September 8, 2024

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Mark 7:24-37

[Jesus] said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

These are harsh words, buried under a layer of metaphor. Jesus was effectively saying that this child was no better than a dog. As a Gentile, she was not as religiously relevant, not as religiously crucial as someone among those that followed the God of Abraham.

But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

This is almost pitiful imagery, but the woman had faith in Jesus and wished to see her daughter healed. The woman responded to Jesus within his chosen metaphor. If Jesus was going to refer to her daughter as a dog, she would turn those words back.

Then [Jesus] said to her, “For saying that, you may go–the demon has left your daughter.”

We do not have much context for these remarks. We do not know if Jesus was simply testing the woman or if he truly was not going to heal the girl. One helpful clue is that this exchange happens in the Gospel of Mark. And Mark offered an unvarnished account of Jesus’ life.

In another passage from Mark, Jesus heals a blind man, but it takes a bit of effort. Mark writes, “[Jesus] took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And the man looked up and said, ‘I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.’ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”

I was at the eye doctor this week and they kept swapping back and forth various lenses trying to see how bad my eyes were this time around. I thought of this passage sitting in the chair. I have always considered this passage as the Story of Jesus the Optometrist. Imagine that stained glass window.

Why did Mark tell the story of a partial miracle? Obviously, it would have been better to see some than to see nothing, but why not round it off into a whole miracle and avoid suggesting that Jesus was not perfectly capable of healing the man in one go? Because when you lie about a little, you sometimes find it easy to lie about a lot.

Recall that Mark is the first written Gospel, the oldest of the four and often the most bluntly worded. He yells at the disciples a few times, famously calling Peter “Satan” for tempting him in one instance. We have developed this image of Jesus as perfect and serene, but that evolution is not entirely from the Bible but from the words of others trying to make it easier to believe.

And how could you not believe in someone who is perfect?

This fall, I am giving a sermon series, this time on movies. Many were suggested to me and thanks for those selections. I tried to sift through them to find good stories that would also work well with the scriptures for Sunday.

Truth be told, I changed the movie for this week. It was supposed to be Citizen Kane. I thought it might work well with the first reading from Proverbs about a good name and the image making efforts of its real life subject, William Randolf Hearst. When I ran the movie title by someone though, they made a face. They were not keen on the title and I thought, maybe it is a bit too precious, a bit too high falutin.

So, instead, we are considering another film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Admittedly, quite a different movie from Citizen Kane. It is an absurdist comedy based on the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the quest for the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail was the cup from which Jesus drank on the night of the Last Supper and was considered a sacred relic.

In comedy, there is the concept of a straight man, the person whose job it is to stay true to the story and serious at all times. Everyone else can make ludicrous remarks and fall into the mud, but the straight man must stay in character as the foundation upon which the comedy is built. For this reason, the straight man usually gets paid more because it is harder to remain serious while everyone else gets the funny lines.

In this movie, Arthur is generally the straight man. He remains true to the medieval mindset of a king wandering around medieval England. He gets a few jokes in, mind you, but he holds the line of the story, allowing everyone else to shine. The strength of that story, and the audience’s deep familiarity with it, make it work.

Years ago, when I worked at a church camp teaching kids theater, we often used fairy tales as the basis for our short plays. We did so because the audience members would immediately recognize the characters: who Little Red Riding Hood was, who the Seven Dwarves were. They knew the basic story and therefore they would quickly notice when we veered away from the story. Knowing the underlining pattern of a story is what makes both comedy and tragedy work. Because we as the audience know when something has gone wrong.

Think about a simple joke. It follows a predictable form. You start a pattern, you repeat a pattern, and then you break the pattern. One, two, three. I heard a joke recently. A priest, a minister, and a rabbit walk into a bar. And the rabbit says, excuse me but I believe I am a typo.

Old jokes about priests, ministers, and rabbis are so familiar that even the pattern of a joke can be used to make a joke. And that is because human beings love patterns. We find them all around us. We like to follow those patterns and will surely notice when they are broken if, and this is very important, if we know the story. If we know the story and see that it is not being followed. Aha, we see something is wrong, something is amiss. It should go very differently than what we are hearing or seeing.

And when that is a comedy, it can be funny. When it is a tragedy, it is a cautionary tale. But when it is a story that we do not recognize, we neither laugh nor learn. We are confused or bored or annoyed.

