bit of a stretch. But I think the historical reconstruction t is worth considering particularly as it engages our own current tendency to remove parts of Jesus’ words or actions that we don’t like. Many New Testament scholars argue that this true story about Jesus didn’t make it into our Gospels initially because of the ease with which Jesus forgave the women that was hard to reconcile with the early churches rigorous discipline of sexual sin and yet we know that the story existed in the second century. It’s true that in Paul’s discussion of sins, adultery and immorality appear repeatedly (1 Cor. 6:9ff; Gal. 5:18ff.; Eph. 5:3ff; Col. 3:5), and those warning are no doubt tied to the frightful immorality of the Roman Empire. But many early Church Fathers, particularly some of the more misogynistic ones, went even further to rank such sin among the very worst – it was often listed alongside homicide and apostasy and for others deemed a heinous act without forgiveness. 

Nothing gets people worked up into a self-righteous frenzy like sex. And I am not suggesting that we be cavalier about it either – this woman was NOT the only victim of her affair and sin destroys relationships, kills life. But we should be thankful for the effort of those within that early church who took extra effort to maintain and include this story in our Bible, who saw fit to challenge an over-indulgence fascination in the condemnation of others, particularly over sexual sin. We should read this story as a declaration by a faction of the church who rightly refused to let sin be fundamentally what our story is all about. 

Yet if this story was an independent story why did the church insert it here in John? Well, the best argument is that they sought to illustrate Jesus words in John 8:15-16, “You judge by human standards; I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is valid for it is not I alone who judge, but and the Father who sent me.” “Judgment is always for the sake of salvation, since it is a bringing to light of that which has lain destructively in the dark” (Robert Barron). So let this story be for you the judgment of God and bring your sin to the light.

Jesus never passes out stones, he passes out bread – his body broken for us, for our sin.

He doesn’t pass out condemnation, but offers us something to drink – his blood shed for us to express the love of God. The meal of communion is Jesus’ response to sin and it is his invitation to us to doodle in the dirt.

"No, thank you": How to love your enemy, work for justice, and speak of God

The following sermon was given at an Interfaith Thanksgiving service for Santa Barbara faith communities. Due to the diverse audience, this talk was a bit different from a usual sermon but I learned a lot even as I wrestled with how to address such a delightfully, motley group while being myself. 

In the book of Matthew in what Christians refer to as the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or “No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” Well, Jesus didn’t have my Texan mother. I could have never gotten away with such advice. An only yes or only no would never work.  She would have given me a quick elbow to the ribs and said, “Excuse me. Show some respect, be grateful.” You say “yes, ma’am or no, ma’am” “yes please or no thank you.” These habits have stuck with me as most do. But as I have lived into them, been chastised or mocked for them, they have never the less communicated to me some valuable lessons that merge quite nicely with Jesus’ teachings. Jesus’s words remind us that “no” is okay, even an important part of the spiritual life. Saying “no” thankfully bears spiritual gifts and deserves recognition and respect. So “no, thank you” is not an oxymoron nor a selfish thing but a belief that “no” is a positive element of our spiritual lives and we can grow by saying it. Saying yes and saying no are companions in the process of constituting a whole and holy life. Without a “no” there can be no “yes” and we say “thank you” to acknowledge that. I think there are three “nos” that deserve our particular attention and purposeful “thanks.”

We need to learn “no, thank you” in order to love our enemies.

We are increasingly confronting a culture of shrill “nos” and a world supposedly filled with enemies. As a society we can sense a loss of civility and the capacity to even imagine that we might be wrong, might be missing something. And so when in doubt, we surmise, yell louder! And our “no” becomes less a remark toward any ideology but becomes the extinction of the person who stands against us. They are no longer one with whom we disagree but disagreement itself and we must remove them, get rid of them. “Thank you” is a humanizing tendency to help us challenge this sickness, it is the recognition that everyone has gifts to bear, even our enemies. Jesus will later tell us that while we might say “no” to our enemies the “thank you” is discovered in the demand to love them. Likewise, the Dalai Lama has often remarked that “our enemies are our greatest teachers.” Enemies show us the faults our friends would spare us from and reveal our own hypocrisies that we otherwise might miss when we surround ourselves with a ghettoized “yes” culture of those who agree with us, dress like us, think like us. 

