sacraconversazione.org

postmodern preaching

Proper 20 Year C

  • Jeremiah 8: 18-9:1

The Lord, in the text of the prophet Jeremiah, expresses utter despair over the faithlessness of the Lord’s people and the inevitable consequences.  “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”  The people do not grasp why they feel abandoned by the Lord: “the harvest is past, the summer is over and gone, and we are not saved.”  Is there no more “healing” for the Lord’s people, who are in such pain, (which was caused by their own faithlessness), the Lord asks?  “Is there no physician…” who can comfort and heal?  The Lord’s head is like a gushing “spring of water” and eyes like “a fountain of tears” to “weep day and night.”

  • Psalm 79: 1-9

Written in response to the desecration of the Temple in Jerusalem, (some scholars believe the first time by the Babylonians while some assume the second time in the Hasmonean period), the psalm articulates utter despair.  The Temple has been “defiled,” David’s city is in “ruins,” Yahweh’s people have become the “corpses” that animals and birds of prey scavenge.  They are humiliated among the nations.  “How long,” the psalmist asks, will the Lord “rage? ”  “Turn Your wrath on the nations who did not know You,” the psalmist pleads, because they are the ones who have caused this destruction and humiliation.  Do not hold the current generation accountable for the “crimes” of past generations.  “Quickly, may we see Your mercies overtake us.”  Help! Let us “atone” and know the Lord once again as “our rescuing God.”

OR

  • Amos 8: 4-7

Although the ancient prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zephaniah and Amos), pronounced the Lord’s judgment on  all nations, because of her unique relationship, Israel got the Lord’s particular attention.  Therefore, the Lord’s prophet, Amos,  would denounce the shameless exploitation of the poor as particularly heinous because they are the “pride of Jacob.”

  • Psalm 113

The psalmist summons the Lord’s praise that extends “east and west” and “high over all nations.”  Why such universal praise?  Because there has never been a god like this God before!  Although enthroned high above “the heavens and the earth,” this God “raises the poor, from the dust… to seat him among princes….”  And, “seats the barren woman in her house…”

  • I Timothy 2: 1-7

The admonition to pray for those in governmental authority, attributed to Paul, is nothing new for God’s people.  A “quiet and peaceable life” enables God’s people to live in “godliness and dignity.”  These conditions presumably aid in the best opportunity for “everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”  Just as there is “one God,” so there is “one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus….”  Although “himself human,” he offered himself a “ransom for all;” (this is the only time this specific term is used in the New Testament, which is the same term as a “payment” or “ransom” for the freedom of a slave).  This announcement is Paul’s calling as a “teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth,” the text says.

  • Luke 16: 1-13

Although Matthew’s text (6:24) includes the aphorism about the impossibility of serving two masters, only Luke’s text has this confounding story by Jesus who seems to be commending the sly, manipulative exploitation of a manager, who, learning he is going to be fired, deceives all those who owed  his boss and pockets the proceeds before the word gets out that he is leaving.  When his boss learns what the manager has done, he “commended the dishonest steward for his prudence…!”  Jesus acknowledges that the worldly of “this generation” are craftier in the ways of the world than “children of light,”  but here comes the twist.  Do not be naive about the ways of the world, but use your “shrewdness” for larger purposes, i.e. for true “riches”  If you cannot negotiate the “dishonest” ways of the world nor manage “wealth,” how will you tackle the thornier, more powerful dilemma: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”

