All the pumpkins, Except the rotten ones
For eleven months I have been celebrating that last year we sold all but the fugliest pumpkins. The load was over 2500 of orange and green and peach and grey gourds; smooth, large, small, gnarly. And it is true that we sold all that we could sell, except the 8 or so fugliest. WELL, but also, as always, we didn’t sell the rotten pumpkins. So while the abundance of the statement it is full of truth, it also steps over what was ready to return to the earth before we sold it. One of the core statements about this tradition and scripture is that all things necessary for salvation are in the Bible. But that does not mean the same thing as all things in the Bible are necessary for salvation.
Our lessons today are full of lament. The 137th psalm is one of the few texts whose context is not obscure. It is art from during (or closely after) the Babylonian Exile. That disaster shaped and colored everything after. In the face of wretched violent relocation, in the experience of the decimation of world view and homeland, they wept, and they sang, they made art. Our psalm is honest to God about the pain of anger and suffering and death, while it also harbors hope beyond the terrible. It is earnest prayer, exactly what is meant by a long loving look at the real. A prayer for ourselves and our fury; for victims and those in captivity, wherever, and whatever, that may be. The most wretched response to evil is to feel nothing at all. Anger and despair do not disappear because we ignore them. To remember the evil that has been done to you, or on your behalf, is to be on the side of God’s mercy. Faithfulness is not a lollypop to cover the bitter taste, faithfulness is a coach that leans honestly into the lament.
Jesus isn’t offering us a parable story, but an analogy. His point is true – that as someone who is trying to be a follower of Jesus, to not live into the duties as sketched, is as if a farmer did not farm. But the words are rotten. I want to just swap out slave for servant or serf, but there is no ambiguity in the Greek. I want to not feel shame and pain and create some distance. Slavery was a normative practice throughout the conglomerate continents of Asia and Europe and Africa for over a thousand years on each side of Jesus’ incarnation. In his context slavery wasn’t always lifetime. It wasn’t based on race. Yet it was still common across most of the regions around the Mediterranean. Jesus is using a wholly normative analogy with a fact of life that few voices protested loudly at the time. But that doesn’t excuse it. There is a strong current in the analogy that emphasizes the whoa of God’s loving grace that it would rescue such lowly sinful persons. Yet still, some pumpkins have begun to rot.
The truth of the Atlantic Slave trade is a terror that erodes the innocence of the word slave. This is a blood-soaked foundation, shaping everything that happened next. It is present in stone and security and expectations, even if your belongingness here is rather new. As disciples of Jesus, we have a duty to learn the layers of the story, to hear the journeys of greed and tears that still flow. Faithfulness is not a lollypop to cover the bitter taste, faithfulness is a coach that leans honestly into the lament.
All things necessary are in scripture. Challenging duty and amazing grace, yes. Do we hear the ultimate judgment against ignorant dehumanization even within the text, yes. Learning the contexts and complexities of the Bible, helps us feel the fruit of the Spirit. Some of the words and norms that are this analogy, are the rotten pumpkins that we don’t sell. Those words are exactly the words whose impact is transformed by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. You can hold fast to a true and deep and orthodox faith, and ask smart questions even to Jesus’ face, like the woman asking about dogs and crumbs. He does not need a blind agreement. What he desires us what he plants in our hearts. It is faith, even just a little like a mustard seed. It is a digging deep and questioning in love, a wholehearted faith in Jesus our shepherd. Which sometimes follows him beyond even his Nazarene expectations. We are called to feel the feels intelligently, we are to lament the pain and/or the sins. And we are to approach the text of scripture, in which is all that is necessary for salvation, as a library, and to enter with the heart and soul and brain Jesus planted in you. We will sell all but maybe the fuggliest gourds this year. And we won’t sell rotten pumpkins.