Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
4:11 At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people, not to winnow or cleanse--
4:12 a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them.
4:22 "For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good."
4:23 I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.
4:24 I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.
4:25 I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.
4:26 I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD, before his fierce anger.
4:27 For thus says the LORD: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.
4:28 Because of this the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black; for I have spoken, I have purposed; I have not relented nor will I turn back.
This is the “Frank Costanza” text. He’s the father of George, one of the central characters. Frank was played by comedian Jerry Stiller as a short-tempered, swift to render judgment kind of guy. In the “Festivus for the Rest of Us” episode, he announces to the assembled dinner guests during the “Airing of Grievances” (part of his made-up holiday, “Festivus”), "I got a lotta problems with you people, and now you're going to hear about it!"
Don’t you wonder if Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld (both Jewish) “borrowed” from biblical themes when they wrote this show? Frank Costanza’s “airing of grievances” sounds EXACTLY like what the prophet Jeremiah is saying in this text, on behalf of God! Here are the specific “grievances”:
*”My people are foolish…they are stupid children…they are skilled in doing evil…”
*Their lousy behavior has even “laid waste” to the earth (which God had made and called “good,” remember, before WE got ahold of it?)
*The people are so bad, even NATURE has “run away” from them (“all the birds of the air had fled”)
*The earth and the cosmos have turned their backs on us (“Because of this the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black”)
God is setting up for the “Feats of Strength,” wherein God will allow the results of what the people have “sown” to come upon them. It seems that Israel is in a never-ending wrestling match with the Almighty, a test of “who is stronger” that is still going on today in the politicized State of Israel. And in the Christian church? Youbetcha. Remember that the OT prophets weren’t sent as much to “warn” Israel about what “may” happen, as to tell them what WAS going to happen because they have already “grieved” God with their self-centered and disrespectful behavior against God, the earth, and each other. Verse 27 in this text holds out a hope for them, however, when the prophet tells them that while desolation will result from their sin, God will not bring this to a “full end.” In other words, God gives them room to improve, repenting of their behavior before the next “checkup,” or when the next “Festivus” rolls around!
Psalm 14
14:1 Fools say in their hearts, "There is no God." They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.
14:2 The LORD looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God.
14:3 They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.
14:4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon the LORD?
14:5 There they shall be in great terror, for God is with the company of the righteous.
14:6 You would confound the plans of the poor, but the LORD is their refuge.
14:7 O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion! When the LORD restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.
This is George Costanza’s Psalm. Like his father, George tends to see things as “black and white,” and views most incidents as either a blessing FOR him or a curse UPON him. He plays the role of the Medieval “fool” (Shakespeare’s “Tartuffe”) in the sitcom. “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’” While George does acknowledge that “Jesus is cool” in one episode, in another, he “converts” to Latvian Orthodoxy just to win the heart of a girl he likes. Again, is George not a great analogue for the “People of God,” be they the Israel being addressed in today’s texts, or the Christian church we witness today? We make snap judgements, do “religious things” for self-serving reasons, and grovel before God when caught red-handed, just like George, when he thinks he has cancer. In Seinfeld, George is always the one looking for some sort of deliverance, just like the psalmist: “O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion! When the LORD restores the fortunes of his people…” When Mr. Wesley wrote of “going on to perfection,” don’t you think he was trying to get us to FIX our issues (with the Holy Spirit’s help, of course) before the curses we have sown begin to sprout? Remember, the word “righteousness” ( δικαιοσύνη, most often in NT Greek) means “right living,” including not just eschewing “sin” on an individual level, but on a society-wide one as well, something the Bible labels “justice.” Let us not be George Costanza characters who are most often seeking “short cuts” to the benefits of right living, or who are cheating to win them.
Exodus 32:7-14
32:7 The LORD said to Moses, "Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely;
32:8 they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!'"
32:9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are.
32:10 Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation."
32:11 But Moses implored the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
32:12 Why should the Egyptians say, 'It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth'? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people.
