True Freedom.

John 8:31-59.   (July 26, 2015)

I.

The Lord’s encounter with the authorities at the Sukkoth festival in Jerusalem continues.  At the end of the previous section we heard that many believed in him.  Now Jesus encourages them to continue in his word, which is to say that they should keep not only following his teachings but remember that he is the Word of God by whom the whole universe was created.  Keeping his word must also mean remaining in partnership and harmony with creation itself.  This is the way to be disciples.  God’s Word is not contrary to or distinct from nature; when we follow God’s Word we are putting ourselves in tune with everything that is.  This is true freedom, he says.  To know the truth, that is, to know and participate in what is real, is to be truly free.

But his listeners are taken aback by this… they don’t get it.  Jesus’ inference is that they were not free before, so they question him on this.  “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.  What do you mean my saying, ‘You will be made free’?”    

This is a question many of us may ask as well.  We have the idea that we are free.  As Americans especially we celebrate our freedoms.  Freedom is a core ideological principle for us.  We could say with Jesus’ hearers as well that we are not anyone’s slaves.  Why would Jesus imply that we were slaves before we chose to follow him?  Indeed, we were free enough to make a decision to be Christians, weren’t we?

Jesus continues with his characteristic bluntness.  He is not about telling people what they want to hear.  “If you commit sin you’re not free,” he says.  Simple as that.  “Your freedom is a lie as long as you remain separated from God.”  

Remember that this day began in the Temple with that incident with the woman caught in adultery, and Jesus defused that situation by inviting anyone who was sinless to administer her death sentence.  No one threw a single stone at her, which was an indication that they all knew they were not sinless.  Now here he is saying that if you’re not sinless you’re not free.  To be truly free is to be sinless.

We think freedom is doing what we want.  But Jesus says this is not the case.  If we do what we want we are only acting out of our slavery to our own ego-centric desires, most of which have been thoroughly conditioned and determined, channeled, focused, and oriented, by the collection of blind egos we call society and its rulers.  Basing our behavior on this is inherently sinful because it is outside of and against God’s will.  

When we do what we want (or what we think we want) we are seeing ourselves as independent agents operating over-against other separate entities.  We treat the world as if it were something we are distinct from and may act upon objectively.  We see ourselves in competition with others.  We see the world as a collection of inanimate objects we may dispose of as we please.

This way of seeing things is sinful and false, and everything we do according to this mindset is also sinful and false.  It is not freedom.  It is the most severe form of bondage imaginable made even more powerful by the fact that we don’t see it.  We think we’re free.

II.

Jesus goes on to say that because we’re actually enslaved to sin, which is to say that we are addicted to the delusion of our self-centered independence and freedom, we do not have a legitimate place in God’s household, which is God’s creation and Kingdom.  

In a sense, we are like the older son in Jesus’ great parable from Luke 15 about the two sons.  He freely lives in the father’s house, but in his mind he is a slave.  In his mind he is earning the father’s favor through hard work, when in truth everything that belongs to the father belongs as well to him.  But he can’t see this.  He thinks he has freely chosen to be good, responsible, loyal, and hardworking, and that he will get something for it.  In reality he is a slave to his own self-serving, self-important, self-righteous ideas.  It is the younger son, the one who wastes the father’s resources and who, after hitting the bottom, returns in deep humility, only seeking work as a slave, who ironically comes to know the true freedom of the father’s love.         

The people claim to be free on the basis of having Abraham as their ancestor.  That’s kind of an avoidance of the issue in which freedom is reduced to an abstraction that has nothing to do with reality.  How does claiming Abraham as an ancestor make someone actually free?  It doesn’t.  

Jesus retorts that we can tell who are the spiritual descendants of Abraham by what they are actually doing in the world right now.  If these people really were spiritual descendants of Abraham they would not be trying to kill the One who comes to fulfill God’s promises to Abraham, Jesus.  If we are truly free we don’t use our freedom to try and kill people who threaten us.