 The great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas remarked, “We must love them both – those whose opinions we reject and those whose opinions we accept. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.” 

That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to say “no” and there is plenty in this world and plenty of folk that should be told as such and they will, of course, tell us in return. And we should say, “thank you.” But maybe I’m saying something even deeper – that meeting the world with a loving and grateful heart will determine what we find there. We mistakenly place our trust, too often, in the righteousness of our “no.” Maybe, just maybe, our “no, thank you” is meant to signal that we refuse be someone’s enemy. It becomes impossible to demonize someone you are thankful for. Jesus reminds us that you can disagree with an enemy, challenge him forcefully, even with strong language – but you nevertheless should also be willing to love her, to give your life for her. “No thank you” is a refusal to let your enemy determine your response. Clarence Jordan reminds us of the creativity of “no, thank you” and nonviolence when he talks about his oldest daughter’s response to the son of Klu Klux Klan members (tell the story) Our “no thank you” to violence is a creative response, a divine joke, a loving and grateful “yes.”

We need to learn “no, thank you” to address our injustice

In the face of increasingly invasive and gigantic corporations let us be thankful for the ability to say “no” to ourselves by the power of the Spirit. Ours is a time of the unlimited choice of a global marketplace where advertisements are quite adept at coaxing us with religious language to shed our “nos” of enough in order to buy, possess, and to accumulate more – but even worse they convince us that in buying, possessing, and accumulating more, we ourselves are more, are become something bigger. Illus. few weeks ago I heard an announcer on the radio say, “Sometimes you’ve just got to believe. Believe in a miracle. Believe in a leap of faith. Believe that there’s something bigger than yourself. Believe in a second chance.” I was expecting it to end as an ad for a new church and felt the need to repent until I heard, “California Lottery Powerball. You just gotta believe.” In light of this infinite commercial “yes” where goods have become gods, market decisions aim to inflate our ego and capture our devotion, and global corporations exists like the Titans of ancient Greek mythology, we need to be grateful for our seemingly insignificant personal “nos.”

The temptation for many of us is to engage them on their own turf, to talk about global change, to become as big as they are. Yet, I have come to see in part that I will never be able to participate fully in broader social change without gratefully starting small. To do so is to recognize the spiritual power of the double diminutive -  Illus. Jesus feeding the 5,000 with the double diminutive (little boy, little sardines) John 6, Jesus’ disciple want to focus on the magnanimity of the problem while Jesus uses the small offering of a seemingly insignificant child to address the issue – small change alters the world.

“No thank you” reminds us that our world is small and that what is required is the gracious ability to say “no, thank you” to that purchase, those stores, that addiction. Some of you may be leaders in broader change, most of us will not, but all of us can contribute to turn our lives into the work of water rather than a hammer of spiritual energy. The hammer will only leave us angry, tired and out of breath with a lot of broken pieces; the former will bring life even as it wears down the rocks of injustices. It’s like the child’s riddle: Would you rather have a million dollars or a penny doubled every day for thirty days? The pennies come to 5.3 million in thirty days. “No, thank you is to recognize the spiritual power of the penny and revel in its patience and humility that brings peace while it is practiced.

We need to learn to say “no, thank you” to speak of God; that is, to love God and to pray.

“No, thank you” in this case is the recognition that we need a little less clarity to speak truthfully of God – a clearly defined thing is not a mystery and yet the Bible and most sacred religious texts assure us that God is mysterious. Many of us should adopt a way of speaking about God like the economic forecasts of the former Fed. Chairman Alan Greenspan who said, ““I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said.” 1988 speech, Alan Greenspan as quoted in The New York Times, October 28, 2005

The Christian saint Augustine said it this way: “If you understand it is not God you understand.”

The danger of words and concepts for God is that we may soon begin to focus on these human constructs as “god” rather than on the living God. We may be tempted, for our own selfish ends, to domesticate the Divine, who is beyond all human symbols or imagery or to fashion a “god” out of our own fragile souls.

