Actually Thinking About the Sermon Before Friday Afternoon...

We're in the middle of the church-induced craziness known as Vacation Bible School this week, so there isn't a lot of extra time to think, but a colleague and I were visiting about the Sunday texts this morning and I've actually had some coherent sermon thoughts. And it's only Tuesday!

Everybody loves the story of David and Bathsheba. It has all the things you want from good reading (not to mention a soap opera) - intrigue, betrayal, sex, power, and the twist at the end. It's fun to preach on, because you can play around with the whole idea of "biblical family values." This is a phrase which, when used, causes me to think that the speaker has never actually read the bible. Most biblical families are effed up. (That line won't preach; don't worry, I won't try.)

And the way Nathan stings David! Great stuff. Speaking truth to power - don't we all wish we could do the same, at one point or another?

Then this great story is paired with the is-she-or-isn't-she-Mary-Magdalene passage in Luke (I'll tip my hand; she's not) about sin and forgiveness. Which, in it's own right, has overtones of sensuality, if not strictly sexuality, and certainly of sin.

So you could definitely focus on human sexuality if you're reading these two stories. Heaven knows that my own denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has been completely entranced by such discussions for the last ten years.

Except that it occurs to me that the vast majority of the "gotcha!" stories about morality in both Old and New Testaments are not about sex: they're about money. And heaven also knows that most of us would rather talk about sex than money any day, especially from the pulpit.

I think Jim Wallis once wrote that he cut out of his bible all the passages where Jesus talks about money, and he hardly had anything left. If you tried that exercise with all the passages where Jesus talks about sex, you'd still have tons of decent reading material. What does that tell us? How we treat each other as human beings is certainly important, and sex is part of that. But nothing gets people's ire up as much as someone having an affair. Would we have been half so interested in Bill Clinton's sin if it had been revealed that he didn't tithe? Would Ken Starr have been able to spend forty million dollars dragging that out into the courts?

And what does it say about us that the very prospect of that last suggestion is completely, utterly ridiculous?

These stories are a little bit about sex. But they are mostly about power. And the way Jesus addressed those in power most often was not to talk about their sex lives; it was to talk about whether they were loving the widow and the orphan with their checkbooks.

This could either be the greatest sermon ever, or it could get me fired. Or possibly both, which seems exactly the point.