We see this all the time today as well.  People claim to be Christians in the same way Jesus’ questioners claimed to be descendants of Abraham.  But they don’t appear to understand, let alone do, what Jesus commands any more than people back then actually lived the life of trust in God that Abraham exemplified.  Too many who claim to follow Jesus are actually trying to “kill” him in the sense of ignore, silence, reject and suppress his actual teachings and example.

Trusting in Jesus — or Abraham for that matter — is not theoretical and imaginary.  It is not a matter of opinion or genealogy or ideological loyalty or membership in a group or a label we apply to ourselves.  It is a matter of whether we are actually following Jesus by doing the kinds of things he does, or whether we are following another power, exemplified in Jesus’ naming of the devil, the father of lies and murder.  Is our life about love and acceptance and forgiveness and welcoming and peacemaking and nonviolence and lifting up the poor, as is Jesus’ life?  Or is it about fear, security, judgment, condemnation, exclusion, murder, and falsehood?

III.

Jesus says that what actually matters is our relationship to God.  Jesus, exasperated, exclaims: “Because I tell the truth, you don’t believe me.”  That’s because Jesus’ truth doesn’t match their experience of the world as a fearsome, nasty, threatening, exclusionary place.  To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, they “can’t handle the truth!”  But for the opposite reason: the truth Jesus knows is too good, too beautiful, too generous, and too forgiving for them.  

“Which of you convicts me of sin?”  Jesus asks.  People know that his deeds are remarkable and good.  He heals, he provides bread, he makes wine; what’s not to like?  The people who do accuse Jesus of sinning are the authorities who see their own power at risk in Jesus’ breaking of their self-serving laws.  For them, sin equals transgression of their regulations.  For Jesus, though, sin is separation from God.  It is by this reasoning that the authorities are the real sinners since their whole regime is based on threats, coercion, intimidation, condemnation, and punishment.    

Jesus goes on.  “If I tell the truth, why don’t you believe me?  Whoever is from God hears the words of God.  The reason you don’t hear them is that you are not from God.”

In other words, he says that in their current, ego-centric, blind, sleepwalking, false existence, people do not know themselves to be “from God.”  If they were they would resonate with and understand what he is saying.

But Jesus also knows that there is another sense in which they are indeed “from God” because God through the Word made everything and the Word echoes in and through everything, including the material from which the bodies of these people was made.  He knows that God is there in every body, heart, and soul if we will but stop wasting so much of our energy in maintaining and propping up an imaginary false self which we mistake for who we really are and which therefore separates us from God.

He knows this because he is himself that Word through which all things were made and he is therefore himself within everyone.  He is the Son of Man; he is the truly Human One; he shares with us in a common humanity; he is the doorway for each of us to the union with God for which we were created.

They don’t understand or trust him because they are not living out of their own innate divinity but they have rejected that truth and choose to see themselves falsely as small, isolated, individual, limited, helpless, temporary, fragile beings, justified in feeling fearful, angry, and ashamed about everything.

IV.

Jesus then reminds them that what he is saying is not even about him.  “I do not seek my own glory,” he says.  “If I glorify myself my glory is nothing,” he says.  In other words, the historical, mortal Jesus of Nazareth, whose father was Joseph the Carpenter, is not the point.  His opponents can’t see beyond this individual, and neither can many of us.  

But when Jesus says, “It is my Father who glorifies me,” he means that God flows through him into the world in such a way that he now is God’s living, saving Presence.  

Then he says, “Whoever keeps my word will never see death.”  He is God’s living Word, the Source and inspiration for all that is; everything that exists is the condensation or precipitation or crystallization of God’s breath in speaking the universe into existence.  Therefore, keeping Jesus’ word is not just about obeying his commandments; rather, it has to do with finding that living Word within you, finding the true you deep beneath the false you you have diligently and busily constructed your whole life long, locating your most profound and authentic self which God spoke into being at the beginning; it is nothing less than recovering and restoring God’s Presence and life and being within you, and thereby participating in that which holds everything together.

When we are one with everything we cannot see death, for even what we call and fear as death is revealed as just one element of this whole field of being, necessary to the integrity of the whole.  When Jesus will say in chapter 11, “everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”, this is what he means.  Not that this particular, temporary arrangement of matter and energy, our mortal bodies, won’t eventually cease, of course.  But that he reveals to us that who we truly are is way bigger, deeper, higher than that.

