Caleb Comes to Boulder

 

You’re going to have to do some powerful imagining, but I’d like for you to imagine that I am a camel.

Yes, my name is Caleb the Camel. I belong to David bar Benjamin, the master who decided not to follow Jesus in the story that Deacon Jan just read. Before I tell my version of the story, I need to set the record straight on one thing. Those preachers who claim that the “Eye of the Needle” is the name of a gate in Jerusalem are just plain wrong. I've been in and out of all those gates, and there is no gate by that name. Therefore, on behalf of camels everywhere, I object to Jesus’ exaggerated remark about shoving us through a tiny needle hole. This ridiculous image is an affront to our dignity. Plus, it sounds very painful.

I am rather flattered that Jesus noticed me, though. I was right there when my master ran up to Jesus, so I saw the whole thing. We had been out inspecting one of my master’s properties earlier that week. My master has lots of properties—5 estates, I think, spread out all over the region. My brothers and I haul piles of sweet dates, and wine, and grain, and olives for him all over the Galilee. But we don’t mind. Master David feeds us well. He’s not like his father Benjamin.

Benjamin was a greedy man. He always had his eye out for getting something for nothing. Whenever a poor farmer couldn’t pay his taxes, Benjamin was right there to buy up his land for almost nothing. Whenever there was a drought, or a farmer got sick, Benjamin was right there, too, promising a few sheckles for the poor guy’s home. Benjamin never forgave anyone’s debt. That’s how the family got so much property. Then, to top it off, Benjamin would underpay his workers. He wouldn’t even let widows and orphans collect the few stalks of grain that the harvesters had dropped on the edges of his fields. Can you imagine?! He was clearly breaking God’s Law. Don’t tell anyone, but I used to spit on him whenever his back was turned. Camels are accurate spitters, too!

My master David, he’s different. He was always a good little boy, slipping me a sweet date from his pocket when no one was looking. He was always trying to please his exacting father by doing everything just right: going with him to collect and count the tenants' rent; watching in silence as his father shouted insults to the beggars and foreigners at the gate. David spent hours in the synagogue studying scripture. He thinks God is like his father Benjamin, full of rules and punishments. He’s determined to earn God’s love, but his prayers never seem to make him happy.

 I really felt sorry for him when his father matched him up with that grumbler Leah, just because she came with a huge dowry. His wife has been a thorn in David’s side his whole adult life. She’s always spending money, always putting him down for going to the synagogue. She’s never satisfied with what he provides for her. And now he’s got three daughters to provide for, too, and no sons. Still, nobody understands why he looks so sad and stressed all the time.

“He’s the richest guy in town,” they scoff. “He can have anything he wants. He’s got no worries.” But they don’t know the half of it.

You should have seen the look on David’s face when that leper came running into town, shouting to everyone that the Messiah had come and healed him of his horrible disease. It was the first time in years that I’ve seen David’s eyes light up with hope. He became obsessed with finding this Jesus from Nazareth, and we spent days on the road looking. When we finally found him, David leapt off my back before I could kneel all the way down. I couldn’t see what he was so excited about. There was just a young guy in a dusty robe on the side the road, surrounded by a bunch of bearded men who smelled like fish. But David, he ran down the road after this guy and kneeled down before him like this teacher was some kind of king. All I could think was that David’s wife was going to yell at him for getting his fancy cloak dusty.

This Jesus really seemed to understand my master, though. Now, anybody could see that my master was desperate, and that he was rich. But Jesus seemed to see beyond that, right into his soul. Jesus knew that David was there to be healed, that his heart was just as scarred as the skin of that leper had been. Jesus was somehow both hard and compassionate at the same time—truthful, you know? He wouldn’t let my master get away with any of that rule-following, goodie-two-shoes nonsense that he had been living by. “No one is good but God alone,” Jesus warned. Jesus even seemed to know about David’s father Benjamin—how he made a fortune off of the backs of the poor and the weak. “You shall not defraud,” Jesus added to his list of ways to live. Coveting isn’t just wanting something, you know. Wanting and taking go together, when you’re the one in power! My master’s whole inheritance—his very being--is woven through with old Benjamin’s covetous defrauding, that’s for sure. I even heard a scornful chuckle escape from the mouth of one of the tenant farmers standing nearby when Jesus pointed that out.

It was hard for me to watch the hope in my master’s eyes die out as Jesus spoke. How could he sell everything and give the money to the poor and then head off down the road with these fishermen? What about his obligations, his lands, his inheritance, his wife, his daughters who needed him? Who would take care of me and all the other animals? It would be like my master had died—died to his family, died to his dreams, traded in his whole life for a new one. Didn’t Jesus understand that? And then that unpleasant remark about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter God’s Kingdom. Ouch. Even the beggars standing around were shocked to hear that. If the well-dressed, educated classes weren’t accepted …. then who was?

It’s cool to be here with you all today, more than two thousand years later. Wow. I’m going to need to be getting back to Palestine soon. I’m not sure I like climbing all these mountains around here … and those metal camels you ride in over there don’t look like much fun to hang out with. It’s great to talk with you, though. Your place here looks pretty nice. And I can tell you’re good, kind, friendly people, just like my master David was. I can’t help but wonder … Your website says that you know this Jesus, that you follow him. How were you strong enough to do what my master couldn’t? Did you feel the weight of Jesus’ eyes on you, those truthful eyes that pierce right into your soul? You must have seen the pleading, powerful love in those eyes. What part of your inheritance did you give up? What did you have to unlearn about yourself, about your community, to go all in for God’s Kingdom? I hear there’s a lot of need in the world these days. It’s sure good to hear that Jesus is still out here, still healing folks.

