Stewardship Sunday, "That we may grow and love," November 10, 2019

C Proper 27 32 Ord BFC 2019

Luke 20:27-38

November 10, 2019

James Fowler was the Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University and an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church.  He is best known for his work trying to define stages or processes that are universal to faith, using Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.   Whether one agrees with James Fowler’s stages of faith, if a person is going to work in Christian education, enculturation, and faith formation, Fowler’s work and analysis are always starting points. 

This is not to say that we should work toward, as a community of faith, all of the children, youth, and adults having, what Fowler refers to, a Stage 6, Universalizing Faith.  What we hope and pray for is that our children are moving through each stage at appropriate times in their lives.  And that the congregation provides enough models of later stages so that our children and youth see those stages modeled to them and gravitate and are called to further maturity and development.  Fowler makes clear that each stage is not considered right or wrong, but universal to the human condition.  As Christians and lifelong learners, we work on not being stuck in one stage or another. 

The first stage is the intuitive-projective faith.  The intuitive-projective faith is the fantasy-filled, imitative phase in which the child can be powerfully and permanently influenced by examples, moods, actions and stories of the visible faith of the adults that are closest to them.    There is no difference between Glenda the Good Witch, Santa Claus, Jesus of Nazareth, or Aunt Becky who takes all the grandkids to a movie when they gather at Thanksgiving.  

The second stage, James Fowler calls the mythic-literal.  In this stage, beliefs are appropriated with literal interpretations, as are moral rules and attitudes. Symbols are taken as one-dimensional and literal in meaning.  This is the faith stage of the school child.  Those in Stage 2 compose a world based on reciprocal fairness and an immanent justice based on reciprocity. For example, this loving woman called my “mother” seems to be really concerned about car safety, so in exchange for all the care and attention she lavishes on me, I, somewhat new to this world, will fasten my seatbelt when she asks me to do so.

Also, in mythic-literal, the actors in their cosmic stories are anthropomorphic. They can be affected deeply and powerfully by symbolic and dramatic materials and can describe in endlessly detailed narrative what has occurred. They do not, however, step back from the flow of stories to formulate reflective, conceptual meanings. God is a man with a long, white beard and kindly gaze.  And that’s it.  Because that is all I have ever heard.  For this stage the meaning is both carried and "trapped" in the narrative.  The meaning of the story is in its literalism, with no bigger meanings.[1]

It is part of the natural faith and spiritual development of children into their youth that they become the (said into the microphone) “Enforcers of the Moral Code.”  You’ve seen this, haven’t you?  We teach and teach our children and our youth our moral code, and they turn right around and enforce against us.  Immanent justice.  Every one of my children, beginning with my oldest to my youngest, has said to me just before I put the key into the ignition, “Dad, put your safety belt on.”  Car drive after car drive when we told them we wanted them to be safe, follow the rules, and do as told, “I’m not pulling out of the driveway until everybody has their safety belt on,” I would say with authority.   That authority is now found in the voice observing that I have not fastened my seat belt.   If not done with alacrity, before I shift the car into drive after backing out of the driveway, the Enforcer of the Moral Code became more insistent, “Dad!  Put your safety belt on.”

They have heard us say it.  They deem it worthy of moral enforcement.  So once they see an aberration, they jump on the opportunity to be the teacher rather than the student.  That moral high ground is also often extended to teaching far beyond safety belts, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy in our lives. 

When I was a church camp counselor at Geneva Point Center, on the shores of beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, a young girl, Alice, was rattling the Biblical cages of the New Hampshire Youth Cabinet.   Alice was insisting that the Sabbath should be rightly on Saturday instead of Sunday.  It was in the Bible.  God had said it.  The Jewish people had practiced it.  Christians somehow had messed it up.  We needed to return to Saturday.  Since I had a “Rev.” in front of my name, Youth Cabinet members introduced Alice to me for the true answers.  Certainly, I could tell Alice where she was wrong, couldn’t I? 