So when the Lord finally proclaims “Before Abraham was, I am,” not only he claiming practically flat-out to be God, he is also inviting us who keep his word and follow him to participate with him in that same audacious claim. If we are “in Christ,” which Paul affirms all over the place, and if Christ is all in all, then we are “in” everything.

V.

This means that by keeping Christ’s word I identify with and participate in and in some sense “am” each person, each individual, each tree, each animal, each cloud, and each rock, that God blew into being in the beginning by that Word.  The deepest “I am” in me, in each and all of us, is Jesus Christ, and therefore God.  So when Jesus tells me to take up my cross and follow him he means that in him I am nailed to the cross, giving my life for the life of the world, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the Lamb of God.  In him it is my old, broken, limited, dark, sour and narrow self that is wrecked and my true self that is liberated from my empty tomb to realize the light it always was.

Not only is Jesus claiming to be God; he is claiming that in him each one of us is God as well.  Once again we are reminded of the affirmation by some early saints that “God became human so that humans might become God.”

No wonder that after he says this Jesus has to hide!  The people who knew themselves to be too sinful to stone the woman that very morning, have now lost their reticence about stoning lawbreakers.  They pick up rocks and are about to throw them at Jesus!

Jesus somehow escapes.  And that kind of becomes the story of our existence.  Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is hiding among us, and within us.  Hiding from our violence, our falsehood, our ignorance, our fear.  If we do find him… if we do hear him clearly, too often we kill him.  Which is what happens when the authorities finally do trap him.

But the good news is that he doesn’t and cannot stay dead.  He always remains there at the very core and foundation of who we are in our deepest place.  When we allow our old selves to die with him, we see that his eternal life opens up to us and he invites us to come with him and live forever.  And that is true freedom. 

       

       

Light of the World.

John 8.12-30.  (July 5, 2015)

I.

Part of the Sukkoth festival in Jerusalem was the lighting of four large, high, bright lamps in the main courtyard of the Temple.  Contemporary accounts tell us that these lights could be seen from everywhere in the whole city and even the surrounding countryside.  There were also many smaller lights shared among the people.  It was like a giant candlelight service of spectacular beauty.

So, just like Jesus earlier reinterpreted another part of the festival, the bringing of water from the pool of Siloam up to the Temple, he also builds on this light ritual when he proclaims, “I am the light of the world!  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

He presents again this alternative between our normal existence, which he calls walking in darkness, and the life of his disciples, who walk in the light.  These are two substantively different ways of being in the world.  Walking in darkness means being driven by fear, anger, and shame, resorting to threats and violence in an existence characterized by competition, strife, selfishness, desire, and the need to control.  Discipleship, on the other hand, has to do with knowledge of the truth through the Word of God, when we seek to become nothing so God’s love may flow unobstructedly through us into the world.  We become one with that love and so one with everything made by that love, and we are freed from the prison of our own ego-centric personalities.

But for people who do not see this, it is incomprehensible.  So anyone who talks this way, like Jesus, has to be silenced.  So the Pharisees, the organization of religious authorities most interested in maintaining the Law, attack Jesus.  “You are testifying on your own behalf; your testimony is not valid.”  So they are charging him with what we would call a conflict of interest.  To them, Jesus is self-centered, arrogant, conceited, and blasphemous… not to mention mentally ill.  I mean really, who goes around saying stuff like this?  “I am the light of the world”?  “Eat me and live forever”?  Talk about a megalomaniac!  Everything is all about him!  Who made him God?

  And from the perspective of people dwelling in the darkness they have a point.  Jesus seems crazy, as does anyone who talks about a different consciousness and reality.  It is like trying to describe colors to someone who is color-blind, or music to a deaf person.

You know how when we relate a funny story and the person we’re telling it to doesn’t get it, and we finally just have to say, “Well, I guess you had to be there”?  This is how Jesus responds.  “I know where I have come from and where I am going, but you don’t,” he says.  “You all can only judge by the standards of your limited level of consciousness, in which you have no access or way of understanding what I am talking about.  I do not judge or even care about those standards.”

