OPENING UP SPACE FOR GOD Sunday, September 18, 2005 Vespers Communion Service Carol J. Allen Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church Psalm 30 John 8:1–11 “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” John 8:6b (NRSV) Dear God, we come into the quiet of this place as people who have had our share of going into and coming out of troubles. In the weeks just past, we have been witness to great suffering and also to the renewal of life. As we prepare once again to come to your table of grace, cause us to hear and receive your good news, and lead us out in peace, to love and serve your people; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. A personal note: I will retire as Associate Pastor for Congregational Care at Fourth Church on October 31. This is my last Vespers service in that capacity. I have enjoyed getting to know many of you over the nine years I have been here. Thank you for your most kind encouragement and support. It has been an honor and a privilege to worship with you and share the Lord’s Supper on these occasions. God’s peace.Like many of you, I am a city dweller by choice. I make this choice because I have found that I thrive on the novelty and creative energy of city life. There is always something new to see, always someone new to encounter. I am kept busy learning new insights from the cultural diversity, lifestyles, and politics of Chicago. I am energized by the hustle and bustle as I come and go by train or bus from home to work each day. But also, like many of you, there are moments when the noise and crowded streets become too much. The city is not always a friendly place. There are times when I am not at home with something I’ve seen or heard. I lose my temper and experience my own capacity for aggressive behavior and rudeness. In those moments, I yearn for a quiet space—both within my mind and all around me. I want to push the world back out of my face and keep life at arm’s length. On those days, I can’t wait to hurry home to my apartment and close the door behind me. I think that is why in tonight’s story I was drawn to the two moments in the text when “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” I wonder, was that his strategy for opening up space to think about the life pushing in on him and giving himself time to reflect on the words he might use to respond? In reviewing the background of tonight’s text, I found that scholars tend to agree that the story of the woman accused of adultery was not originally part of the Gospel of John. In some Bibles, the story is put in brackets. In our Bible, the story is dropped in and interrupts what comes before and after it. The story has been moved around in ancient Greek manuscripts to various locations in John and even appears in Luke’s Gospel. “It is truly a homeless story,” says Professor of New Testament, Frances Taylor Gench (Back to the Well: Women’s Encounters with Jesus in the Gospels, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004). Scholars also believe that the story is based on an authentic event in Jesus’ life that got passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation, so Gench wonders why the story has become free-floating. Maybe, she wonders, it was because Jesus’ extension of mercy to an adulterous woman embarrassed the early church, or that the church thought that the story would encourage Christian women to live unchaste lives. Because the story has been preserved and passed on, it must hold some useful and helpful meanings. It seems to be a story for all times and places. You’ll remember that the story is told in two acts. The setting is the temple, where Jesus is teaching. He is interrupted by a group of scribes and Pharisees who bring a woman along with them and present her to him as a sinner. We aren’t introduced to the man with whom she was caught in the act, nor do we know whether the woman might have been caught in a trap by those seeking to test Jesus in order to find charges to bring against him. They leave out half of the law of Moses when they demand a response from Jesus about whether he will condone this mob judgment and take part in the stoning: in fact, the law prescribed the death penalty for both the man and the woman. So what does Jesus’ writing in the dirt mean? Some students led by Gench in studying the passage have replied with answers such as, “Jesus was writing, ‘It takes two.’” Another thought he did this to handle his anger; another, that he was taking time to search for help from the scriptures in a quick mental review. One writer has said that through the action of doodling in the sand, Jesus was disengaging himself from the proposed action of stoning and literally distinguishing his position or posture from that of his questioners. Another saw his gesture as an “act of civil courage”—that is, by so doing, he was resisting the pressure of the lynch mob. At any rate, his detractors don’t let up. Finally, Jesus stands up and gives them a verbal reply: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw the stone at her.” I like Gench’s take on this action. She sees Jesus as able to disarm the mob because he surprises them. First, he didn’t seem to rate sexual sin as greater than any other sin in God’s sight, and he directed his reply to individuals, singling them out and looking them in the eye amidst the mass of people gathered. Gench writes, “Though they had arrived on the scene as an undifferentiated mob, they depart ‘one by one.’ as individuals who have been disarmed and redirected by the self-knowledge that emerges in encounter with [God’s] Word.” To me this means that Jesus opened up space for God to challenge each person to think about what they were about to do. They got it—they refused to throw the first stone. Then Jesus addressed the woman and invited her to speak. Gench draws on the work of Gail O’Day, who observes how “Jesus treats both the religious authorities and the woman as ‘theological equals, each as human beings to whom words about sin can be addressed.’” “Both the scribes and Pharisees and the woman are invited to give up old ways and enter a new way of life.” From being a condemned woman, surrounded by violence, she is freed from her past and is directed toward an open future. In fact, this freedom is a gift accepted by both the Jewish religious leaders and the woman. Whether marred by a judgmental spirit or by a visible sin, God offered all parties redemption through Jesus. What if, Gench asks, the Pharisees did not intend to accuse Jesus? What if they wanted to help the accused woman? If the verse about testing Jesus (vs. 6a) was added on in a later edition, it’s possible to see the Pharisees in a new light. According to Gench, Brad Young, who studies first-century Judaism, comments that this kind of gathering was frequent in Jewish life. “When a difficult religious issue arises in the life of the community which affects faith and practice, it was an accepted custom to seek a responsorium.” This took the form not of a lynch mob, but