When I think about the story of Jesus and the girl, it works for me like such a story. Jesus is the teacher, the wise man, the holy one. And yet, that pattern of doing good was slightly wobbly in this story. Jesus said no. He was not going to heal the little girl’s suffering because she was not one of his own. And the mother responded to Jesus in just the right way for Jesus to realize that he was not following his own story. He was breaking the pattern he had set for others.

O course, Jesus was famous for breaking away from past traditions and prejudices. He healed on the sabbath. He ate with prostitutes and tax collectors. He argued with the priests in the Temple. But he had begun a new pattern, one that this woman had detected and used to remind Jesus himself of what he had taught.

In the Holy Grail, there are numerous instances in which characters break out of the mentality of medieval England into a more modern way of thinking. There is a moment when King Arthur is seeking information from a pair of peasants who are working the fields below a castle. He asks who their lord is, and they say they do not have a lord. They are an anarcho-syndicalist collective.

I remember hearing this phrase, anarcho-syndicalist collective, for the first time and not knowing what it meant. It is basically a hippie commune, something that would have been more familiar to an audience in 1975 when the movie came out than to a high school student in the 1980s.

In the story of Arthur, there were kings and knights, chivalry and derring-do. There were not supposed to be arguments about class warfare. And there were certainly not supposed to be scientific discussions about how coconuts had made their way into medieval England, carried by pairs of swallows on a length of twine.

By the way, they were using the coconuts to make the sounds of horse hooves. They did this because the movie was so low budget, that they could not afford to rent horses. In fact, the movie was not going to be made at all until unexpected benefactors showed up to fund the film: the rock bands Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, and Jethro Tull.

I mistakenly said at the film screening last Wednesday that it was George Harrison of the Beatles. He funded Monty Python and the Life of Brian. My apologies for the misinformation. Obviously, I could have left out reference to my mistake. Honestly, only a couple of folks would have known. And wouldn’t it be better to affect an air of infallibility, of never making mistakes, of possessing perfect knowledge of all things? But that would be a lie.

And the same is true for religion. That same is true for the Bible. Some religious people will act as if religion is the cure for every social problem or that the Bible is the perfect in every way. And while I think there is great value to both religion and the Bible, that is not the same as perfection.

Remember what I said about Jesus. Jesus broke away from past traditions and prejudices – Biblical traditions and religious prejudices. And we still follow some of those traditions and, occasionally, some of those prejudices. For this reason, we cannot handle the Bible or religion with kid gloves. Just as Jesus challenged the sensibilities of his time, we need to follow his example and wonder about what we should be doing today.

The Holy Grail is an absurdist comedy. It is absurd because it takes many liberties with its underlying story, the tale of King Arthur. In absurdist comedy, bizarre things happen. When the Knights of the Round Table approach the Cave of Caerbannog on their quest to find the grail, they are warned of a terrible monster. When they get to the entrance, the ground is covered with bones and rusting armor. Then the monster appears – a fluffy white rabbit. They call their guide a silly sod and approach without concern. The rabbit, however, flies about tearing the knights apart. It is very silly to watch, seemingly brave knights running away from a ridiculous enemy.

The basis of humor is the juxtaposition of incongruous things. These do not belong together. These do not follow the story. But you need to know that story to understand why this is so strange. You need to know that knights are brave and rabbits are harmless.

And the same is true for the Bible. When Jesus tells this woman that her sick daughter is like a dog trying to eat the food meant for children, it is a story with clearer meaning for those haring it two thousand years ago. Observant Jews were not meant to mix with Gentiles. Their religious lives were closed off and, in many ways, insular. Why would a Jewish holy man heal someone who was not Jewish, who did believe in God?

Because it was the right thing to do. Because Jesus had repeatedly pushed against the presuppositions of the Temple and the religious leaders of the time. And because of that subversive quality to the teachings of Jesus, we cannot simply turn to tradition. We cannot simply listen to our Sunday school teachers and, yes, even ministers from the pulpit. That does not mean they are always wrong, but it does mean that they can be wrong.

And therefore, it is healthy to ask questions. It is healthy to have doubts. It is healthy to ask why are who doing this and not doing that. And furthermore, it is healthy and helpful to ask those questions within a religious community of people who follow the practices of Jesus without requiring lockstep adherence to Biblical traditions or religious presuppositions.

But it is critical to also know the story. To know the story of Jesus and the disciples. To know the story of Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers. To know the history and the traditions well enough that we can understand the pattern of it all. And to recognize when something does not truly make sense within it because it breaks the pattern. Sometimes that will make us laugh and sometimes it will make us think.