II.

In other words, Jesus’ life has to be experienced directly.  Just talking about it from outside, supposedly objectively, without being involved in it, is pointless.  He doesn’t judge anyone in that way, he says.  He doesn't place himself above others and evaluate their performance; he doesn't grade people according to how meticulously they keep the law; he doesn’t condemn anyone as if he were their superior, because he knows there are no such hierarchies in human life.  All of us are equals under God and in God.  The only judge and evaluator is God, the eternal Father who sends Jesus Christ into the world.

The truth is not a democracy.  The testimony of one person who can see is more valuable than that of a hundred blind people.  Just as we cannot repeal the laws of physics by majority vote, which some people today actually imagine they can do, neither can we repeal or overturn the truth of God’s saving love revealed in Jesus Christ.  He comes into the world to plug us into the living presence of God.  His testimony is not true because it is corroborated by a multitude of witnesses; his testimony is true because it comports with God, who is Truth itself.  It is corroborated by the whole creation.

Jesus is trying to break us out of our sleepwalking, blind, dark, limited existence.  He is trying to jump start us to another level of consciousness where we see ourselves and our world much more clearly.  But too often this does not happen and we think he is just referring to himself.  So we worship him like he is some kind of religious celebrity, when in reality Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of Man, that is, he is the One who reveals both true divinity and true humanity.  

These come together in him… but they also come together in us.  Jesus shares true humanity with us.  Only in us, our true humanity is obscured, hidden, buried, and forgotten.  But it is still there, deep within.  Jesus wants to awaken us and enlighten us about ourselves, who we truly are as God created us.  His purpose is to show how through the true humanity we share with Jesus we also participate in the true divinity he shares with God.  

This is what the early church means by the rather audacious claim that “God became human so that humans might become God.”  If we don’t get this — and few of us do — then we are just messing around with superficial religion.  We’re just having wonderful, beautiful ceremonies, like this one with the lights at Sukkoth in Jerusalem.  If we do break through to this consciousness, then we are talking about engaging with eternal life in the Spirit.  Then instead of looking at the pretty lights, we become one with the light itself.  We become the light of the world, even as he is the Light of the World.

III. 

The Pharisees then ask, “Where is your father?” apparently imagining that he is talking about his earthly father who may be found somewhere else.  The fact that they can ask this indicates that they do not understand what he is talking about, for the Father to whom he refers is God, who is everywhere, whom Jesus has come into the world to reveal.

Jesus just sighs and says, “If you knew me you would know my Father also.”  Because he is the perfect vessel through whom the Father, God, is revealed.  

This fact is validated by experience.  It is not something we must only take Jesus’ word about.  That is where we have to start, but then his word must become flesh in the sense of being applied and tested in our own experience and actions.  

Jesus continues.  He says, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin.  Where I am going you cannot come.”  It reminds me of the futile ways in which we search for Jesus or God according to the limitations of our own thinking.  Like when we search for “the historical Jesus,” and then find a historical, mortal human, and decide that this invention of our own imagination is the only “real” Jesus.

But to search for Jesus as if he were a historical artifact, an object of our research, a thing we can put under a microscope and observe or pin on a table to dissect, is to miss the point and remain mired in sin, which is to say, caught in separateness, enmity, and violence.  To search for anything in this way is to kill it so that what we find is a corpse, not a living soul, something we have disassembled and left in broken pieces, not something we may have a conversation with.  

That’s why here Jesus is beginning to talk about his cross, when the religious and political authorities will finally catch and kill him, though they will never truly find him.  They will turn him into an object, treat him like a thing to be disposed of, which is the way they treat the whole world anyway.  It is the way the powers and principalities treat creation and people, as objects to be exploited and thrown away.    

There on the cross Christ will be lifted up in the ultimate revelation of God’s truth, condemning and dooming those very authorities that thought they were winning.  That is when he will give his life for the life of the world, when he will take away the sin of the world as the sacrificial Lamb, when he empties himself completely, so that God’s eternal life and peace may emerge in him in his resurrection.  He will draw and unite all things to himself, and his blood, which is his life, will cover and renew the whole creation.