This way of doing theology is referred to as “apophatic theology” the way of unknowing, a theology of negation in which we unmasks or at least admit the inadequacies of all words not simply sacred ones. I heard a survivor of Auschwitz say that all words have become for her suspect or ridiculous – not just the calculated rhetoric of political camoflauge but ordinary expressions that seem to require no thought at all like, “I’m dying for a cup of tea.” Apophatic theology acknowledges that all words are too small, too fragile and that we are simply too broken to feel totally secure without divine help. It’s a beggar’s theology and many of us don’t like to beg.

I am convinced that we need a spirited and respectful debate about the nature of God. But, the truly important reason for such a discussion is not so that we can share something critical about our faith. Its gift is that might realize that we have become too comfortable with what we already know – we might think that’s all there is to know about God. We need apophatic language to remind us that God cannot be reduced to a checklist of explanations, a moral code, a life plan, a theological scheme. We need “no, thank you” so that any person who stands up and says “God is . . .” stops and thinks very, very carefully. We need it because I am more and more of the belief that we need to be left spiritually speechless and theological beggars.

There is an interesting story in the Gospel of Luke – the two on the road to Emmaus - a stranger comes along chides them – “How foolish you are” – and then the text says a curious thing, “As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on.” And it’s only when they beg that he sits down with them, takes a simple loaf of bread, offers a prayer of thanks at which point they see him and he disappears from their sight. That’s apophatic theology – it’s the belief that we need to beg the stranger to stay with us, implore the one who challenges our vision, who says “no” to us, to beseech the stranger to sit down with as at table to eat. Only then will our “no, thank you” become the divine “yes” of hospitality and we might catch a quick glimpse of God before he disappears from our sight.

Radically Dependent, Rebel God: Why we can trust Jesus

John 5:31-47  New International Version (NIV)

³¹ “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. ³² There is another who testifies in my favor, and I know that his testimony about me is true.

³³ “You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. ³⁴ Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. ³⁵ John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.

³⁶ “I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me. ³⁷ And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, ³⁸ nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. ³⁹ You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, ⁴⁰ yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

⁴¹ “I do not accept glory from human beings, ⁴² but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. ⁴³ I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. ⁴⁴ How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

⁴⁵ “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. ⁴⁶ If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. ⁴⁷ But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”

It’s hard to carve and eat a whole chicken well. There are so many places where an exact cut is needed and, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily have a big mess on your hands. John chapter 5 is one big chicken – we finally come to the end of it today and I suspect that many of us find our hearts and minds bloated with wonderful truth, challenging demands, and maybe even some boney questions. The juiciest part has been a controversy over a good thing  -  a healing which quickly moves to scandal, persecution and even a desire to kill Jesus. But whether it’s about a miracle, or a controversy – in John it always boils down to the same question, “Who is this guy?” And Jesus’ answer, as I’ve just read, is a bit bewildering. What are we to do with this thoroughly picked through carcass? And then I remembered something my wife taught me about carving a chicken. Two of the best pieces of the chicken are often looked over by people who don’t know about them (they’re on the backside and about the size of your thumb and are probably the juiciest pieces on the whole bird). The French have a funny name for them – Le sot l’y laisse (pronounced: le soh lee less) or “the fool leaves them.” Well, I didn’t want to be a fool and so I sat with this text until I figured out where those pieces were and heard Jesus saying, “Stop managing me but trust me. I don’t care if you think it’s confusing or tedious. I don’t need your glory or any glory for that matter. I only care about what God wants me to do. I only say what God wants me to say. And as God is my witness, I will not be swayed by your praise or adulation, your hatred or your persecution, I will do what God is asking of me so that you may be saved,” vs. 34 (that’s my paraphrase of our passage). 

As God is my witness, Jesus says, my story, my actions, my words are all about God – Jesus constantly claims that his identity and actions are grounded in following God whole heartedly. Vss. 19 and 30 offer some striking statements: Jesus says, “the Son does only what he sees the Father doing” and “I can do nothing on my own.”  Illus. of a kid given authority by a parent – Get up! Dad said that I can get you up.” Kids, like most of us, revel in the power offered by association – for kids being a fascist is fun, Jesus, however, revels not in the power he wields but in his single-minded obedience to God alone.

“Why do you do what you do?,” the Jewish authorities ask. “Because God does these things and I love him and am obedient,” Jesus responds. So Jesus Christological claim - his stated claim about his own identity and relationship to God in John’s Gospel, which is said to have the highest Christology, is grounded in his claim not to be equal with God but to be utterly dependent upon him. 

