The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12), July 28, 2024
July 23, 2024 | by Thomas Hermans-Webster
| Reading 1 | Reading 2 | Reading 3 | Reading 4 | Reading 1 Alt | Reading 2 Alt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Samuel 11:1-15 | Psalm 14 | Ephesians 3:14-21 | John 6:1-21 |
Don’t avoid it.
Even if you haven’t preached on David at any point this month, do not avoid this text from 2 Samuel.
Statistically speaking, multiple people in your congregation are survivors of sexual assault, harrassment, or abuse. The Church is not immune from these issues; from public scandals of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse in Roman Catholic and the Southern Baptist traditions to the recent United Methodist apology “for the times we allowed our desire to protect the Church to outweigh our desire to care for victims and survivors of sexual misconduct. We have allowed polity and protection of the institutional Church to prevent us from holding persons accountable. . . . [We apologize] for the times we have not listened to you, doubted your stories, ignored your wounds, and have not tended to your pain. We believe this has contributed to allowing an unsafe culture to exist.”
From our passage in 2 Samuel, two things are true and must be engaged from the pulpit:
David was called by God to be a shepherd of God’s people, in covenant with God and the people.
David raped Bathsheba and had her husband killed in an attempt to cover up his sin.
Process-relational theology offers compelling theological resources for addressing sexual sin and trauma. First, naming sin as sin is critically important in the present moment, for it makes paths of healing more possible options for the person who was sinned against, the community who has experienced moral injury, and the sinner. Simply, truthful confession matters.
Second, recognizing our fundamental interconnectedness positions us to care holistically for the person who has been sinned against. Practices of social healing prioritize the voice of the person who has been sinned against and make space for them to articulate their experience, their needs, and their hopes for themselves and the community. Bathsheba, notably, has not been given that basic respect in traditional interpretations of this text. Break the traditional interpretations and their misogyny.
Third, truthful confession matters because accurate accounting of an event in the past makes it more possible for sinners to be held accountable for their sin in the future. How we story an event matters, it materializes particular values by making them influential in the real relationships through which the world emerges.
Fourth, bodily responses to traumatic events can include maladaptive responses like Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With an event metaphysics instead of a substance metaphysics, process theology is uniquely positioned to recognize how presently emerging moments feel past events. In process theology, the past is effervescent, haunting the present, foreclosing or disclosing possible futures. Because we are not isolated substances who act or acted upon by the world, we cannot just shake off whatever action has already happened to us. Our pasts live within us.
Fifth, God did not cause Bathsheba’s rape, nor did God sanction the coercive action that murdered Uriah. David did. By choosing to not faithfully answer God’s calls to love, beauty, peace, truth, zest, and adventure, David sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah and morally injured the people of God, whose experience of a sinful leader clashed with their expectations of the Lord’s anointed shepherd of the people. Process theology history of engaging theodicy questions and questions of suffering can, in some cases, be used to refocus survivors and community members alike. Be careful and pastorally engaged when doing so, though, for the “God can’t” response to suffering is often insufficient and pastorally negligent without fuller personal relationships that aim toward healing.
When this story is told with David as the unfortunately seduced ruler who had to make a hard choice or two to preserve the image of the monarchy, we influence survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse to continue in self-doubt, silence, and shame. We prevent their healing, delay justice, and obscure possibilities that the abuser can be held accountable and repent. We can even position God as a divine sanctioner of rape and cover-up. That story tells survivors that their experience will be coercively re-narrated as a seduction of someone whose future was too promising to lose for just a short mistake.
When this story is told with Bathsheba as a survivor and Uriah as a victim of David’s sins, however, we narrate a more complex story that prioritizes flourishing and well-being; that refuses to ignore the presence and prevalence of sin in the community, including in the leadership of the community; that actually creates a world in which sexual exploitation by people in power is a sin that renders the exploiter in need of confession and repentance not defense and obfuscation. That story tells survivors that they are not alone, at fault, insane, selfish, or demonic temptations. That story tells the people who love survivors and the world at large that the God of all creation and the God of the oppressed ceaselessly works for well-being and flourishing, living among us and empowering us to reveal and enact blessed healing in each and every relationship.
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The God of all creation is the God of the oppressed, and Christian process theological convictions can emerge from this confession of faith. With the psalmist, we can proclaim that the Lord is the refuge of the poor while the wicked are defined in their wickedness by their confounding of the poor.