32:13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, 'I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
32:14 And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
There is no doubt that this is the Jerry Seinfeld passage! The timeless and fascinating dialogue between Moses and God from high atop Ararat is one of the most profound conversations in all of divine comedy. God tells Moses that the divine wrath is ready to roll against this “stiff-necked” people, and Moses adeptly—and rather indignantly—talks God OUT of it! It is a funny “court scene” with God suddenly becoming “the accused” by a clever “attorney,” Moses. Moses uses God’s own promises to Abraham (and his “seed”) against God. In the Seinfeld show, the title character, Jerry, strives to bring “equilibrium” to his out-of-balance friends and life circumstances. In fact in one episode, the script brings this right to the surface, but Jerry suggesting that if something goes BAD for him, something just as GOOD will happen to balance it all out. In this passage, Moses is using the Seinfeld principle to outwit God, and it apparently works. Oh, we could go all out on the “God is all powerful, all-knowing” schtick and say that God is just making it LOOK like Moses wins the argument, but that is what we might expect of the Greek Gnostics, not the “earthy” Hebrew people of the Old Testament. This “argument” or comedy court scene of Exodus 32 may just be the most honest and revealing passage of scripture in the whole Bible, or at least until we get to John’s wonderful Prologue to his Gospel. Likewise in the popular sitcom, Seinfeld plays the friend who is always trying to bring harmony to his “community” of friends. In the show, Jerry seems very proud of his Jewishness, but resists it when its teachings don’t reflect the direction he wants to go. Sound familiar? Even as Moses ends up leading a “stiff-necked” people when he resisted so strongly God’s call to do so, so Jerry Seinfeld regularly reminds his friends in the show that he is not in charge of their lives, even though the reality is that they really all DO revolve around Jerry! Fans of the TV show and its goofy cast of characters would most likely understand if every episode of Seinfeld were to end with verse 14: “And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”
Psalm 51:1-10
51:1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
51:2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
51:3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
51:4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.
51:5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.
51:6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
51:7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
51:8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
51:9 Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Now we come to Kramer. “Cosmo Kramer” (we don’t find out his first name until season SIXof Seinfeld!) is the divine comedy’s “Everyman.” The hapless figure seems to be just drifting through life, on one hand, but on the other, is clearly the most passionate ABOUT it. Kramer, for all of his off-the-wall antics and seemingly amoral behaviors, is often the moral “voice” of the show! He calls Jerry out for being an “anti-dentite” for joking about dentists, and shows serious remorse when it is revealed that it was one of his Titleist golf balls he drove into the ocean that almost killed a whale. On the other hand, he’s never against a little “playing the system” to help a friend, like when he smashes Jerry’s malfunctioning, out-of-warranty stereo and mails it, planning to blame the U.S. Postal Service for doing the damage, so Jerry can claim the insurance. “They just write it off,” he tells Jerry. If anything explains Kramer’s character as the eternal “Everyman,” it is verse five of this Psalm: “ Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me,” especially if you review the episode when we meet Kramer’s biological mother, “Babs.” We are ALL Kramer, friends! No matter how you try to dress up the pig, it’s still a pig, and Psalm 51 is bringing us to the honest assessment that we are all “born guilty,” when the first word most of us have to hear from our parents is “NO!” United Methodists (and most Protestant Christians) do not believe humans are “born in sin,” but in innocence. It is this innocence that leads to such early guilt. In the mythical Genesis story, Adam and Even did not partake of the tree of “sin,” but of the “knowledge of good and evil.” When we are innocent, we act on what gets our attention, with no knowledge of where it is “right” or “wrong,” whether it is “healthful” or “harmful” to us. We’re back to Kramer, who is basically an adult “child” in the show. And yet, the scriptwriters see him as a person with a HUGE heart, who always seems to have the welfare of others in mind. The cry of this psalmist to “Create in me a clean heart, O God” is the cry of the Everyman to be restored to blamelessness and purity, even though none of us “deserve” it. Like our man Kramer in Seinfeld, our “warts” are never in dispute, but our need for healing—redemption—is not, either. And this redemption, this “blotting out,” must be a divine act.
1 Timothy 1:12-17
1:12 I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service,
1:13 even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief,
1:14 and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
1:15 The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners--of whom I am the foremost.
1:16 But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.
