Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.29.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 7:1-10
Hamilton is such a peculiar thing, and a reminder to me of just how poorly I’d do as an investor.
Hey, says the playwright at the party, I'm writing a hip-hop musical about the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton.
Uh huh. I can feel my eyes rolling. Not putting any money into THAT.
So of course it's soaring. As it should be. It's engaging, it's funny, it's historically grounded, remarkably subtle and intelligent. It was written by a Latino, intentionally cast in the rich warm hues of American diversity, using the forms and styles of both classical Broadway belting and rap. Mostly rap, which I used to enjoy back in the day but haven’t listened to in decades, now that it's descended into subsentient misogyny, consumerist grasping, and the celebration of violence.
But it does this odd thing. It embraces the fundamental humanity of the American creation story, staking a claim on that narrative. This is part of my story, the musical sings. It is the story of the immigrant. The call to shake off the chains of oppression? That's a common story. The human mess of love and conflict that lead to Hamilton's death at the hands of Aaron Burr? That's human. Being human, it's a story we all understand.
Here, a Broadway musical, a raging success, sold out shows stretching out to the horizon.
You just can’t get tickets, can’t at all. There’s just no chance.
Well, that’s not entirely true. You can buy tickets to the show, without doubt. All you have to do is go to a reseller, and there are typically thirty or forty tickets available for any given show.
Like the show this upcoming Wednesday, where you can find tickets ranging in price from just under a thousand bucks to just over two thousand.
Or you could wait until the touring company comes to DC, which it will...in two thousand and eighteen. Then, they’re available...but only if you’ve bought two full annual subscriptions to the Kennedy Center. Which will end up costing you just as much. It’s one of those things you’d never, ever suspect, the concept, so wildly and remarkably unlikely as a triumph.
How to process it?
For all of its retelling of the Founding Story, it sure isn't right wing, not by the standards of borderline fascism that have come to define the shout-radio fueled madness of American ultraconservatism. Here, a willful recasting of the American narrative, shattering expectations of color and race. Here, a musical that defiantly celebrates immigration as central to the American experience, at the same moment that off-the-rails conservatism seems to have forgotten that completely as it throws its love to fascist demagogues and race-baiting charlatans. Hamilton, in form and intent, resists the shallow, false idol that the right worships in place of the American dream.
But neither is it a creature of the far left. The radical left has only contempt for the founding narrative of the United States. It was just the monstrous self-interest of racist oligarchs, wealthy white men who understood "freedom" no further than their own power over their land and the souls they claimed the right to own. Or so I've heard, sitting in the back of classrooms and listening. From this perspective, America was always a lie. That's all it ever was.
And yet here it is, this thing that, in this fleeting moment, our society has collectively decided has worth. It is praised and celebrated, winning both the gold ring of Broadway sellout crowds and Pulitzers and MacArthurs.
What is it, exactly, that gives something...or someone...worth? What makes for value and worthiness?
That question is one of the potent images underlying the story of the centurion today. Luke’s telling of this tale is interesting, maintaining a peculiar distance from the stories told in the other three Gospels.
Mark doesn’t tell this tale at all, although there are analogues between this story and the story of the Syrophoneician woman in Mark 7. It’s similar, in that there’s a non-Jew and a healing that happens at a distance, but otherwise, it’s kind of a stretch. Mark just doesn’t bother with the story.
John’s gospel, which wanders its own path, describes a very similar event in chapter 4. Jesus has arrived in Capernaum, where he encounters an official, one who approaches Jesus because someone in his household is sick. In this case, it’s his son. The official begs Jesus to come to his house and heal his boy, but Jesus does not. Instead, he says: Go, your son will live. The official returns, and finds his boy healed.
Matthew also tells the story in Matthew chapter 8, in such a way that . It’s in Capernaum, and there’s a centurion and a sick servant. But in Matthew 8, the centurion approaches Jesus directly, person to person, and asks Jesus for help. Jesus says, sure, but unlike in John’s story, the centurion demurs, telling Jesus he’s not worthy.
It’s Luke who keeps the centurion at a distance, with two delegations arriving to talk with Jesus. Luke knew importance, as a literate historian writing for a literate first century audience. If someone was truly worthy, a person of value in society, they don’t just walk right up to you.
Their people talk to your people. You get approached by their assistant, or their agents, or their manager. A person of quality...at least as quality is measured in both the ancient and the modern world...is known by their ability to have people do for them.
Which, as the tale is told in Luke, is just what the centurion conveys when the second delegation approaches Jesus.
And yet worth...the thing that truly matters about a person...is not the power to have folks do what you tell them. In Luke’s story of this event, what matters most significantly is the faith of the centurion. It is that he trusts, that he allows himself to see the possibility of restoration and believe that it might come to pass.
That theme is the core unifying thread between each of the variant stories we encounter, the essential connection that each of them share where the details may be variant.
What is worthy, and what makes a being worthy, is their faith in God’s capacity to make things whole again.
Our culture tends to spin worth a little differently.
What matters, or so we are taught, is our net worth. What matters, or so we too often hear, is our power.
But the shape and form of what Jesus teaches, and calls us to believe in, is a very different sort of worth. It is value that does not place store in wealth and political power. It is worth that does not find its ground in the approval of the crowd.
What matters, what has worth, is the frustratingly intangible character of faith.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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