IV.

On his cross the limited and enslaved perceptions of our blind consciousness will be exhausted.  The powers of evil will have done their worst, and that will prove to be not just ineffectual, but counterproductive.  It becomes the means by which God achieves the ultimate victory over sin, death, and evil.  The power of Rome and the authority of the religious elites will be neutralized.

The way of the cross is this experience of self-emptying; it is the way of repentance, that is, acquiring a new mind, the mind of Christ, which is a radically open, generous, receptive, and transparent mind.  The way of the cross means letting go of our old self, our old, limited, constricted consciousness, our old, narrow loyalties and allegiances, our old blindness and fear.  It is a way that the Pharisees and others who are “from below” cannot follow.  They are from this world and their values and habits and memories and hopes are all conditioned by this world, this human-corrupted world of fear and force.  The idea of letting go is inconceivable to them; the notion of taking up a cross is an absurd and ridiculous horror to anyone committed to “working within the system.”  Therefore, they will die in their sin; that is, they will die still languishing in the darkness of their own blindness, still holding on to their limited, unconscious existence as if it is the only life possible.

Jesus offers life.  But the life he offers requires us to see the tombs in which we have been subsisting destroyed.  He means the tombs in our heads, which are the ideas and beliefs by which we function, and he means the tombs in our world which are the institutions and relationships we have generated to govern our common life.  It all has to go, he says.  Those tombs need to be declared empty.  They don’t contain us.  We are somewhere else now.  We will see him act out this story on our behalf in chapter 20.

So we have to ask ourselves, Can we follow him?  Can we go where he is going?  The text says that “as he was saying these things, many believed in him.”  Many who were listening that day placed their trust in him, which must mean that they joined his movement and committed themselves to living like him, according to his commandments.  According to his love.  

Here is something worth dying for.  That is what he was asking, let there be no doubt.  Jesus is calling us to die with him.  This does not necessarily mean actually having our physical body killed, though of course that does happen.  But the people, some of them anyway, realize that here is an opening, a connection, an interface with God.  Here is something more profound and functional than the usual things teachers were saying, which was Keep the Law!  It’s not that Jesus was counseling that they break the Law.  But he was giving them access to the One who gave the Law in the first place.

V,

Jesus Christ is the Light of the world.  It is only when we live according to his teaching and example that we are able to see what is truly out there.  He illuminates the world beyond our closed-minded blindness and the darkness of our preconceptions, beyond our fear and anxiety.  He shows us, and more importantly, connects us and engages us and immerses us in, what is true and real.

Because we have come to see everything and everyone through the love of God revealed in Jesus, we are able to give up our old limited ways of thinking and acting, and live instead according to the forgiveness, liberation, healing, peace, goodness, and justice we know in him.  Because in trusting him, we are trusting in the God who makes and restores and renews and redeems all things.

In him our own true humanity has come to us revealing in our own souls the presence and love of God.

+++++++     

       

  

"Without Sin."

John 8:1-11.  (June 28, 2015)

I.

The Sukkoth holiday is winding down.  It is the morning of the last day, which started the evening before.  After walking into the city from the Mount of Olives, where he was staying, Jesus sits down to teach in the Temple.  As he is talking he hears a commotion approaching, as some religious authorities are forcibly dragging and pushing a woman through the crowd.  When they finally get to where he is they make her stand in front of him like a convict before a judge, and inform him, “This woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.  Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such a woman.  Now what do you say?”

We are told by the narrator that this is a test because they wanted to bring some new charge against him.  They expected him to let the woman off, thereby breaking the letter of the Law, thereby showing himself to be soft on crime, an excuser of immorality, going against the Bible, unpatriotic, and undermining the very foundation of the society: the family.  All things that Jesus and his followers have been accused of throughout history.

There is of course so much wrong with this picture that Jesus is probably rolling his eyes with frustration.  For instance, it takes two people to commit adultery, and if this woman really was caught “in the very act,” the other party must have been present at the arrest.  And yet he is not dragged here with her, even though the Law of Moses applied to him as well.  So right from the start we have this hypocritical, self-serving, unjust, selective enforcement of the Law.

