Diversity – 4 gospels and the Reformation wars
Common time
September 15, 2019
For Beloved Community Mennonite Church
©Vernon K. Rempel, 2019
Bible reading from the Revised Common Lectionary:
Luke 15:1-10 NRSV
All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
So he told them this parable: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, `Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’
Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, `Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’
Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Luke’s gospel
Our assigned lectionary reading for today begins:
“All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus.“
That is a resonant note for sure.
Tax collectors were hated servants of the Roman Empire, who were seen to be acting against their own people.
Sinners were people who for one reason or another had fallen out of compliance and favor with good society. In some cases this was because they were poor and could not keep up with the temple taxes on top of their Roman taxes – and you better pay the Romans or else. (Journey Towards Holiness, Alan Kreider) This was probably usually a burden placed on men.
Women got in trouble for other things, like having too many husbands – the woman at the well – or being caught in adultery. Women seemed to be the focus of such sin. Apparently the phrase “It takes two to tango” was not well-accepted at that time.
Out of the four gospels, in Luke, Jesus is the friend of the outcasts, a person of compassion. Jesus’ life is filled with connections with those ruled out by the religious leaders and by the society of the day.
If we look at the four gospels side by side, Luke is the only one with who records this statement about tax collectors and sinners, and then follows it with a unique pair of stories, about the woman with the lost coin and the prodigal son, two powerful stories of loss and forgiveness. Luke’s gospel especially fits the Donald Kraybill title “The Upside-down Kingdom.”
That’s Luke. One thing to notice: Jesus’ friends in Luke are very diverse.
Another thing, the four gospels are very diverse from each other. Our reading for today is unique to Luke, except for one little bit in Matthew that about the hundred sheep.
The social diversity in Luke is echoed in the diversity among the gospels. One might hope Christians would learn something from this embrace of difference. But we often have not. Instead, we have demeaned each other and even gone to war.
War after the Reformation
The dogs of war
Wars of neighbor against neighbor are perhaps the most disturbing, because they run against the very fabric of community. All wars should be completely disturbing, including dropping bombs by remote control drone on “foreign” lands. For a humanization of that process, see the movie Eye in the Sky.
But neighbor against neighbor – that has a visceral immediacy. Think of the Balkans wars that turned Christian against Muslim, or Rwanda with Hutu and Tutsi, or the American Civil war that often turned family members against each other over slavery, or the dirty wars in Latin America with deaths squads arising from neighborhoods at the behest of terror-mongering dictators.
In Christianity, this kind of war played out most fully, perhaps, after the Reformation.
One of my current favorite bumper stickers reads: “It was us; we let the dogs out.” I take it to mean giving dogs freedom, a bunch of bounding, happy dog-park dogs. But of course it could also could have a tragic meaning: “Let slip the dogs of war” as Shakespeare wrote.
After the Reformation, Christians let out the dogs of war among themselves.
(“Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” – Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. Cf. the Pink Floyd song “The dogs of war.”
It is a terrible thing to let out the dogs of war.
Europe became a vast killing ground for thirty years as Lutherans and Catholics battled each other.
The thing is, as Diana Butler Bass notes in her bookThe People’s History of Christianity, (Chapter 12 Ethics: Kingdom Quest: Tolerance), people of that day could not imagine that the church was not one church – that there might be two or more churches. It was not only wrong, it was unimaginable. It was an offense against nature.
““Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” wrote John Donne, lamenting the collapse of an ancient, comforting cosmology….” (Quoted in People’s History…)
So it is all the more astonishing when in the midst of all this killing and drive for uniformity that tolerance broke out from time to time. One of the more amazing stories is of the Church of St. Martin’s in Biberach, Germany.
All over Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor was pursuing break-away Lutherans. But in certain places, he simply ran out of troops. This left an opening.
Biberach was one such town, where there weren’t enough troops to pursue the war. So instead of going to war with each other, in 1548, Protestant and Catholic townspeople created a Simultankirche, a “simultaneous church.”
This was a church that was both Catholic and Protestant. It actually had two naves. So, “from one direction [inside the worship space] the church appears Protestant in its depiction of biblical scenes and the life of Jesus; from the other it appears Roman Catholic, decorated with its panoply of church fathers, saints, popes, and the Virgin Mary.”
They two faiths took turns hour by hour to trade worship times on Sunday morning. And they had to pass each other at the church door and in the street as they came and went. Tolerance and mutual understanding broke out in the midst of the Thirty Years War.
Four gospels
Back to the gospel of Luke and the four gospels.
The Mennonite Bible teacher Linda Oyer points out that there have often been four approaches to diversity among Mennonites and others:
1) Unity without diversity – Here diversity is to be avoided, a plague on the group or system. Usually this involves strong and even violent enforcement. Diversity is a problem to be destroyed.
2) United despite diversity – diversity is minimized – how different are we all really? Don’t we all believe in God, etc. But of course the difference tend to stubbornly remain like an unrepaired leak in the plumbing. Diversity is a problem to be avoided.
3) Unity in diversity – Here diversity is well-managed. Diversity is still a problem, but we can work with it.
4) Unity through diversity – This fourth option is Oyer’s amazing point: What if diversity is not a problem but is essential?
(—Linda Oyer at the SENT conference, 2019 at Beloved Community Mennonite Church)
Here, we need the array, the complication, the plurality, the buffet of life in order to not stray in to narrowness and violence and in order to live fully.
Oyer then notes that this lies at the very root of Christianity, with four gospels. And they are different.
Alan Culpepper in his commentary on Luke gives us a nice summary of the four gospels (p. 4)
Mark’s Jesus invites us to take up the cross and follow him.
Matthew’s Jesus is all about fulfilling the law of Moses and making well-trained disciples.
John’s Jesus is mystical, all about living after, the bread of life, being born from above.
And Luke’s Jesus is about the outcast. Luke above all gospels embraces social differences.
Four diverse stories in our very gospels.
This was controversial from the beginning.
Marcion tried to get rid of all the other gospels besides Luke.
Both Irenaeus and Tertullian had to fight to keep all four.
(Culpepper, p. 5)
Over the centuries, there have been many attempts to harmonize all four gospels, to get rid of this unsightly diversity.
But Oyer says these differences are essential. It’s not all you or me or them. It’s all of us. We’re all in this together.
Elizabeth Warren sounded this note a bit in the Democratic debate, I thought, when she said to deal with terrorism we need all our allies from all around the world, and economic and social responses in addition to whatever ever we do with our military. Not just the military and not just us alone.
Diversity is of course a challenge. I will have to deal with the fact that I prefer tamales and you prefer raw fish or for me Buddha and for you Mohammad. But as with the four gospels, diversity gives us so much more than just the sterile simplistic unity of just my way or just our way.
The Lutheran and Catholic church in Biberach was something of a miracle.
Having four very different gospels about Jesus is something of a miracle.
May we also be miraculous.
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