Jesus’ claim to be One with the Father is not some grandiose claim of his own heroism or self-determination or even power. He is not running around the Galilean hill sides crying, “Look at me! Look at what I can do!” And it’s the Jewish leaders not Jesus who construe his claim of having God as his father as a claim to be equal with God – a reason, by the way, I believe that we get caught up in bad theology whereby we pit the one god against the other  as a contest of wills (OT God vs. NT God, judgment vs. salvation, holiness vs. love, scary vs. nice) or we imagine a humanity-less Jesus who as God has incredible cosmic power at his whim, illus. King Missile’s song, “Jesus was way cool”. Jesus, however, bypasses this word “equal” altogether. Equal is not his word but rather his argument rests on voluntarily renouncing his own independence. He only does what the Father is doing, says only what the Father wants him to say. It’s not works or miracles in and of themselves that are meant to be great, that somehow settle the issue of who Jesus is – Jesus is not some David Copperfield looking to make the Statue of Liberty disappear and his healings so far have done little to make him well-liked or understood – but he points to his utter obedience to God as the true witness of his own identity. 

These people say, “we don’t like what you’re doing” and Jesus says, “I don’t care, take it up with God. He’s the One doing it.” That’s not some cold hearted statement but an admonition of deep love for us – he will save us, be faithful, whether we like him or not. It’s funny that the very thing Jesus is so often praised for – his rebel streak, his going against the grain, his challenging of authority, these things that make him supposedly so edgy, so defiant, is not, according to him, because of a contrary nature. No, his radicalness, his “out-of-the-box” vision of God, holiness, healing, love is because he only does what he is told. When you think of Jesus remember that – He makes God known through his audacious obedience. Your salvation was not at heart daring or heroic manly rescue gained by an army of one it was accomplished by an act of radical submission to a rebel God.

Why does this matter? Why obsess over these few verses of legal argument about testimony and witness? Why should we care about Jesus’ claim of radical obedience? What are the sot l’y laisse?:

               1.      First, it matters because it means that we can trust that Jesus is God incarnate, God with skin, God in action, in love, at work in our midst. This is not because Jesus carries God’s genes or chromosomes or wields a magic ring but because he is obedient to God alone. And what does he do with this argument – make himself a king, gather great wealth and acquire political clout? No, he becomes a servant and accepts death on a cross. It means that God can be trusted because we have before us his agenda and purpose in Jesus Christ. It means that God is not out to get us and that we can dispense with a great deal of bad religion that hides behind God’s supposedly hidden agenda, his mysterious ways (a phrase always used when something terribly shocking happens), or the vast gulf that supposedly separates God from us. It means what Trinitarian theology has tried all along to say, “All who God is, is faithful, offering salvation to us.” It doesn’t mean that all mysteries are solved but that because of Jesus we can now understand what God has wanted for us all along – life to the fullest, John tells us.

               2.      These verses matter because they have everything to do with how we read our Bible. According to Jesus, the whole Bible is to read and understood as pointing to, and finding its place in, the story that Jesus is Lord. Jesus obeys and reveals that Yahweh from the OT, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the prophets and the creator of all that is. It reminds us that above any moral reading, the Bible is fundamentally the story of the God who gives life. And that lens should shape how we read the story – we have to read the story in a sense backwards knowing who God is in Christ. In contrast, if we read without this center we may not find life (see John 5:39). The Apostle Paul recognized this reality in Romans chapter 7. He states, “the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.” Believing the scriptures offer eternal life on their own, by way of the children sermon, is to believe that if I eat the magazine advertisement for Ben & Jerry’s it will taste like ice cream. This does not mean that you shouldn’t study your Bibles, read them regularly and even passionately – you should and can with full confidence that Jesus can be found therein. You cannot love your Bible too much but you must remember that loving your Bible is not the same thing as loving or trusting Jesus – the Pharisees and teachers of the law are proof of this. One final illustration to make the point: Talking to a fellow deaf seminary student through an interpreter. She had to keep telling me. “Don’t look at me, the interpreter said, "I’m not the one speaking. Look at him. He’s the one who’s speaking.”

As you read your Bible – always remember to look at him, for he read it and lived it faithfully before God, he is, John says, the Word.