Minimizing God: Acts 28: 1-10
Transfiguration Sunday
After we had reached safety, we then learned that the
island was called Malta. 2 The natives showed us
unusual kindness. Since it had begun to rain and was cold, they kindled a fire
and welcomed all of us around it. 3 Paul had
gathered a bundle of brushwood and was putting it on the fire, when a viper,
driven out by the heat, fastened itself on his hand. 4 When
the natives saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another,
“This man must be a murderer; though he has escaped from the sea, justice has
not allowed him to live.” 5 He, however, shook off
the creature into the fire and suffered no harm. 6 They
were expecting him to swell up or drop dead, but after they had waited a long
time and saw that nothing unusual had happened to him, they changed their minds
and began to say that he was a god.
7 Now in the
neighborhood of that place were lands belonging to the leading man of the
island, named Publius, who received us and entertained us hospitably for three
days. 8 It so happened that the father of Publius
lay sick in bed with fever and dysentery. Paul visited him and cured him by
praying and putting his hands on him. 9 After this
happened, the rest of the people on the island who had diseases also came and
were cured. 10 They bestowed many honors on us, and
when we were about to sail, they put on board all the provisions we needed. (NRSV)
I wanted to anchor this sermon in the
Muppets’ “Treasure Island.” I had a
lovely lead-in about the expectations of Long John Silver, expertly played by
Tim Curry, and how Jim Hawkins was so taken in by him and made all sorts of
snap judgments based on what he wanted to be true. I love that movie, and I was pleased with
myself for making the connection.
But I am a
preacher in the United States of America and I cannot ignore that the United
States Senate voted almost exactly along party lines yesterday to acquit the 45th
president of the charge of incitement of insurrection in the January 6th
attacks on the U.S. Capitol building.[1] Muppets’ “Treasure Island” will have to wait.
Five people were killed in the riotous
attempt at a coup, but the Republican party declared the former president had
no criminal part in it—despite the fact that, after the verdict, many
Republicans stepped forward to denounce his actions and accuse him of the very
thing they had just voted he did not do.
Outside of
this pulpit, I am happy to be as clear as I can be about what I think of the
proceedings, the vote, and the coup itself.
Inside this pulpit, I can only stand in shocked amusement that this
happens on the eve of the Sunday that we are looking at a text about justice—about
how we consider people who seem to cheat consequences, and about what happens
when a person finds himself in a place he did not expect, elevated beyond his
reality. The Spirit has a wild sense of
humor.
We finish our
Epiphany series today on the book of Acts with a final pair of Paul-is-awesome
texts—at least, by Luke’s standards. After
being caught in a storm off the coast of Crete, Paul and company wash ashore on
the island of Malta, part of the Roman province of Sicily. Fortunately, the people who live there are
friendly—a marked change from the reception Paul has received in other parts of
the empire. Even Luke tells us it was
“unusual” kindness, which must have seemed a Godsend after the tension and fear
of the storm.
But then Paul
is bitten. It seems a harmless thing;
the snake was disturbed from its home and attacked the nearest thing, as wild
animals (and, on occasion, people) are wont to do. Paul shakes it off, thinking nothing of it,
but the people who live with these snakes wait.
Snakes bite the guilty, they say.
Storms come to the guilty.
Surely, Paul will not last the night, especially having had both of
these together. Such a pairing couldn’t
be simple bad luck. “Justice has not
allowed him to live.”
But Paul does
live. The Greek used here for justice is
Dike (dikh),
the Greek goddess of
moral order and human justice according to social customs. She was often depicted with a set of scales
to indicate the balance of lawfulness.
Incidentally, she is thought to be the model for the constellation
Virgo.[2] It is her Roman counterpart, Justitia, who
wears a blindfold; Dike sees clearly.
So Dike,
personified justice, would see Paul, and surely only her intervention could
cause such a frying-pan-into-the-fire moment of surviving a shipwreck to be
bitten by a snake. He must have done
something awful for her to pursue him to so thoroughly with a snake after a
storm.
Except that,
too, is curious. There are four types of
snakes indigenous to the island of Malta.
The leopard snake and the black whip snake are the best candidates for
whatever bit Paul, as the Algerian whip snake and the cat snake are fairly rare
and don’t go near people if they can help it.[3] Curiously, however, none of these snakes is
venomous. There is a local legend that
all snakes on Malta stopped being venomous when the one bit Paul, that holy
man, but that seems a little unfair to snake-kind and a little bizarre to
science. Alternatively, Joel Green
posits that, “The snake incident on Malta may recall Jesus’ words in Luke
10:19, that he had given his disciples ‘authority to tread on snakes and
scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy,’ and promised that ‘nothing
will hurt you.’”[4]
Perhaps, since
this whole book is a script explaining to us not only how the Church got going
but why Paul is someone worth listening to, Luke is embellishing a true story
to elevate his subject. No narrative is
ever without purpose, after all.
But the
reaction that Paul’s calamities are something he earned through his own evil is
such an incredibly common thing. We
humans want so badly for justice to be something that swoops in and fixes
things, unequivocally pointing out to us what and whom we should avoid. We want there to be a goddess who makes the
decision, a snake cleverly planted, a storm out of our control. We like the kind of cosmic retribution that
is unambiguous—as long as it happens to someone else—because we like not having
to take on justice ourselves.
It is a hard
thing to call out evil when the thing by which we are measuring is our own
moral compass. And it is an even harder
thing to know that not all which is evil in this world is countered by justice
we can see, hold, tell our neighbors about.