As Alice explained to me her righteous indignation, as an enforcer of the moral Sabbath code, I could tell she took more than a little pleasure in stumping the band that was the New Hampshire Youth Cabinet.  What I forgot in talking to Alice, was that she was exactly in the right spiritual place.  Working on these issues, pressing them as she was, indicated an interest and curiosity in spiritual and religious life I should have encouraged.

What I did instead, was take all of the air out of her.  First, I told her she was right.  She brightened.  The Sabbath was on a Saturday and Christians changed the day over a long period of time.  “But, Alice,” I said, “regardless of which day the Sabbath is on, I think God has all the grace and love in the world to hold us.”  Alice continued to argue the Sabbath should be on Saturday.  I told her, in return, that I thought it was small and incidental compared to some of the bigger and more important Biblical commandments like loving God and loving each other.  She did not care.  This was important to her.

No matter how much I may have been right, this was not very loving to Alice, and, predictably, she began to cry.  She was showing her fervor and love for things faith-related and spiritual, being a seeker of wisdom.  My response was to defend the tradition and characterize God.  And, as I’ve grown up and realized over the years, the tradition is wide and broad and God doesn’t really need that much defending.

Alice was exactly where she should be, working out a mythic-literal faith that is about rules and literalisms and figuring out the long and short of how those play out in her life.  She had come across a rule that had been changed with no convincing reason to change it, the Sabbath moving from Saturday to Sunday.  The pastor boy had dumped on her for not being more than a bright and spiritually aware young girl, interested and curious about her faith, seeking to be an enforcer of the moral code.  I failed Alice in that moment and always wish I could get that conversation back.

In contrast to Alice, the Sadduccees, in the Gospel text we have before us today, are adults who should not be finding meaning in the literalisms of their faith nor nitpicking traditions or Scripture verses which undercut the broad sweeping stories of Jewish faith and life.  Unlike Alice, the Scripture says they are devious, out to trap Jesus in a theological concept they don’t even give credence to but would like to see Jesus paying attention to the trivial and unimportant, wringing his hands over minutiae.  We should also take note that resurrection was an assumed concept in many circles of First Century Rome.  But the Sadducees literalize a belief in the resurrection and their moral code.  They try and trap Jesus with the literalism of Scriptural minutiae..    

The Sadducees point to a Scripture verse in Deuteronomy 25 that is intended to keep the family name alive and produce children in a world where women have little power without husband or son.  To a degree, the maxim also protects women in a strongly patriarchal world.  If a married man, living with his brothers, dies, his brother is to literally step in his place, marry the woman, and have sex with her to produce an heir.  They exaggerate the literalism to try and get Jesus wringing his hands over otherworldly things, caught up in their literalistic world.  In so doing, these Sadduccees are caught up in the unimportant and invite Jesus to be consumed by it.

  Seven brothers marry this woman and produce no offspring.  So whose wife shall she be in the resurrection, Jesus? These are Jewish scholars trying to trap a Jewish peasant in word games.  I imagine them snickering and sneering as they offer up this snarky example. 

Take note.  Jesus is no longer doing his teaching in Galilee.  While he was on the road to Jerusalem in previous chapters of Luke’s story, when he met the ten lepers and Zacchaeus, he is now in Jerusalem.  It was somewhat simple to follow him in Galilee.  The good news might get Jesus in trouble with the powerful in the synagogue, but the good news is generally well-received by those who have, till Jesus arrived, not seen themselves as welcome to the banquet of God.  Now Jesus is in Jerusalem, and the conflict has heightened.  People are trying to trip Jesus up at every turn, and they recognize that he threatens and challenges their comfortable faith and hard-earned power.  This will not end well.  Jesus can lose these verbal sparring matches and be discounted as a fraud or win them and become an ever-greater threat.  At the most, they won’t dare challenge him again. 