The woman is a classic scapegoat.  She’s about to be basically lynched by an angry mob as a sacrifice for their sins.  She is going to be unconsciously used to unify the community, as everyone goes against her.  Then they can feel they have expunged some great evil and done God’s will, and thus feel good about themselves because they kept the rules of the Bible literally and preserved the nation from impurity.  They will focus their rage and fear on her with every rock they hurl at her, and they will go home justified and satisfied that their religion and nation and families have been saved.

This is the way that blind, fearful, shallow, and ignorant communities had kept the peace and constructed social unity for centuries.  To avoid the chaos of disorder and to preserve the fragile stability of the status quo, periodically some weak soul has to be almost randomly selected from the group, made into a common and public enemy, vilified, scorned, rejected, and slaughtered.  And this kind of thing still happens even in our hyper-civilized culture.

II.

One of the most amazing and powerful things about the Bible is the way it consistently speaks from the point of view of the victim.  The obvious example is Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant passage.  Throughout the Psalms we hear these laments of people who have been basically ganged-up on, even by their friends.  Jesus knows that whatever sin this woman committed, at this point God is with her, the suffering one, not the angry mob and the smug authorities.

So the woman is standing in front of him, the crowd is jeering and calling for blood, the police and their bosses are watching, ready to make the arrest.  And Jesus starts writing on the ground, of all things.

We know from historical sources that when Roman judges delivered a sentence, they would first write it down, then they would read aloud what they had just written.  It is possible that Jesus is mocking the judicial system by pretending to pompously write down the sentence, apparently playing along with the self-righteous hypocrisy exploding all around him.

The authorities keep pestering him, badgering him, taunting him to render his opinion.  “O famous rabbi, expert on the Law, are you going to go along with what your ‘Father’ gave us in the Bible?  Or are you smarter than God?  Is your word more authoritative than your ‘Father’s’?  You who like to dismiss the Law by saying, ‘the Law says this but I say to you now…’?  Are you going to be faithful to Scripture or overturn it with your own opinion?  What’s it going to be, O great Messiah?”

They think they have Jesus in a no-win situation because if he rules in the woman’s favor he rejects the plain sense of the Bible, and if he rules against her he shows he is no better than they are, and in effect one of them.  If they don’t get to stone her, their religious freedom is infringed!  Either way he loses.

Jesus stands up.  Everyone goes quiet.  Then he says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  Then he goes back to writing on the ground.  The place remains silent as these words sink in.

It is as if he says, “Okay.  We all know the Law.  We all know what’s supposed to happen here.  We have to expunge the abomination from our midst.  Let the stoning begin!  But.  Let the first righteous administrator of divine justice be himself or herself pure and sinless.  For it would be hypocrisy, would it not, for someone to condemn this woman when they have done similar things themselves and avoided detection and punishment?  Adultery is certainly a sin.  It’s prohibited in one of the Ten Commandments.  I am assuming that anyone qualified to punish this sin, would also have kept those Commandments perfectly.  So, if you never took the Lord’s name in vain, never violated the Sabbath, never coveted something that didn’t belong to you, never stole, and so on, be my guest.  Grab a rock and get to work.  But if you were to punish this one when you have sins on your own head, would that not draw down God’s judgment on you even more?”

III.

“Are we alive because we have kept God’s Law so perfectly?  Is our life a reward for perfect obedience?  Or is it by God’s grace and forgiveness, God’s infinite patience and forbearance, God’s overlooking our sins, that we yet live?  If we carried out the Law to the letter, with the ruthlessness you wish to apply to this woman, which one of you would survive?”

“So by all means, go get a rock.  But remember that you are no less a sinner than this woman, and next time it could be you they’re ready to stone.”

And one by one, beginning with the older folks, the people remember that they have other things to do today, and wander away.  No one throws a single rock.  

The authorities would be fuming at this point.  Heck, what is this world coming to if only perfect people are qualified to enforce the laws?  It is a recipe for chaos!  Anarchy!  A total breakdown of the social order!  But not even they manage to toss a stone in the woman’s direction.  That would be beneath them anyway; if some of the blood got on them they’d have to go through this whole purification thing, with which they could not be bothered.…

The lynch mob quietly dissipates.  Jesus, who is still crouched or kneeling down, intently writing on the ground, is left alone with the woman, who remains standing there.  She still stands before her judge, who is this scruffy guy scribbling on the pavement.