For the process preacher in the United States, the last few weeks of political gossip and news may indeed bring us to the lament of the early portions of this psalm. The United States is certainly not the only national context that is full of unrest and dis-ease at the moment, but it is my political context, so I don’t want to speak too far afield. I mentioned to a coworker just a few days ago that it is so difficult to not slide into despair, and the psalmist of Psalm 14 echoed in my words: “they have all gone astray, the are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no not one.”
Who is the “they,” though?
Not who is the “they” today–us and them factionalism can be a dangerous sentiment to fuel from the pulpit–but who is the “they” for the psalmist?
They are evildoers, and they seem to be evildoers because they devour the people of God and thwart the well-being of the poor. Deliverance from their evildoing will come through the God of all creation who is the God of the oppressed, the one in whom the poor find refuge.
This is not a proof-text for naysaying atheism or funding despair in the face of myriad complex atrocities and oppressions in our world. This is a psalm that reminds us of God’s actions and desires. So today, how does your church participate in the life of the Refuge of the Poor?
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How beautiful is the desire for someone to have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, how broad, how long, how high, how deep, and how enveloping is the love of Christ? Even more, what a profound hope that someone might so comprehend so that they may be filled with all the fullness of God!
Nestled within this longer blessing, we have an ecclesiologically rich hope for the Ephesians then and for us today. The world emerges through relationships. Every event influences and is influenced by others. As it is with the basic drops of experience throughout the cosmos, so it is for the Christian life. The Christian life is life-in-Christ, together. We are a people, plural. Catholic theologian Brian Flanagan reminds us that the proper pronouns for the Church are “we, us, and our.”
It should be no surprise that the blessing for the Ephesians, then, is addressed to the plural “you.” The writer is saying, “I pray that y’all may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints…” Through our local community, the writer reminds us, we are woven into an intergenerational and catholic life. With one another, we are blessed to experience, reveal, enact, and participate in the Love that knits the cosmos through intimate relationships with each every occasion of reality.
In process and neoclassical theologies, God’s power and perfection have been reinterpreted through God’s love. This passage gives the preacher Christological and ecclesiological language for this interpretative move. The relational power to experience, comprehend, and participate in the love of Christ aims us to become filled with all the fullness of God. In Orthodox and Wesleyan salvation language, we can read this fullness as theosis, deification, or sanctifying grace (with the notable disagreement between Orthodoxy and process traditions regarding final stasis and dynamic open futures).
The power that is at work within us, then, is not a coercive force. It is wholly inclusive love itself, shed abroad in our lives, transforming and creating the cosmos in beauty, calling each of us into and beyond ourselves as co-creators of the world.
As co-creators with God and one another in our life-in-Christ together, of course we can accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. Each of us can interact with only some others, including God, but God is eternally and universally interactive. “God is the one to whom all things make partial differences, and the one who makes partial differences to all things,” Theodore Walker, Jr., writes in Mothership Connections.
The ecclesiological character of our salvation is that we experience the fullness of God, through the love of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, as an empowering expanse that lures us into more loving and creative relationships for the life of the world because of the sheer scope of the relationships into which we are baptized in Christ. Brought together in the life-in-Christ, we are graciously invited to participate in life together, learning from the experiences of others and teaching of our experience to others, including the divine Other. We, with all the saints, become church together, an intersubjective organism alive in Christ, revealing and enacting the fullness of God in Love in action throughout the world.
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Familiar stories, like this one in John’s gospel, can be risky. You may assume that your congregants will have this story so deeply ingrained in their image of Jesus that you either avoid it or shoot for the most radically novel approach as a way to stir them from complacency. Your congregants may want a steady interpretation amid the many uncertainties of our world. You both might want to just get through an ordinary Sunday in ordinary time.
Lean into the ordinariness of the day. Maybe even make a corny joke about “Ordinary Time” if you have a congregation who is liturgically aware enough to give you a pity laugh. I think leaning into the ordinary day for this text is both subversive and honest.
It is subversive because John tells of an extraordinary event. Feeding 5000 people with the produce of five barley loaves and two fish, near the Passover, in Galilee, people who try to forcefully make Jesus a king after being fed, is an extraordinary story. Why is this story, liturgically, nowhere near Lent or Christmas or Easter?! Does this story not perfectly fit the bill for a christological “WOW!” moment that would be showered in gold and white raiment? Shouldn’t this be somewhere between All Saints and Christ the King? This is not a normal event, y’all!
