(opening sermon in the series Lessons in the Beginning)
Texts on Sunday, July 17, 2005
Readings: Genesis 27: 1-38 James 4: 13-17
“Anyone who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin.”
What is the right thing to do? How do you know? In 1932, a thirty-one year old physicist won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics. His name is best known for the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” which established his discovery that it is not possible to know precisely both the location and the speed of anything that moves in the subatomic world. But this morning, I am interested in another principle of uncertainty surrounding Werner Heisenberg. In 1939, at age 38, this Nobel laureate “chose to remain in Nazi Germany while many of his colleagues fled the country,” as an encyclopedia article puts it. He became “the leader of Germany’s atomic research team, despite his opposition to Nazi policies . . . but the team failed to develop nuclear weapons.”(1) At least one biographer has explored the evidence for the possibility that Heisenberg stayed in Germany to head up the atomic bomb research so that he could bog down the project in unnecessary detail and keep such a weapon from the hands of Hitler. In other words, the argument goes, he sacrificed his intellectual skill, his passion for knowledge, and his reputation, and put his life on the line as well, in order to try to do nothing from a position of leadership. Let us assume he did make all these choices. Was that the right thing to do?
The substance of history and our love of heroes make the question sound foolish. But consider his decisions in “real time.” In 1939, one day, he lied. Not once, but every day. He betrayed his nation into defeat. Are lying and treason good? Who could say No in this instance? Therefore, evil and good are not absolutes. They are more like frames we place around sections of a huge painting called existence. If Heisenberg had placed his “good” frame around Germany only, as most people do with their homeland, he could never have betrayed it. But according to our parable, he placed his frame around the whole world–around history itself–to see what he should do. There came a certain afternoon, after the Nazis had offered him the job, when, for a limited time only, he could pass through his frame–his idea of good and evil–and enter existence on his terms, win or lose, and do what he might with what neighbors would label lies and treason to re-frame the world.
Now you and I cannot assume that our stories and choices will have so great a significance. But then, neither could Heisenberg. The fact of life is that one does not know what will happen. Commitment to what we think should happen is all we have. The rest is a matter of framing–what we put the good frame around, and what, the evil; and how large the frame is–that is, what we include and exclude from our sight. To frame things, this is moral life.
I heard an interview with a former juror in one of the three cases since 9/11 brought by our government against a supposed terrorist arms dealer in the States. To catch him, we had to supply this nincompoop with both a fake missile and a fake terrorist buyer, since he could find neither on his own. But he took the bait. He was nabbed with the fake missile delivered to his apartment. In the aftermath of 9/11, all but one juror was willing to convict him simply because he had been willing to do the evil, even though he had neither means nor motive to perform it. But one juror is feeling guilty these days. She is still convinced that the United States used entrapment to put this sad 70 year old man in jail for the rest of his life. When, however, the foreman of the jury threatened her, saying she would not see the inside of her home for six months, she folded. Her “good” frame suddenly shrank to the size of her self. As she told the interviewer, her thought was –What do I care about that old man? He was out of the frame, so she lied about her convictions and convicted him instead. Now her lie haunts her. Even though her government says she did the right thing to lie, did she? For a limited time only, her frame of reference was large enough for her vision of American justice, but she chose not to pass through it into time and history. It closed, like a prison door.
Like most of you, I have heard Rebekah’s story since I was little, how she sided with her younger son against the older, and conceived a plot to deceive her husband and get all the goods for her favored boy. “Appalling!” exclaimed one member of the Bible study last Wednesday, after a fresh reading aloud of the famous tale. What shall we make of such a story? We might shake our heads in amazement and some kind of gratitude that God uses scoundrels and bad actions for God’s own good purposes. We need to have our frames adjusted, goes the thought, but God, whose eye sees all, is merciful to use the thread of even our lives in his embroidery. Although this manner of thought may encourage humility, which makes fragrant whatever breathes it, when humility becomes confused with passivity, it spoils. If we take from this story, or from any account of the flawed and the foolish who show up in this narrative of God’s salvation story, only that God can use our failures in his future, then we have from it only an excuse to go on living just as we are. This cannot be in the will of God–not according to the Biblical testimony. What transformation can transpire in a soul persuaded that his main moral tasks are to avoid doing bad things, and to accept that even his sins are not all that serious, because Jesus saves? This is a recipe for a moral catastrophe–not in the consciousness of the individual, but in the society where many are so minded. Again, the problem is the size of the frame of reference for what is good and what is evil. When the frame is hardly bigger than oneself and one’s friends and family, the opportunities for decisive action are few. The sense for being alive dissipates into the average, the boring, the long. One supposes that true happiness lies over there a piece, out of reach. Someday. But in the eye of God, your happiness is here now–for a limited time only.
We forget: Rebekah had labored with a gruesomely painful pregnancy. She thought she would die of the ordeal in her belly, goes the story. She besought her God, who inclined her heart to trust that this war within her was necessary, and, according to the oracle, “that the elder shall serve the younger.” It is God whose word favors Jacob, not Rebekah’s. And let’s not quarrel with the story. We don’t need to believe that all this happened just as it is told. And we don’t need to believe that whoever claims that it was God’s voice that inspired her actions has heard with a sound heart. But if we hope the Bible can be for us an aid in living and dying, as generations have long held, then we must let the story come to us as Godly fiction. So, in this story, since God has spoken, Rebekah’s frame of reference for what is good is God’s frame. No larger frames can be fitted! Come in to her moment.
Isaac is about to die. She has heard the plans for father to bless son, yet she knows–knows!–that it is in the divine will that Jacob father the nation. For a limited time only–what, an hour?–the window is open for action. She can pass through this frame–yes, her idea of good and evil, hers alone, it seems, for even Jacob is afraid of it–and enter existence on her terms, win or lose, and do what she might with what her family and generations will label lies and deceit. Yet: “Anyone who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin.”(James 4.17) On the Bible’s own terms, for Rebekah to stick with conventional moral rules in that moment would have been selfish cowardice and sin.
Shall we then keep telling her story because we like to stand in amazement at the deep-seeing wisdom of Rebekah? Do we excuse her case because she was a sage and a saint? I don’t think so. We will keep telling this story because we are just like her, but for a limited time only. Now, it is not a question of formulating new rules for behavior that will help us see where the boundary lines of good and evil lie, so we can be safe. That sort of literalism is for the fundamentalists to exercise themselves with. Anyone can pull a sentence or two out of this book–and use it to justify whatever evil is in his heart. Fundamentalists on the other side of the globe do the same with their holy books. The two come out with different answers, naturally, but they are identical twins. It is no wonder they make war on each other, for fear is the only channel of their power. But we can never understand Rebekah, or our own self, before God while fear governs our moral life. To sing Rebekah’s story is not to argue about moral relativity. It is to claim the reality of God as source and power in your life. Not morality, not the good opinion of others, but the reality of God, which becomes present for a limited time only. It does not linger. It is the possibility of stepping through your “good” frames and ideas into action that will become part of the history of God. You have done this before: in marrying, in taking a job, in giving birth and raising children, sometimes in a voting booth, sometimes in helping a stranger. Rebekah’s story simply opens up the frame to the size that Christ asks his disciples to step through. Act in hope for the whole world. Do not seek first to be good, says the story; seek to be God’s, and God will give you the wisdom and the courage to do the needed thing, no matter what the neighbors think. For a limited time only.
1. Microsoft Encarta, 2002
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, July 2005
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