• I Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)

Despite Samuel’s having been chosen by the Lord as a young boy to supersede  the priestly heritage of Eli and then successfully leading the Israelites against their arch-enemy, the Philistines, “the elders of Israel” tell him they want a king, “like other nations.”  In response  to his praying, the Lord tells Samuel to warn the people about the consequences of a monarchy, but to accede to their request.  After all, “they have rejected me from being their king over them,” the Lord tells Samuel.  He tells the people they will get their king, but he also describes what they will loose under a monarchy.  A monarch will conscript their sons for an army and the rest of their families for other tasks to support the military.  A monarch will “take” ten percent of all  their wealth and give it to the “officers” and hangers-on.  A monarch will take ten percent of their workers, flocks, and work animals.  “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, who you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”  The people dismiss Samuel’s’ warnings and repeat their insistence for a monarch.  So, he led them to Gilgal and “made Saul king before the Lord….”  Everyone celebrated their accomplishment.  (Soon, Samuel would be required to find a replacement, David,  for Saul, whose tragic reign ended in his suicide.)

• Psalm 138

The psalmist testifies and gives credit to the Lord above any and all “other gods,” for “Your steadfast kindness and Your steadfast truth.. and Your word….”  The Lord’s favor to the psalmist is so dramatic, “All the kings of the earth will acclaim You, Lord/for they have heard the words of Your mouth.”  Although the Lord is “high” and “lofty,” the Lord sees what goes on.  The psalmist concludes with a plea for the Lord to never abandon him, the Lord’s handiwork.

OR

• Genesis 3:8-15

The “Serpent” has told “the woman” that she can give in to her “lust” for the fruit of “the tree in the midst of the garden” with impunity.  She took the fruit, ate it, and gave it to the “man,”  who also ate.  “And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked….” (3:1-7)  Today’s appointed excerpt continues: the two heard “the sound of the Lord God walking about in the evening breeze….”  They hid.  The Lord God called, “Where are you?”  The man admitted they hid because they now know they were “naked.”  “Who told you that you were naked?”  The man blamed the woman the Lord had given him; she gave  him the fruit “from the tree, and I ate.”  The Lord God queried the woman, who, in turn, blamed “the serpent.”  Immediately, the Lord God told the serpent it is cursed, doomed to crawl on its belly in the dust.  Forever, there will be “enmity” between “you and the woman.”

• Psalm 130

Beginning in the first person singular, the psalmist “cries out” “from the depths, believing that if God were only justice, no one would endure.  But, thankfully, God is  also “forgiveness!”  The psalmist “waits” for the Lord’s “word” as anxiously as the “watchmen” stares at the horizon for the first sign of sunrise.  She now addresses God’s people: wait for the Lord with whom their is “steadfast kindness and redemption.”

• II Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Quoting from the psalms (116:10), Paul identifies the cause of his tireless preaching and teaching: “I believed, and so I spoke….”  He and his readers in Corinth will come into the Lord’s  “presence,” because “everything” Jesus said and did was accomplished “for your sake.”  This is a generosity of “grace” that just keeps “increasing” to more and more people, who “increase thanksgiving to the glory of God.”  This is what sustains us: “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.”  Current afflictions are “temporary;” “what cannot be seen is eternal.”  We live in an “earthly tent,” but God has prepared “a house not made with hands in the heavens.”

• Mark 3:20-35

Jesus has just completed calling his twelve disciples, and Mark’s narrative provides a list of their names.  The crowds following Jesus have become  so large and frantic that they cannot find a place to eat.  When  his “family” saw what was happening, they tried to “restrain” Jesus, because the crowds  were  beginning to say, “He has gone out of his mind.”  “The Scribes who had come down from Jerusalem” joined the frenzy and declared that only an ally of “Beelzebul” would have the power to cast out “demons.”  Jesus responded: “How can Satan cast out Satan?”  Why would Satan work against Satan?  They only way Satan could be restrained would be if someone tied up “the strongman” and they “plundered” his house.  Alluding to his own words and works, Jesus assured them –sins are being forgiven!  Anyone who rejects his power to forgive “blasphemes against the Holy Spirit…..”  Perhaps worried for his safety, the mother and “brothers and sisters” of Jesus send word to him to come to them.  But Jesus addressed the crowd around hm:  Here are my mother and my brothers.”  Because, “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Each option of the two appointed readings from the Hebrew scriptures chronicles human folly and failure and each is followed by a responsory psalm that promises the Lord’s “forgiveness, which is unexpected, unmerited and always more than enough.  Paul testifies to a flood of “grace” that just keeps sweeping up more and more people.  In the episode in Mark’s gospel, Jesus confronts the confusion and suspicions among everyday people as well as the religious authorities raised by his audacity to “forgive sins.”  They conclude that he is either “crazy” or a disciple of “Satan!”  They understand evil, what they are incredulous about is  that much “forgiveness”  announced by someone who seems so eager to confer it on anyone!  After all, they are decedents of the faithless children of Israel and we are all the decedents of the first man and woman who disobeyed God and ruptured that pristine relationship.  Evil makes sense; “forgiveness” — unexpected, unmerited, and always so much “grace” it just keeps getting “extended” to “more and more people”– is what they cannot grasp.

At the heart of the Biblical testimony is not a rock (or, if it is a rock, it is a rock from which flows miraculously water in the wilderness), but a volcano; not something solid, unchanging, inert, but something that just keeps spewing and flowing in all directions.

In his study of Derrida and Theology, Steven Shakespeare writes sympathetically of the potential benefits of the French apostle of “deconstruction” for theology.  Shakespeare finds Derrida’s insistence that before there was theology, dogma or even belief, there was an “event,” an irruption, that set in motion what became belief.  He finds in Derrida’s work that:

“There is a wildness at the origin of any structure.  It is a disruptive upsurge; as the origin of any structure, it is not part of the structure.  It follows no pre-given rule, and it escapes domestication in all conceptual knowledge.” 

Shakespeare borrows a French phrase to name this “wildness,”– “une genese sauvage, which could be translated as ‘savage genesis.'” (p.44)  It is God who keeps the world “unsettled and alive  to what exceeds it.”  Shakespeare concludes, “This God lives in the difference between madness and reason.” (p.85)

A just God is “reasonable;” a just God makes “sense;” but a God who is always eager to supply more “forgiveness,” more “grace” than we ever imagined was possible is a kind of “madness.”   But it is a “madness” that allows the world to get back up, start over,  find hope, move on, begin something new.  The accusation against Jesus was that he was either “crazy” or in league with “Satan.”  The cause for this reaction was his audacity to announce– sins are being forgiven!  And to warn that to reject such grace would be “unpardonable!”

At the heart of the Biblical witness is a “savage genesis,” an irruption, an upsurge a certain “madness/craziness;” Jesus affirms boldly that God forgives freely, eagerly and always excessively.  This is what keeps the world “unsettled” and open to “what exceeds it.”

“The lunatic, the lover, the poet

Are of imagination all compact”

                              “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

William Shakespeare