When You Have Deeply, Deeply Understood

In Which I take apart a Meme

File: 109. Ezra Reads the Law to the People.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

There is a meme making the rounds amongst more progressive-minded religious people regarding the sermon recently preached in the National Cathedral after the inauguration of President Trump. Here it is:

The meme is being shared as a kind of “own,” as the young people say, of those who did not find Marianne Edgar Budde’s homiletical effort particularly edifying. ‘Look at those poor ignorant people who are upset about that sermon!’ sniffs the meme, ‘They don’t understand the basics of faith. They don’t understand the teachings of Jesus. They are the baddies who are on the side of oppressing the poor. How awful for them.’

I quite like this meme for the opposite reason—that it appears to be a gotcha of the kind we all relish so much, but because of the way it is phrased, it shows that the people sharing it so happily and widely do not understand why anyone found the sermon objectionable. It is, in itself, an ironical sort of gotcha whereby the people thinking they have got ya don’t, in fact, have a grasp of the salient points.

There are at least four giveaways. The first is the expression “your Christianity.” Though many people disagree about the content of the Christian faith, Christianity does, in fact, have knowable content. It is about something, or rather, someone. It isn’t so much that a person *has* a version of Christianity, but that one is a Christian. I wouldn’t use an expression like “my Christianity” because the doctrinal content associated with my personal relationship with the Lord Christ is not something I own. Rather, I receive the divine revelation of the Scriptures, I confess with my mouth and believe in my heart that Jesus is Lord. I am *a* Christian. I so identify myself with Christ that my primary allegiance both temporal and eternal, is with him. I don’t belong to myself. I belong to him. Whatever he says, I accept completely and fully. I don’t pick and choose. I listen and obey. I am thus bound together in a mystical Body with all other believers whose lives and doctrine are arranged by the Holy Spirit.

The second tell is of the question of power. When Marianne Edgar Budde implores President Trump to have “mercy” on the “powerless” she is making an emotional, and, as this person pointed out, manipulative plea about a jumble of fraught and complicated issues. Immigration isn’t a simple powerful/powerless binary. The question of sexual identity likewise. By framing it as powerful versus powerless, Marianne Edgar Budde deflects away from the real question: What is True? Is there such a thing as a trans child? Is the deportation of undocumented residents of the United States good or bad? Each of these points ought to be debated for veracity and goodness, not power.

The third (I have accidentally gone out of order) is the question of offense. I think many people who listened to the sermon were offended for two reasons. The first is that the person who is in a pulpit should talk about the aforementioned content of the Christian faith. If politics come into it, they should be discussed within the frame of the Kingdom of Heaven and not the other way around, as though current political debates can be superimposed over the Scriptures or Christian doctrine with no adverse consequences. The Kingdom of God is about people who were alienated and in trouble being rescued and restored, but how that occurs and what it means is determined by the Scriptures. The second is that you shouldn’t stand up and there and forget to mention the gospel of the Lord Christ. Like that he died, was buried, rose again, and ascended into heaven on behalf of sinners who have so offended him. Anyone who doesn’t repent and believe will be eternally separated from God. No one is offended about a preacher confronting a president. That isn’t an unreasonable thing. The offense is that she ignored the fact that Donald Trump is a sinner who could die any day and he should have a chance to hear about the saving work of Christ every moment that it is appropriate to tell him about it, like when he goes to church.

But, really, it is the last bit that is the biggest and most ironical tell. The meme maker used that clueless line, “the teachings of Jesus.” No Christian who has given himself into the hands of Jesus for the forgiveness of his sins and the sanctification and remaking of his soul is going to blather on about “the teachings of Jesus.”

The trouble is, you can’t separate Jesus from “his teachings” which is something almost everyone wants to do. “His teachings” comprise the entire scriptures—every word of them—and so if you were going to try and follow “his teachings” you would have to grapple with the Law, the Prophets, and the entire New Testament. No Christian is at liberty to extract the things Jesus said during his earthly life and then try to “follow” them in isolation from the whole. For one thing, Jesus was constantly claiming to be God. And for another, he claimed that all the Scriptures—all of them—are about him. There is no sort of nebulous body of “Jesus’ teachings” that vaguely resembles the teachings of other nice though eccentric, spiritual leaders that will enable you to craft a more palatable political sensibility.

And the best way to illustrate this fact is to just glance at the lections appointed for this morning. We are up to the third Sunday of Epiphany and so all the returned Exiles are gathered “as one man” in a big open space before the Water Gate in Jerusalem. The city is still a shambles, of course, because it had been destroyed 70 years ago by the Babylonians. But God had other plans than to let his people so scatter across the face of the earth that they were no more and so a remnant of people returned from Babylon. Nehemiah was the governor and Ezra was the priest and scribe.