But notice what the teaching of Jesus does here.  While the Sadducees choose Scriptural minutiae from the teaching of Moses in an obscure verse in Deuteronomy, Jesus quotes Scripture as well but uses the central story of Moses and the Exodus to critique Scriptural minutiae.  In that powerful story from Exodus, Chapter 3, Moses asks the burning and breathing God for a name to give to the people.  Who are you?  What shall I tell them when they ask me?  “Tell them,” the Living God says, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  In this great passage, so instrumental to our tradition and story, Jesus asks, “Is God identifying with the dead or the living?”  Do Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still live through and breathe in our tradition, or are they as dead as dirt in their burial places?  Do they continue to inform your faith?

Last week we celebrated All Saints Sunday, and we spoke the names of people near and dear to us.  But we said, and we say, the goodness of these lives, the righteousness of those lives, we choose to have our faith continually informed by them.   We lay behind the curse and the pain in healing and forgiveness and choose to be informed by the goodness and the righteousness.

Jesus also makes it clear that in the resurrection, women shall not be valued by their marriage to a man or the son they produce.  Though you Sadducees may only value her as long as she has a male by her side, in the resurrection . . . in God’s eyes . . . in God’s eyes, this barren woman, she is a Child of God.    

We live in an age where we no longer recognize the mythic-literal stage of faith as a necessary place to where our children arrive, then move on from growing, and later flourishing into fuller maturity.  Rather, we have made the mythic-literal stage one of the primary ways we interpret Christian faith as adults.  Like the Sadducees, we come to Jesus asking him to enforce the moral code for us.  Pondering questions can be fun to think about, like, “Can God make a rock that even God cannot lift?” or “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

But when we use Scriptural minutiae to espouse hate or limit the love of God through some moral code, we miss the broad, sweeping message of a God who does justice, loves kindness, and walks humbly in the midst of us.  When we quote Scripture with a sneer or snicker to entrap others in the rhetoric of the dead, we miss out on a faith that continues to live and breathe in ancient and new ways. 

The mythic literal stage is an important step and process in our faith.  I wish I had remembered that when I spoke with Alice on that summer day in Moultonborough, New Hampshire.  Unlike the Sadducees, however, we are not to remain trapped in the story to miss the bigger stories of faith.  In those bigger stories of faith, Jesus says, a barren woman, a person without husband or son, is herself considered a Child of God.  As Alice, wherever she is now, is.  As we are.  Many times, our jobs as Christians, is to get past adult enforcers of the moral code to proclaim to others who have never heard the good news, that they are Children of God. 

Fasten your seat belts if you do, for the road in Jerusalem does not get any smoother, and the enforcers of the moral code have historically shown themselves to be petty, nasty, and violent. 

Today we asked you all to place your faith in this congregation which works hard not to be caught up in minutiae, to wring our hands over the unimportant or the otherworldly, but to give our talent and resource to an ever-maturing community of  faith with a God who has an ever-broad and expansive love.   I pray that you see this church and its leadership not caught up in silly questions of faith or struggles that make little difference in our public lives, but seeks to address the real world issues of how we care for the earth, how we heal the historical pain and trauma of violence, racism, and war, and how weave together community in Billings with so many partners who are grateful for a downtown church that holds out it hands in love, inclusion, and justice.  We have worked hard so that you might not be satisfied with calling this “my” church but “our church.”  For when we remember that this is a church bigger than just me or my, all of us become saints who model to younger generations what it means to be a Christian at any age.  Our church.  Our church.  Praise God.  Amen. 

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[1] See all the stages here, http://www.usefulcharts.com/psychology/james-fowler-stages-of-faith.html and here http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/fowler.htm and here http://www.exploring-spiritual-development.com/JamesFowlersStages.html.  Fowler believes that many church folk are found in the synthetic-conventional stage, Stage 3, and have never moved out of it.  He describes the “conventional” this way: “The name ‘Conventional’ means that most people in this stage see themselves as believing what ‘everybody else’ believes and would be reluctant to stop believing it because of the need they feel to stay connected with their group.”