Jesus stands up and looks around.  “Where’d everybody go?” he says. as if he didn’t know what was going on.  “Has no one condemned you?” he asks her.

She shakes her head.  “No one, Lord,” she says.

“Me neither,” says Jesus.  “Go on your way, and from now on don’t sin again.”  The Lord does not downplay or ignore her wrongdoing.  He doesn’t excuse or celebrate adultery, which is actually a very violent and destructive thing to the soul and to relationships.  He just knows that violence never works.  He knows that only grace and forgiveness heal violence and free people from sin.

I don’t think this woman did sin again.  For one thing, everyone else had left.  She is the only one who could tell the story.  Who knows that she didn’t tell it as a member of the early church?  Who knows that this incredible, miraculous grace and forgiveness does not completely transform her life?  There is a reason why the church cherishes this story so profoundly.  Too many of us have been there, rejected by others, standing with our crimes before the Judge, who then says, “Neither do I condemn you.  Go on your way.  And don’t sin again.”  Too many of us have been found and released by the saving love of God.

IV.

When Jesus says, “Don’t sin again,” he means turn away from the alienation and violence, the judgment and condemnation, the fear and the anger, that lead us into disastrous actions like adultery, or any of the other things rightly prohibited in the Commandments.  Jesus says that if we want to get rid of these bad practices that are killing us, the only way is through forgiveness, patience, acceptance, and love.

Is it a ruthless lowering of the boom on sinners that keeps society together?  That is the argument for harsh and selective enforcement of our laws today.  Violence and retribution are the only things those criminals understand! we say.  And when we apply such remedies we become just as much sinners ourselves.  Because violence and retribution are the only things any of us understand, when we are under the sway of evil.  

You know, people were lynched in this country until only about 50 years ago.  If you want to learn about the application of hell in human existence, read some accounts of lynchings.

We have not rid ourselves of this scapegoating impulse.  We have merely domesticated, systematized, and rationalized it.  Society still relies on terror, choosing some nearly at random to serve as human sacrifices, thereby assuaging our guilt, stoking our fear and anger, pumping up our self-righteousness, and manufacturing a counterfeit unity.

We do this through allowing any white male idiot to have a gun, and encouraging them with this idiotic and cowardly ideology of self-defense.  Thousands of Americans die from gun violence every year.  They are part of our human sacrifice.  

And we do it through locking up in prison a far higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world.  Most of the incarcerated have committed non-violent crimes, or no crime at all and were forced into a plea bargain, and the majority of them happen to come from minority communities.  

In these two ways and others we keep the blood of human sacrifice flowing.  This is how we affirm our worship of Baal and Moloch and whatever other evil demon we have decided to let rule in our consciousness.  This is what we choose to do with our religious freedom.  

V.

Jesus is saying that it doesn’t have to be this way.  It may be the way human societies have coped for 10,000 years.  But he comes to finally abolish human sacrifice, and all sacrifice, by himself becoming the final sacrifice, in which God’s live is given for the life of the world.  In this way he takes away sins and restores us to our true, created, blessed, and good relationship with God, each other, and ourselves.  For it is not by selecting one person or group to suffer our unified violence that human community is sustained, it is by our mutual, humble, grateful, and joyful acceptance together of God’s saving, forgiving, redeeming, and liberating grace.  It is by mutual confession of our own brokenness that we find ourselves healed together and bound to each other and to God.

That is what the gathering of disciples is supposed to be about.  It is the place where we tell each other what Jesus tells this woman:  “Neither do I condemn you.  Go on your way, and do not sin again.”  

In other words, God is not about condemnation, and neither are we.   None of us is sinless; we have done horrible things.  But we are forgiven together.  God has given us new life and a new future.  In Jesu Christ, God has shown us the way of peace and love.  Therefore, do not react out of fear or shame or anger anymore.  You are forgiven.  You are free.  You are loved.

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