It would be much better if God or this goddess would simply strike down people
with snakes, ensuring they do not continue to walk among us. Right?
“After they
had waited a long time…they changed their minds and began to say that he was a
god.”
If Paul could
escape justice, the divine retribution, surely there must be some divine
in him; if not even the gods were going to hold him accountable, then he must
be a god himself. How easily swayed we
are by our desire for the extraordinary! How impatient for there to be
something that can hold its own in accountability—and how strange that Luke
records no refusal of the rumor of divinity by Paul. This is not Paul’s first
brush with deification: in Acts 14, Paul
healed a man in Lystra and the locals declared he was Hermes, messenger of the
gods and divine himself. At that point,
Paul was quick to declare that he was no such thing—he was in service to a
totally different God. “We also are men,
of like nature with you,” insisted Paul, “and we bring you good news, that you
should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the
earth and the sea and all that is in them.”[5]
Yet here, in
the exhaustion of having survived a storm, in the frustration of a snake bite, of simply trying to get warm by
the fire because he was tired, so tired, we have no moment of Paul
responding—did he not know what the others thought of him? Or after so much work, after so many times of
narrowly escaping “justice,” did he appreciate, just the smallest bit, being
held in such esteem? Did he, too, have a glimmer of a moment when he was
impressed with himself for having survived the non-venomous snake? I do not know; perhaps I will ask him, one
day, but just as we humans are not great at taking on the task of bringing
about justice, we humans are not great at remembering our own humility in the
face of the unknowable divine.
Today is
Transfiguration Sunday in the Church calendar, the day that marks the moment of
Jesus’ transformation on a mountaintop in conversation with Moses and
Elijah. The Gospel of Mark records it
like this:
2 Six
days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a
high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and
his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach
them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with
Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Then Peter
said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three
dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6 He
did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 Then
a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my
Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8 Suddenly
when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
9 As they
were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they
had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. (Mark 9:2-9, NRSV)
Peter did not know what to say, but
my if he wasn’t going to give it a go anyway in true Petrine fashion. “Let us make dwellings for You here, Lord;
let us enshrine this moment, calcifying the miracle of this trio in this place,
making sure that all that is holy is kept in a way that we can understand, we
can find in one place.”
Do you hear the echoes of the ones
who elevated Paul to godhood? Let us
take that which we do not understand and make it accessible, make it
containable, make it small. We
want so badly for the divine to be a man who stands in front of us and tosses snakes
into the fire; for the holy to be a trio of shrines we can visit annually and
leave when it is too much; for God to live in a sanctuary where we have the
same seat we’ve had for years; for justice to be a country that does not acknowledge
its sickened core so that the flag can keep on waving.
The thing about the impeachment
trial, about Paul’s encounter with the islanders of Malta, about the
transfiguration of Jesus, is that each is an attempt to take something beyond
our grasp and make it ours. It is an
oh-so-human desire—the universe is, after all, a very big place, and we want to
be able to hold some of it, name some of it, control some of it. If we acquit a former president, we can tell
ourselves that we will move on and learn from our mistakes and we will not have
to deal with the systemic rot that eats away at our governance structure. If we say that the man who seemingly cheated
death is a god, we can tell ourselves that the gods look like us and nothing
more, that the Incarnation was miraculous because it was human—that maybe
we ourselves could get to be godlike. If
we say that the wonder of a transformation can be kept in shrines, we can tell
ourselves that God’s magnificence is chartable, describable, and only briefly
overwhelming.
None of these, however, is
faithful. None of these is healthy. All of these forget that we do not in any way
have a handle on justice, on holiness, on wonder, on salvation, on Incarnation,
on God because we are not in control of any of those. We are invited along for the ride but we are not
steering the car. God moves in ways not
only that we can’t see but that we don’t even have language for
sometimes and we cannot put God into a box, no matter how hard we try and oh,
do we try! We cannot put justice into a
snake’s body and walk away from the everyday decision that we have to make to
be creators of justice in an unjust world.
We cannot put transformation into a memorial that is so beautifully kept
up and walk away from the magnificent truth that God is everywhere at all times
in all things, beckoning us to walk alongside in new adventures we have not yet
dreamed. We cannot put innocence into a
PR spin and walk away from the reality that our actions have consequences and
we who are decidedly not gods must listen for the God Who invites us to more
than what is easy, more than what makes us comfortable.
Paul is declared a god and then goes
on to heal the person who gives him a place to sleep because healing is what
God invites him to do, whether or not it is what Paul had planned to do on this
random island. But God says you are here and you can do the work of the Kingdom
in this moment. And Paul does.
Jesus sends Moses and Elijah back
because Jesus is not done with the work ahead of Him and knows that there are
people who still need Him at the bottom of the mountain, even if He, too, may
have wanted to stay there in the glory of His Father. Our nation will limp
forward with the help of those brave enough and honorable enough to call
violence violence and declare unequivocally that it is wrong because the work
ahead of us must continue in honor of the work behind us.
To what are you being invited,
faithful sibling? In the vastness of the
justice to which we are called, the worship to which we are called, the ways in
which God is refusing boxes and superstitions and shrines, how is the Spirit
saying to you come, be transformed into a person of justice and mercy, not a
god but a beloved creation of wonder and pragmatism? How are you willing to embrace the wonder and
the frustration that we cannot tell God how to do God’s job but can only
faithfully serve in ours?
May we have the courage to do what is
right, the humility to ask for guidance on what that is, and the strength to follow
God’s invitation to wholeness in ourselves and for each other. Amen.
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