Proper 14 Year B
9 August 2015
John Addison Dally
Church of Our Saviour, Chicago
Are you a good person, or a bad person? I don’t mean your behavior. Who are
you way down deep inside? And when God looks way down deep inside you, what is
God’s answer to that question? Western Christians typically say that they’re reasonably
good people until you add the part about God’s point of view, and then you might
encounter anything from a moment’s hesitation to a complete reversal of the generally
positive self-assessment. God’s opinion of the human race has been variously and
colorfully expressed by Christian theologians through the ages: according to Augustine,
humans are a massa damnata, an assemblage of beings who deserve by theirvery
nature to be condemned and destroyed; it is only by God’s grace that we have not
been. For Luther, we are miserable sinners, for Calvin, utterly depraved. Even
Episcopalians familiar with the previous Prayer Book or Rite I of the present one know
what it is to bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, sins which have become a
grievous remembrance unto us and an unbearable burden, all committed since the
previous Sunday when we’d last said the same words. In recent decades such views
have generally fallen out of favor in our brand of Christianity. The Dominican Matthew
Fox wrote the book Original Blessing in 1983, arguing for the essential God-made
goodness of human beings, and attracted a huge following. The revisers of the current
Prayer Book kept the words “lost sheep who have strayed from thy ways” in the General
Confession of Rite I Morning Prayer but decided to drop “and there is no health in us” as
unnecessarily pessimistic.
The notion that human beings left to their own devices are inherently bad
because of the stain of Original Sin was codified during the 5th Century and has never
really left us, Matthew Fox and his enthusiastic followers notwithstanding. The debate
was dramatized in the conflicts between Augustine and a monk named Pelagius, one of
the most brilliant Christian thinkers no one has ever heard from, because all but a few
scraps of his writings were destroyed after he was declared a heretic by the church in
418. He is known to history only by the caricatures of him put forward by his opponents,
who portrayed him as claiming that human beings have the power to improve
themselves without God’s help. What he actually seems to have been saying is that we
are not robots; if God has to possess us first in order for us to turn toward God, then
free will doesn’t exist. Our common sense tells us he is right, yet to this day, Pelagius
has no defenders, unless you count me and about five other people, all of whom want to
make the same simple point: we are responsible for our lives. They have been placed
in our hands like a gift, and the choices we make about them matter. It is true that we
are not in control of our lives, but not because God is in control of them but because
we’re surrounded by other people making free choices as well. And you never know
about other people, do you?
This remains a controversial and unpopular sort of theology. What is
uncontroversial and therefore popular is to say that God is in control of everything, and
you’d better believe that or something bad will happen to you. Seminarians who had
never heard of Pelagius before their theological education leave seminary with a
mantra firmly lodged in their heads: “Augustine was right, Pelagius was wrong.” Try to
have a discussion with one of them about Pelagius; you’ll quickly learn that there is
Proper 14 Year B
9 August 2015
John Addison Dally
Church of Our Saviour, Chicago
nothing to discuss, since the church has already declared the winner and it’s heresy to
have your own ideas about...well, anything, really. Pelagius even gets a mention in
our Articles of Religion, the 16th Century constitution of the Anglican Church, still found
in the back of our Prayer Books: Article IX reads: “Original sin standeth not in the
following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of
the Nature of every man...who therefore deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.”