Before I go, let me tell you a secret: My master came back. Yep. He sold his lands and started one of the earliest Christian communities. My master David stood with Jesus ‘til the end, even died in a Roman prison for his faith. He never turned away again, no matter what. Yes indeed, with God, all things are possible. All things are possible.

A Way Over the Divides

 

   

The oppositional rhetoric of our world even casts its shadow on us as Christians. We often feel as we are constantly being asked to fit ourselves into one camp or another. No matter to which side of the gaping divides our upbringing and personal reflection have led us, I’m sure that each of us knows the feeling—the feeling of being carried down a rough river much too quickly, barely dodging boulders of inflexible opinion, trying to keep our heads above the floodwaters of information surging around us. Whether the topic is gun violence, masks and vaccines, war and refugees, abortion, or even climate change, Christians manage to fight even over the answer to the question: “What would Jesus do?”

Jesus is no stranger to opposing camps trying to find out where his loyalties really lie. The scribes and Pharisees lie in wait constantly for Jesus’ teaching to get him on the wrong side of someone. That’s what’s happening in today’s difficult Gospel reading. Before we snatch up Jesus’ words to support our views of marriage or to condemn those whose marriages have failed, let’s take a look at what’s happening in this passage.

In Jesus’ day, Jewish scholars were at odds over divorce. Yes, the Law that God gave to God’s people in Deuteronomy was clear: a man could definitely divorce his wife. (It was always the men, by the way, who could do the divorcing in the patriarchal first-century world.) Even with such a clear law, there were, of course, details to argue about. The issue for the rabbis was remarriage, as well as what would constitute grounds for divorce. Could a woman be turned out because she burned the pita bread? Or did she have to do something worse, like get caught in adultery? The Pharisees want to know if Jesus is going to uphold this Law, and which side he will take. What interpretation will he bring to scripture? Or will he dismiss the whole problem and thereby prove himself to be the heretic that they believe he is? What’s interesting for us is that Jesus doesn’t play the debating game with them at all. Jesus refuses to join sides in the rabbis’ debate. Instead, he pushes the question to the extreme

Modern rhetorical scholars call Jesus’ technique “over-acceptance.” Actors involved in improvisation do it all the time. Some of you might remember Jonathan Winters or Robin Williams using this technique, pushing comedy to the extreme. They left their fellow actors standing with mouths agape, forced to reconsider their next lines. Today, as we approach the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, I immediately thought of another example: the story of St. Francis and his father. A bishop had ordered young Francis to repay his father some money that he had taken from the family business. Francis needed the money to obey the revelation that he had received to rebuild the church. St. Francis did more than give back the money. When asked to repay his father, Francis stripped off all of his clothes and dumped them at his father’s feet, standing naked before the town. Francis had “over-accepted” the bishop’s demand, giving much more than was asked of him! Over-accepting is a way to make a point that goes beyond what a simple reply can do. Jesus uses this technique to stay ahead of his enemies. But he also uses it to shake us out of our complacency, to prevent us from settling into easy rule-bound ways of thinking.        

Theologian Sam Wells argues that our whole Gospel is a story of God’s over-acceptance. “In the annunciation and the nativity,” he writes, “God over-accepts human life. He doesn’t reject his people, nor does he simply accept them: Instead, he comes among them as a Jew... [And then] in the resurrection, God shows that even the worst offer, the execution of the Son of God, can be over-accepted - even death and all its grim causes can become part of the story [of new, everlasting life]."[1]

So what does this mean for us, for us who seek to follow an over-accepting Lord? How do we follow Jesus’ lead through our own divided land? Certainly, concerning divorce, Jesus knows, as do any of us who have been through it, that the ties of marriage can’t be broken without deep pain. We know that what God has joined together comes apart only in broken pieces, with the tattered bonds trailing behind us like sad rags wherever we go. Jesus doesn’t flinch from this difficult reality. But his strong words are not meant to establish new laws in our divorce courts, either. They are not aimed directly at the joy that might be found in a happy second marriage. They are meant to break through the limiting arguments of the religious scholars of his day. They are meant to take us off of our ideological high horses. They are meant to point to our common dependence on God’s grace.

New Testament scholar Kathy Grieb wonders if Mark doesn’t purposefully include the story of Jesus taking the child in his arms with the debate about divorce. She believes that Mark wants to show us that the reign of God is open to all who receive it in the way that only a little child can receive it: “as sheer gift to those with no power, no rights, no demands, no status, and no sense of their own achievement.”[2] The over-accepting God who became a little child holds all of us sinners in a loving embrace.

Perhaps what we need to hear amid the din of political posturing—are words of mercy. Mercy for me, for you, for those that we condemn, as well as for those that we love. Any stand that we take on the questions of our day must be grounded in and focused on the never-failing compassion and mercy of our loving God--mercy that is, in the poetry of TS Eliot, “A condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything).”[3] The divine mercy of over-acceptance is greater than any solution that we can imagine for ourselves.

 

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[1] Sam Wells, quoted in Jill Dufield, http://pres-outlook.org/2015/10/27th-sunday-in-ordinary-time-october-4-2015/

 

 

[2] Kathy Grieb, “Blogging toward Sunday.” http://theolog.org/2009/09/blogging-toward-sunday-is-it-lawful.html.

[3] T.S. Elliot, from “Little Giddings.”