The psalmist (113) declares that the world has never seen a god like this God!  What makes this God unique, unprecedented in human experience?  This God reaches directly into the messiness of human activities to “raise the poor from the dust.”  This is not a god who is above getting involved in the individual and corporate activities that trample on and exploit the weak.  Actually, this God always identifies with and sides with those whom individuals, governments and corporate entities ignore or exploit.  Jeremiah records the Lord’s passionate obsession for “healing” for God’s people and all nations.  Amos condemns absolutely any and all exploitation of the poor by any nation, but especially by God’s people!  Luke’s text tackles the question of how God’s people are to negotiate the inherent exploitation of the weak by individuals and human institutions with brilliant subtly and sophistication; the story itself displays the kind of “craftiness” it commends, but for a “truer” cause.  At a first hearing/reading, Jesus seems to be telling a story that praises self-preservation at the cost of others and the “shrewdness” of the perpetrator!  Jesus commends the “shrewdness’ of “this generation” to the “children of light,” but for a totally different purpose.  Because in the end, no one “can serve God and wealth.”  God’s people can make no justification for withdrawing from the world; indeed, just the opposite, they are called to be just as shrewd as the most enterprising, but for a cause aligned with God’s priority– the weak, the poor, the vulnerable, the needy.

As a Jesuit, Michel de Certeau (d. 1986) knew Scripture, theology and the traditions of the church; as a public intellectual and academic he read Freud, Foucault, Derrida and others fruitfully and wrote provocatively with distinctive originality.  Two of his most enduring insights were a radical insistence on the irreducibility of the individual and a searing critique of late-Modernity.  He was thoroughly engaged as a worldly man in the ways of the world with the other foot firmly planted on biblical texts and theology.  (He came to popular attention with his writings in response to the riots of 1968 that shook Europe, especially France, and the USA.)  At the conclusion of The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau describes how he sees the fate of the individuals and institutions in late-Modernity as manipulators for various kind of exploitation.

“The consumers settle down, the media keep on the move.  The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the rations of simulacra [a term introduced by Jean Baudrillard to identify the appearance of reality  by hyper-commercialism and saturation by the media] the system distributes to the individual.” (pp 165-166)   

This environment enables systems, institutions and networks to pervert belief in a specific way.  Michel de Certeua continues:

“In business, the demobilization of workers is growing faster than the surveillance network of which it is the target, pretext, and effect.  Wasting of products, diversion of time… turn-over or inactivity of employees, etc., undermine from withing a system which… tends to become a form of imprisonment, offices, and even in political and religious groups, a cancerous growth of the apparatus is the consequence of the evaporation of convictions and this cancer becomes in turn the cause of a new evaporation of believing.  Looking out for one’s own interests is no substitute for belief.  [emphasis added]” (pp 179-180)

Yet, de Certeau continues, “beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology, opaque and stubborn places remain.” (p. 201)  Late-Modernity has produced “An illusory inertia.”  But do not be misled.  Beneath even such massive, universal communication, de Certeau believed, is buried the possibility of  the “unforeseen” that interrupts or connects (and which no doubt has ever been thought) is not programmed time.”  There is always, therefore, the possibility of an “accident” or “lacuna” a “lapse in the system….”  And then  comes the punchline on the last two pages of The Practice of Everyday Life:  “The gap or failure of  reason is precisely the blind spot that makes it accede to another dimension, the dimension of thinking….”  This other “dimension” is the reality of “everyday practices,”  the blip of basic, common-sense humanity that upends vast systems that have taken on “mystical” status as “an empire of the evident in fundamentalist technocracy.” (pp 202-203)  In the end, de Certeau bets on basic human decency in everyday circumstances to upend even the most domineering systems, institutions, networks and group-think that lure the individual into a false belief: “Looking out for one’s own interest is no substitute for belief.”

This Sunday’s readings and gospel insist that God’s people are, willingly or not, deeply enmeshed in the institutions, practices, customs,  politics and laws of today.  But God’s people are called upon to be as willy as the most cunning entrepreneur for the causes of justice.  This one-on-one, one-to-one everyday justice  upends even commercial and technological systems that have taken on “mythical” proportions as “empires.”  All it takes is one Gandhi or one Martin Luther King, Jr. or one Desmond Tutu and “empires” that seemed invincible crumble.  And all believers can participate in such activities in “everyday life.” 

Comments are closed.