Maybe a triumphalist “WOW!” isn’t a useful reading, then.
To lean into the ordinary is not the same as being casual with the text or brushing off the event as something less than a sign of the abundant life that Jesus came to give. It is, with eucharistic undertones, a foretaste of glory divine. In the feeding of the 5000 and the gathering of the leftovers, the gathered crowd glimpsed a different world; an otherwise world that was characterized by sustenance, restorative relationality, creative transformation, and abundant life.
In process theology, glimpses of an otherwise world like this are possibilities on offer from God, toward which we can co-create the world. “Because we are genuinely free,” Monica Coleman writes in Making a Way Out of No Way, “the future is not guaranteed. It is easy to assume that one may continue on as one has done in the past. Yet one can choose not to do so.” As witnesses to a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, we can choose to become into that possibility, that promise, that apocalypse – quite literally that revelation.
There’s no triumphalism to it, for the process of creative advance is as mundane as the cosmos can get, and that’s beautiful. We’re not locked out from experiences of divine signs and wonders because of our separation in spacetime from the Johannine crowd who was seated in that grass. We, too, are offered satisfaction and well-being, healing in relationality, and abundance in New Life.
Leaning into the ordinary is also honest with the text and ourselves, for they were doing something with which many of us are familiar: eating. Now, we may generally expect Luke to be where the meal-theology happens in the gospels, and that’s a fair expectation! John gets a turn here and throughout chapter 6 that I think is beautifully ordinary and fertile for a process interpretation.
In an article for the journal Process Studies last year, I wrote about meals and memories, hopes, and relationships (“Cooking and Eating with Love: A Whiteheadian Theology of Meals for Planetary Well-being”). I believe that meals can reveal and enact hopes toward specific futures in and beyond our present relations and actions, futures that may intensify or abandon the relations of our present day in transformative and consequential ways. In particular, I think that meals can fuel hopes for communities of creative resistance and dreaming that can reveal God’s good news for the oppressed by offering opportunities for life that may have previously seemed unimaginable on our own.
For so many of us, our relationships to and through food are severely limited, isolating each of us from the creatures who become our food, the human people who prepare our food, and the human people with whom we could be sharing our food. So many meals today are the product of commodified isolation that mistakenly centers the self as the prime arbiter of all relational values. With an ordinary event–eating a meal–this passage in John can shake us from our individualistic stupor, liberating us from intentionally crafted food system oppressions and exploitations.
When Jesus took, gave thanks over, broke, and shared the loaves and fish–notice that eucharistic pattern?!–he gathered a community for a meal. It was a community of communities, intersubjective relationality weaving together to empower quality of life in the face of hunger. Let’s be clear: Jesus met a basic need, and that was good. If nothing else happened that day, it was a good day, for Jesus ensured their survival, enhanced their quality of life, and brought wholeness to the people. The people glimpsed an otherwise world of divinely abundant life through having their basic needs met.
Meals can reveal both how a society understands itself in the present and what influences a society values as it becomes into the future. When meals are shared in families, neighborhoods, or communities like church or school, a society can emerge that foregrounds the people who bring themselves to the meal as vital and vibrant kindred. When aiming toward community in this way, meals also present opportunities for members of a society to experience and express gratitude for how each member of the society–including the members who become the meal–depends upon one another in their shared life together.
The crowd who became a meal community on that shore of the Sea of Galilee glimpsed an otherwise world and valued a possible triumph in the political arenas of their day. “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king,” John writes, “he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” Jesus recognized a dissonance between his vision for the future and the crowd’s, between the influences that he valued for an emerging Reign of God and the influences that the crowd valued for power in the realm.
Many churches are good at eating together, within the Body, in the fellowship hall or on the grounds. When you eat, do you glimpse the creative transformation of the world that comes through meeting basic needs, restoring relationships, and ensuring that not a scrap of abundance is lost? What do you do next? How do the meals you share aim your community’s next steps? How do they reveal what and who you value, and how you value it and them? Do you move together as the Body? Do you break back out to be individuals in the world until the next Sunday? Do you go about the countryside, proclaiming the good news and sharing the abundance?
Do not be afraid, for Christ journeys with you.