One of the members of the Monty Python troupe, John Cleese, gave an interview about their absurdist brand of humor. Now John Cleese was a comic actor, but he also attended the University of Cambridge, where he read law. Unlike the United States, where one attends law school, Cleese would have been prepared to become an English barrister or solicitor fresh out of university. So, he was no lightweight.

In this interview a few years ago, Cleese said that they could never put on a television show like Monty Python today or get one of their movies made. He said this because absurdist humor does not work in a world that is absurd. No one would get the jokes, I am guessing, because we are living inside a joke.

I do not entirely agree with him, but I think there is something to his comments. Humor requires that people understand a story. Something is funny because it seems out of place. But you only know it is out of place because you understand what should be happening. That is true with the tales of King Arthur. It is true with the books of the Bible. And it is true with the culture we find ourselves in. We need to understand the pattern around us so that we can determine what fits and what does not. And whether that understanding leads us towards comedy or tragedy, well, that depends upon what we see.

One of the reasons I think John Cleese was onto something is because the world of the 1960s and 1970s is quite different from the world of today. Six decades later – yes, six decades – we have a much less cohesive culture and narrower base of common knowledge. We do not share stories in the same way.

 

The cultural energy of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States was a response to a familiar culture. Whether you were for them or against them, the generational experiences of the 1940s and 1950s led to strong reactions in the following years. You might not agree with the choices someone else was making about the war in Vietnam or race relations or women’s rights, but you had a basis for understanding what was happening.

That is less true today. People do not share the same information. Back then, you had familiar newspapers and magazines and nightly news on three, count them three, television networks. You had a handful of movies available down the street in a building, not on demand in your house.

There is so much information now that people can have entirely separate bases of knowledge about what is right and wrong, true and untrue, in the world. And sadly, most of us are not terribly good at sampling information from outside our preferred sources, our comfortably familiar echo chambers that tell us we are absolutely right and all those other people are completely wrong.

And yet, I am wrong all the time. I do not know up from down some days. I try to learn more, to sift through the noise, and to listen beyond the choir of endless agreement from my favorite news sources. But it is hard to do so. I do not want to hear people say things I do not agree with, things I do not emotionally connect with. But in a nation where half of the people do not agree with the other half, you cannot assume that you are perfectly informed and all the others are woefully misguided.

When I am talking to couples about getting married there are many old platitudes that come to mind. Don’t go to bed angry. Always be respectful of the other person. And pick your battles.

That last one is interesting to me because I think as a culture we have tossed that idea out the window. Because everything has become a battle. We fight over the important things, but we also fight over the unimportant things we equal vehemence.

And part of that cultural warfare arises from having different ideas about what is culturally important, politically important, and religiously important. Now that was also true in the 1960s and 1970s – honestly it was true in the 1940s and the 1950s. I think the difference is that as our informational lives have drifted apart, we do not even have the shared vocabulary, the shared basis of ideas for having a sense for compromise.

Any compromise becomes a betrayal. Even disagreement over the internal story is a betrayal. You just need to drink the Kool-Aid and hold the line against destructive outsiders.

Well, for those of you who do not remember the origin of the term “drink the Kool-Aid” recall that there was a cult in Jonestown, Guyana. One that committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid upon the orders of their leader, Jim Jones. To drink the Kool-Aid is a self-destructive willingness to accept what should not be acceptable because someone talked you into it.

We need to be able to accept that sometimes we are wrong, that we are not even following our preferred stories. When Jesus himself was willing to accept the criticism of this random stranger seeking his help, we in our own lives should be willing to pause and to think carefully if this is the battle we need to fight. If this is the argument or the issue that truly matters. Because they cannot all matter to the same degree. They can’t.

And if we can pick our battles over what truly matters and make compromises over the rest, wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t that be a better way of being? And wouldn’t that be a better way of following the example of a man like Jesus, who was able to fix his own mistakes when someone gently pointed them out to him?

The purpose of humor is to make us laugh, but also to help us to understand something a little better, a little deeper. We know how the story should go and how it should not.

So, the take home message for this week is that we need to think about our stories, to re-read or re-watch them or to consider them over and over again. And to be willing to laugh. To laugh when we notice something seems out of place. And not rage against the person who dares to point it out. Because sometimes even Jesus changed his mind.

And are we any better than Jesus?

Amen