1:17 To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
This Timothy text most reminded me of “Newman,” one of the most important, and regularly reoccurring “secondary” characters, in Seinfeld. There is such a profound insignificance to his character, at least at first, but between Wayne Knight’s acting, and clever scriptwriting, Newman gets a life of his own on the show. The Apostle Paul sees himself in such a negative light, as described in this text: “formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.” And yet, because of the mercy of God in Christ Jesus, he is given new life—just like Wayne Knight’s character. Newman goes on to be a “cult hero” on the TV comedy, once arranging the mob-like kidnapping of an incessantly barking dog, “cleaning up” the muffin top mess with four bottles of milk and his appetite, and turning his job as a postman into a “G-Man” inquisitor in the infamous “broken stereo” incident precipitated by Kramer, on Jerry’s behalf. Newman is the only character not ostracized by the “Soup Nazi.” Even as the character Newman is given “new life” by the creators of Seinfeld, and a superb acting job by Knight that boosts his own career, so the “blasphemer” Paul is not only redeemed by his encounter with Christ, but his new life includes becoming the Apostle to the Gentiles. If it weren’t for Paul, there might not even have been a Christian church. And as far as we’re concerned, like Knight’s career resurrection, our encounter with Christ elevates us from the mundane, flawed rank of humanity and “seats us in the heavenlies with Christ,” as the apostle says. What we have, we do not deserve, but in the Creator’s mind, we are given such a high status that the psalmist says we are “a little lower than the angels (or, as some translations say, “than God”). Like Kramer’s stumbling “Everyman,” Newman’s character represents hope for us—a character that wasn’t meant to be more than secondary, but who ends up with a large fan base. In our case, it is Christ himself who is “rooting” for us! May any of our listeners who judge themselves terminally “unworthy,” or even as “blasphemers” like Paul, come to believe in the unexpected, unearned, and often underestimated MERCY of God in Christ! To all who feel left out, God says, “Hello, NEWMAN!”
Luke 15:1-10
15:1 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.
15:2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them."
15:3 So he told them this parable:
15:4 "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?
15:5 When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices.
15:6 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.'
15:7 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.
15:8 "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?
15:9 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.'
15:10 Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
Now it’s Elaine Benes’s turn! Like all of Seinfeld’s other characters, Elaine is a composite of people Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David know in real life, and as such, she’s a gem. She is typically immaculate in appearance (one episode where she let herself go and “became George” was hilarious), has a penchant for detail that often drives the other characters crazy, and likes to be fully in control, of both friendships and affairs of the heart. She so much reminds me of the dear woman in the second of the two small parables in this text from Luke—if she lost a coin, one of ten, she would go CRAZY, obsessing over it until it was found. Honestly, do either of these parables make any sense? Would a shepherd who had 100 sheep “leave the 99” to go looking for the one which is lost? Not if he wanted to stay in the shepherding business! That makes no animal husbandry sense at all, and neither does turning the house upside down to find ONE lost coin, only then to spend far more than its value throwing a party for her friends to celebrate finding it. Both of these parables are nuts…unless you factor in one important, hidden factor. You see, Seinfeld’s Elaine is all about relationships. Her desire to control stems from her need to belong, to love, and to be loved. These are the hidden factors so often in “irrational” behavior. The parables are about relationships. The shepherd DOES care about that one lost sheep, as an analogue showing that GOD cares for each and every one of us, and desires that NONE should perish. There IS a celebration in the Realm of God when one of God’s children finds her way “home”! And the party for the found coin also is about the FRIENDSHIPS, and the finder’s desire to SHARE her good fortune with her besties. This is our Elaine. And while Seinfeld bills itself famously as a “show about nothing,” it is anything BUT that—it’s a show about relationships, friendships, and affairs of the heart, about how important they are, and also about how difficult sustaining them can be. It is a tragedy when one is lost, and “party time” when one is restored!
Of our “show,” we can say that it, too, is all about relationships—ours to God, our friends and loved ones, and even with ourselves, and our internal dialogue. We can have all kinds of theological debate about what Jesus was getting at in his enigmatic, parabolic stories, but one thing is for sure—they, too, are all about relationships, and if we approach them with this in mind, it is much easier to uncover what he probably meant as the central meaning of each. Relationships rarely make “sense.” In fact, the closer and more intimate ours are, the less sense they usually make. Logic and love rarely walk together. In his film, “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen’s character Alvie Singer tells a story about relationships. First, he tells of a crazy uncle who thought he was a chicken. When asked why the family didn’t get the uncle help, Singer said, “Well, we would, but we need the eggs.” He goes on to say that relationships are like that—they are crazy, they don’t make sense, and they are often difficult or complicated. So why do we keep them? We need the eggs.
As Jesus revealed God to us, it was clear that God is LOVE, but not always “logical.” Relationships are the key to understanding God, as we see from several of today’s scripture passages. Whatever, we are left with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a “show” about EVERYTHING important! Amen.
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