March 30, 2020 (lectionary texts for today)
Susanna o won’t you cry for me … in the unused-by-Protestants passages of Daniel her story is told. She was lusted after, refused the advances of the old men and then finally was absolved. In that absolution the old men were condemned and killed. “Innocent blood was spared that day,” the story goes.
And in Psalm 23, read of Susanna’s night of dread, after SHE had been convicted, before she was touched with the forgiveness of the court. “Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.”
“You, O Lord, you alone are with me. For thou art with me. Your rod and staff comfort me, they give me courage.”
I think Susanna’s prayers were heard, then messenger angels whispered of her innocence into the ears of the young boy Daniel. His youth, his sincerity, his skein to catch the elders in their lies quickly drew Susanna from their web and entrapped the elders themselves.
But innocent blood? Who, on earth my Lord, is innocent?
Jesus cries out above the lifted faces, “Let him among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.””
Jesus sits on the hill, seems to be waiting for the world to come to him. And it does. A crowd of growling, crabbing creatures, mostly old, mostly men, pushing a young beautiful unwashed woman in front of them. They are righteous, she is not. They are unaccused, she is not. They are privileged, she is not. She chose to have sex with men for money, they did not.
Now in righteous chronos time, she is condemned by their courts. The kangaroos have cornered her, they have met and called her unto death.
Jesus looks at them all with little obvious interest. But his eyes belie that calm on his face, and I can see his muscles tense beneath his shirt. The creatures shout their accusations at him, asking for his agreement. He looks away, he looks down, he begins to write words in the dirt beneath all their feet. Oh yes, to dust they will return. There is no one worthy, not even one. The sins of fathers are visited upon generation after generation.
But we are not alone here. As Melissa said Sunday at West Side during their online church, “God does not promise us that we will not suffer. He does promise that we will never suffer alone!”
We are not alone, young lady on the hill. You are accompanied, you are kept covered, you are held close, you are loved. Let me just say a few words, Jesus says to himself. And he lets those old accusers have it!
Such a simple thing. “Let the one among you who is without sin stand up. Stand out. Let that one cast the first stone.”
Innocent blood was spared that day.
But still, who among us is innocent? Should we throw stones at each other? No. Should we release each other from guilt? No. Should we drown each other’s fault in faulty praise? No.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. James Agee’s book title, penned in horror and sadness and sarcasm, comes from Ecclesiasticus 44:1. The passage is subtitled “A Hymn in Honor of Our Ancestors.”
But perhaps only some of them.
Verses 8 and 9: Some of them have left behind a name, so that others declare their praise. But of others there is no memory; they have perished as though they had never exited; they have become as they had never been born, they and their children after them.
This passage might have been written by a member of the Southern Gentry, perhaps a decade or so after the Civil War in the midst of radical Reconstruction. Or not. Of course it was written long before, by others in earth’s long line of disenfranchised peoples.
But Agee took his cue from those around the gentry, and wrote only of the broken, often angry, poor white sharecroppers, in what Paul Theroux (quoting a Greensboro historian) calls an “incantatory” almost poetic voice. They too were rarely remembered, they and their children after them.
Agee’s book, by the way, was unrecognized in his lifetime and he died of a heart attack at age 45, thinking himself a failure. Later others came and took up their pens, writing a book about the same families in the same county of the same state of Alabama. Their title? And Their Children After Them. Their book, though perhaps undeserving according to Theroux’s historian, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990.
I just have to say again, who among us is innocent? My spiritual director might sometimes tire of hearing me say again and again that I don’t do enough, that I … don’t do enough. My sins are rampant, mostly of omission, and they rear up their crowing calculating condemning heads and cry their … scream their … curses. You are NOT innocent. Don’t think you are.
Still, in effect it seems to me, I do nothing. Nothing about me smells sweet, nothing tastes umami, nothing looks pure. It is not pure, the “me” I think of often but do nothing about.
Jesus frees me, lets me know on the hillside with the woman that I can step up and join her. I have long ago left the crowd of accusers, but now I can come from hiding, descend from my secret tree and join her. We both are sinners, and we both are free. In a moment, at last, I stop accusing myself.
Cover me, Jesus. Your cover will be easy, your cover will be light, and you only you Jesus can carry me out of my fear and into the lives of people who like me also are allowed to be free. This is your gift to us all.
The trick, David, is to let this moment of freedom carry you. It fades quickly, into your old ways of holding yourself back, holding yourself together. You are NOT holding yourself together when you hold yourself back. You are just, really, holding ME back. You have let me come to you. Not let me stay.
God, I am afraid of being one of those ancestors, those unpraised famous men. Certainly of being one of their children after them. All these generations that have gone on for so many centuries, sinners in the hands of an angry God. Sinners, OK, in the hands of a loving God. But sinners still. And unremembered still.
You want to be remembered, do you? By whom? By more of the men and women you have so little trouble separating yourself from? No. You’re right. You are my children, you are separate and unique, and you have all sinned and fallen short of my glory. You will continue to do that. Why do you need to be different? Just let yourself be who you were made to be, and relax into my rest, my arms, my touch, my forgiveness, my sweet love.
Thank you for these conversations, God. These prayers. Read, listen, write. Read, listen, write, pray.
Along all these quiet roads, showing me the way home.
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