Well, the notion that God is in control of everything so you and I have no
responsibility for the bad choices we make may be a time-honored theology of the
church, but it is not supported by the bible. The bible’s theology is oblique, complex,
and full of shadows. There are, of course, moments of clarity — “You shall not commit
adultery” — but much of the theology of the bible is wrapped in story, and stories are as
complicated as the human beings they depict. Over the summer we have been reading
the Throne Succession Narrative found in First and Second Samuel, or How Israel Got
a King and What Happened Then. Two weeks ago we heard the story of King David
and Bathsheba. No longer a fighter, the king sends other men into war while he takes
his leisure at home. What he sees and wants, he gets — the droit du seigneur, it’s
good to be king. But David’s pleasure is spoiled by the conception of a child. He tries
to get Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to cover David’s tracks, as it were, but when he is
unsuccessful he makes his generals partners in crime and connives to have Uriah
slaughtered in battle. After Uriah’s death Bathsheba joins becomes one of David’s
wives and gives birth to the child, a boy. At this point it would seem that the king has
absolute power and has gotten away with multiple overlapping crimes, breaches of the
law and of the heart. However, the narrator adds this rather startling phrase:
“But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”
Wait a minute...you mean God just let all this happen, allowed a good and
honorable man to go to his death so another man could steal his wife? And God is
nothing more than “displeased?” Why didn’t God intervene? Perhaps that’s the point:
God never intervenes. We’re on our own, just like most of America’s founding fathers
believed, including the Episcopalians. But no, that turns out not to be the
point. Immediately, David is confronted by the court prophet, Nathan, the moral
authority in a palace that has lost its compass. Nathan tells the story of a rich man with
flocks and herds who steals a poor man’s one little lamb to feed a guest who happened
to drop in. David is outraged at such behavior until Nathan says, “Well, you ought to
know” and metaphorically holds up a mirror to the king. It’s Nathan and God’s “gotcha”
rolled into one, and it packs a punch: Nathan declares that the child born of the king’s
adultery will be struck with an illness and die. (II Samuel 12:1-15)
Okay, now we’re on familiar ground, right? If you commit the crime, you do the
time. God is the cosmic punisher of all sins, the righter of all wrongs. But if that were
the case, we wouldn’t even need a criminal justice system, would we? We could just
leave it to God to be judge, jury and executioner and pick off all the bad guys for
us. Yet that doesn’t seem to be happening. A lot of people do the same things David
did and worse and get away with it. But according to the bible David isn’t a lot of
Proper 14 Year B
9 August 2015
John Addison Dally
Church of Our Saviour, Chicago
people. He was chosen to rule as God’s anointed, the mashiach, (messiah)and David
willingly agreed to serve as the image of God’s reign on earth. At his coronation the
Levitical priests chanted the 110th Psalm: “The LORD said unto my Lord, ‘Sit thou on
my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool.’” God and David are in a
relationship, and it strains each of them mightily.
When the child becomes sick David fasts and weeps and prays, all to see if he
can change God’s mind; the child dies anyway. Then David gets up, takes a shower,
and has a meal for the first time in days. His entourage is astounded: why not fast and
weep and pray now? David has a simple answer: “God has spoken. I will go to my
child, but my child will not return to me.” If the story ended there we might conclude that
the bible’s universe is indeed a nicely balanced one, even if innocents sometimes pay a
high price to make the scales of justice come out right. But the story doesn’t end there.
“Then David consoled his wife Bathsheba, and went to her, and lay with her; and
she bore a son, and he named him Solomon.” (II Samuel 12:24) That’s right,
Solomon. In the memory of Israel the second greatest king after David, the builder of
the Temple and the writer of the Book of Proverbs, the wisest man in human
history. The story does not end with David’s punishment, which is neither more nor less
than the consequence of his failed human choices. But it continues with redemption,
and a chance to make better choices, choices that allow a bit more of the face of God to
be seen on the earth.
In most every cathedral in Europe you can find a window depicting the Jesse
Tree. The patriarch Jesse, David’s father, reclines on a couch at the base of the
window, and from his loins rises a flowering tree, like Jack’s famous beanstalk. Nesting
in its branches are the greatest of Israel’s kings, beginning with David and Solomon and
crowned at its leafy peak by the Virgin Mary, who holds the infant Jesus on her lap, the
King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, the heir of David’s throne. In jewel tones lit from
behind by the sun we see a remarkably accurate representation of biblical theology in
all its complexity and with all its shadows. The image of the Jesse Tree portrays
visually the unbroken succession that leads from David to Jesus, unbroken but strewn
with the messy consequences of human choices along the way. That’s biblical
theology, and it has few points of contact with the Augustinian doctrine of Original
Sin. In the bible, you win a few, you lose a few, but the story keeps moving
forward. The humans never get everything they want, and neither does God. Yet
neither side gives up. They’re in it for the long haul.
That’s why, in spite of David’s craven exploitation of his kingly power, his all-toohuman weaknesses and failures, he is remembered not as a good person or as a bad
person but as a human leader with a passion for holy community, for urging a gathered
people to choose freely to serve the mysterious God of the universe. Long after his
death, it is that passion that remains, that keeps recurring in history. It is that passion
that leads a crowd of men and women, natives of Jerusalem and visitors in town for the
Passover festival, to throw their garments and branches ripped from trees beneath the
hooves of the donkey carrying Jesus, the rabbi from Nazareth, as he enters the Holy
Proper 14 Year B
9 August 2015
John Addison Dally
Church of Our Saviour, Chicago
City, the city of David and Solomon, on the day we call Palm Sunday. It is that passion
that makes them cry out “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the Name of the
Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest
heaven! Hosanna to the Son of David!”
Jesse Tree window, Chartres Cathedral