of a forum in which questions and answers became a way of establishing customs and making official legal rulings. Biblical interpretation was a key part of Jewish religious experience. In this suggested perspective, the problem was that the law taught stoning but the Pharisees didn’t want to do it. So they went to Jesus looking for a loophole in interpreting the Torah. Jesus gave them a way to relate the law to their daily lives. He helped them save her. Whether or not this interpretation of John 8 is correct, it suggests another way to view the Pharisees other than from the usual anti-Jewish one. Gench then directs us to look again at the woman and consider what is missing from the story. Only half of the law of Moses is mentioned; there are no witnesses to prove the woman’s adultery, no man was brought with her, and none of her own comments are included, until the end of the story when she responds to Jesus that no one has condemned her. Maybe she did not actually commit adultery. Or maybe she was charged with adultery by someone in power who was trying to seduce her and whose advances she resisted. Maybe she was like the more than 200,000 Asian women forced by the Japanese military government during World War II to serve as “comfort women” to soldiers and then shunned as victims of sexual crime. Maybe she was married to a violent husband and life had become unbearable—she used adultery as a form of resistance. The multiplicity of these perspectives makes my head swim. And they don’t exhaust the list of possible interpretations. The brief survey makes the point: don’t be too quick to judge. One implication or bottom line of our survey of perspectives is offered by church historian Roberta Bondi. She writes (see Gench) about judgmentalism as one of the basic struggles of living a Christian life. She says, Judgmentalism destroys community, it destroys those who do the judging, and, even more seriously . . . , it often destroys (and certainly excludes from community) the one who is judged. On a small scale judgmentalism destroys marriages, families, and churches. On a wider scale it provides the major fuel of racism, sexism, neglect of the poor, and national self-righteousness. Judgmentalism for this reason as a breach of love is as serious as any other sin we might commit against one another. The story of John 8 hints that self-knowledge can help us be freed from a judging spirit. The hope is that exploring the roots of my own rudeness can cause me, for example, to be a bit gentler and less quick to explode at those being rude to me. In other words, seeing myself as a sinner—whether as a judging spirit or living a life more obviously “disfigured by a judgmental spirit”—begins the healing of my own judgmentalism. In that sense, we are all alike. We all share the human struggle with sin, and we all share the need for God’s grace to overcome it. It was Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who inspired my exploration of John 8. On September 11, 2001, Williams was in a building of Trinity Church, Wall Street, a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center in Manhattan. He had gathered with a group of colleagues to record discussions of spirituality for the church’s educational broadcast program. In his short essay, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (Eerdmans, 2002), he reflects on his experience of the terrorist attacks and asks, “What are we prepared to learn? . . . Can we grow through this terrible moment?” I believe these questions are like the questions running through the mind of Jesus as he wrote in the dust surrounding him and like the questions with which he challenged those gathered around him, as they shared their own terrifying moment and a profound ethical dilemma. Like us, Williams later heard about the religious words used by terrorists to create a closed space into which they talked only to encourage each other and to justify murder. He also heard secular words sent by cell phones from the twin towers and the airplane heading for Pennsylvania. Those words sent by persons knowing that their own death was probably imminent opened up space for them to offer love and encouragement to their loved ones, who have had this bit of comfort to keep. This irony sent Williams’s mind whirling. He saw in those words, said for another’s comfort in the presence of death, a place for rediscovering God. Those words of love opened up a space for words that were not “formal, flat, or self-serving” as religious words often can be. Those words were not spoken to make God fit an agenda, as in the terrorist’s words. Those words were for engaging the moment, facing the suffering, and offering a bit of a breathing space. The contrast he said he heard was between “the murderously spiritual and the compassionately secular.” In the face of violence as a communication, what language shall we use? The language with which we choose to respond can open up space “between our feelings and our choices.” This “requires courage and imagination: it is essentially the decision not to be passive, not to be a victim, but equally not to avoid passivity by simply reproducing what’s been done to you. It is always something of a miracle,” Williams writes. He goes on to say, For the Christian, it is the miracle made possible by the way in which God speaks. The story of Jesus understood as the “speaking” of God to the world repeatedly brings this into focus. God speaks one language, and human beings respond in another. God speaks to say, “Don’t be afraid, nothing will stop me from welcoming you”; or to say, “Be afraid only of your own deep longing to control me.” I commend this essay to you. It is not necessarily a neat and tidy theological one as Williams struggles like we all do to make sense out of a changing and violent world and how we got ourselves into a murky and seemingly endless war in Iraq in a roundabout response to 9/11. One of the insights I take away from his essay and which connects to John 8 is that trauma can offer a breathing space; and in that space there is the possibility of recognizing that we have had an experience that is not just a nightmarish insult to us but a door into the suffering of countless other innocents, a suffering that is more or less routine for them in their less regularly protected environment. Isn’t that a lesson coming out of the aftermath of the hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast? Shall we cling harder and harder to truths that are delusions, or shall we let go and make room for new truths that will open our hearts to strangers and be part of the creation of a new kind of hospitality that is life-giving for all God’s people? As you enter the space around the Lord’s Table, I charge you to accept the invitation of the crucified and risen Christ to let go of all you hold against yourself and against one another. Take comfort in God speaking through him, “You are my beloved. Do not be afraid, for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.” Amen.