Gotcha Game

Sermon 27c  The Gotcha Game

November is a month we associate with those who have died.  The hay is rolled up, the tobacco hangs in the barns, the flowers have wilted, the leaves are dropping, and the grass has stopped growing.  The freshness of spring and the hot summer are distant memories.  Yet amid these signs of death, we look with hope for the next cycle of nature when it will all begin again.  In a few short months we will be celebrating the resurrection of Jesus at Easter.

Today’s scripture readings speak of our resurrection hopes.  Psalm 17 is a gut wrenching lament of someone, maybe a childless woman.   Those around her who might include women friends play a deadly game of Gotcha.  You know that game. They question her innocence, her purity, her value and worth, and they set on her like a pack of hungry lions.  So beset is she that she literally feels that she is in hell, or sheol as the OT calls it. She is uncommonly strong, even valiant and she never looses her self or her hope.  Her last words stun us as she prays to God.

But at my vindication I shall see your face; *

when I awake, I shall be satisfied, beholding

your likeness.

When Jesus enters the temple in today’s Gospel, he becomes the target of a deadly game of Gotcha too.  These sad Sadducees come to trap and snare our Lord.  You remember how they once came with their loaded questions about taxes to Caesar.  But Jesus answered their question with question.  He has no illusions about the final outcome of this game of theological ping-pong.  The cross was always there on the horizon and it got closer and closer.  Now the Sadducees, come with a new Gotcha ploy that ironically enough turned on a belief they rejected—the resurrection of the dead.  This is how they play their game.  They ask Jesus about a childless woman who was wife to seven brothers.  When one dies, she marries his brother.  When he dies, she marries another brother, and so on, one after another.  I imagine our Sadducees pausing dramatically at the end of the long winded question, baring their teeth and ready to pounce like another pack of lions. In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?   But Jesus answers calmly.  The resurrection, will not be about “having” wives, it won’t be about having anybody.  Resurrection will be about being children and children have only one purpose, one real job—to become the people God made them to be.  Jesus even adds testimony from Moses, who in the presence of the burning bush confessed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the living, to whom all of them are alive.  That’s who God is, Jesus says, the God in whom and for whom death has lost its sting forever. Jesus won this round of the Gotcha game, but for the other jealous losers it was not over.  They took the game to the Upper Room, the Garden of Gethsemane, the gathering of the Sanhedrin, to Pilate, and finally to Golgotha.  The battle of words started in the temple ends up in smacks, beatings, scourging, thorns driven into the skull, and finally the cross where the dark side of religion slugged it our with Jesus in a battle of good and evil on which hung the destiny of the world.  Job and Handel sang the results so well, “I know my redeemer liveth,” for redeeming love did win that cosmic battle.  The resurrection of Jesus is the living and true cornerstone upon which this Church is built.  But sadly, so sadly the Gotcha game still plays on in our Church as one Christian condemns another as heretic, as one Christian sends hate mail to another, and whenever this tragic game is played, Christ is crucified again and his church suffers a mortal blow. 

November is a month we remember the dead.  We put flowers on their tombs and we hallow their memories.  I remember, my friend, my mentor, Aelred.  I had just been a loser in the Gotcha game and Aelred quoted from a 5^th century bishop as only Aelred could do—I mean that literally Aelred was the only one in the world who knew and remembered such words.  These were the words of Philoxenus quoted by Aelred;

Christians ought not to judge each other, because God judges us much more leniently than human beings are able to do.

 These words bowled me over.  There were exactly what I needed to hear.  They spoke to my heart of a God whose kindness and love far outweighed any divine interest in my inadequacies, a redeemer that liveth.  They taught me that I ought not be intimidated even by religious people who are judgmental for their judgmentalism has nothing of God in it, but is part of that dark side of religion.  If someone wants to play Gotcha in the Church, let him go ahead, let him revel in the power to accuse, divide and destroy.  He will win, but he only a hollow, temporary victory.  And when he has played the fracturing game to the hilt, the hoped for joy of victory will turn into guilt for sisters and brothers that have been lost. We need to remember that day in the temple when Jesus delivered us from Gotcha to glorious freedom as children, the children of the resurrection, whose only job is to become the people God made us to be.