To go back and try to rebuild what once was so comfortable and gracious was difficult and discouraging for everyone, and on this particular day, the people tell Ezra to “bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel.” This request by itself is unusual in the course of human affairs. Almost no one, both in that far-off day, nor now, wants to hear the Bible read aloud or to take the trouble to read it silently, but on this day the desire arose. So Ezra got out the Law and all the people “both men and women and all who could understand what they heard” arranged themselves to listen. They built a platform for the purpose, which is something I expect every living person today can picture. He climbed up and read “from early morning until midday.” And what was so extraordinary is that “the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law.” That means the gathered assembly was really interested and therefore listened. They didn’t get bored and wander into daydreams. They didn’t fall asleep. They didn’t think about the game later in the afternoon or what they were going to have to do during the week. They didn’t wish they could be doing something else. They didn’t even think about how they would post about it later on Isnta.

Ezra wasn’t by himself. There was a whole bunch of people next to him on the platform. As he opened up the book to read, “All the people stood” which is what you are supposed to do in church when the Gospel is read on Sunday morning. You can sit for the Old Testament, the Psalm, and the Epistle, but when it’s time for the Gospel, everyone stands up. Why? They just do. That’s how it works. Here they stand while Ezra is reading and then he blesses the Lord and everyone replies, “Amen, Amen,” and lifts up their hands and then bows their heads with their faces to the ground, which just shows they hadn’t become Anglican yet, otherwise they would have just solemnly knelt or something like that.

Then something even more extraordinary happened. All the people who were on the platform with Ezra “helped the people to understand that Law.” The people stayed where they were, and, I think the implication is that the people on the platform maybe went out into the crowd for sort of small group Bible Study, or took turns on the platform to give short—or long—sermons. Either way, the point is that the people didn’t just simply understand everything from having had it read out the one time. It needed some explanation, some exegesis, some reasoning through the text. Probably the people on the platform had to say a little bit about who Adam and Noah and Abraham and Moses were and what happened to them and why. They had to work out the concepts of worship and idolatry, of coveting and lying, of faithfulness in marriage. And over and above all, they had to explain about who God is and how and why he would reveal himself to the people of Israel in the particular way that he did, and what they could expect in the future, about the coming Messiah. One of the most remarkable lines in the whole Bible, I think, is this one: “They gave the sense so that the people understood the reading.” Can you imagine? The Bible was read and then explained and the people understood.

After that, Nehemiah and Ezra both tell the people to stop weeping, for as they heard the reading and the preaching, they were moved, they were stricken to the heart. They saw how far away from God they were and yet they desired to know him and be with him. And the reading made them feel both the lack and the desire. And so they weep and then the governor and the priest tell them not to weep, but rather to be happy. In fact, they were to go home and “eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing reading, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” So all the people go away, convicted, but strangely encouraged and strengthened in ways they could not quite explain. And they gather and eat and drink together, with “great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.” They weren’t in the dark anymore. The light of the Scriptures had shown in their hearts and minds to heal and restore them.

And thus was every person silenced who would ever after try to say, “The Bible is too hard to understand” or “The Bible is full of contradictions” or “I can just read it by myself I don’t need to go to church” or any other number of excuses that people have made down the ages for not wanting to crack open the text or click open the app to hear what God says to his people.

And this is an amazing occurrence, but is also a sort of shadow of another day when Jesus comes to his hometown “where he had been brought up.” And “as was his custom,” he enters the synagogue because it is the Sabbath, and “he stood up to read.” There isn’t a whole gathering of people around him. He is all by himself facing the people who imagine they know him the best.

And the scroll that is handed to him is Isaiah because nothing in the cosmos happens by chance. And so he unrolls it to the place where it says this:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

And lots of progressives get super excited because they think they are going to get to talk about the powerless and the marginalized for a minute, but then Jesus ruins it by rolling up the scroll and giving it back to the attendant and saying, repeatedly,

“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Because he didn’t come to bring about a utopia through the hard work of his followers to live up to his teachings. No, he came, as God and Man, to go to the cross to do away with the sin that makes people blind and poor and enslaved and oppressed.

And this thing that he did, once it is explained, once you have desired more than anything to understand it, will so transform you into a different kind of person that you adopt a different name. You are a Christian. You have clung on to Jesus so completely that he is yours and you are his. You understood—that’s what happened.

Anyway, hope to see you in church!