Who will buy? February 3, 2019

New Testament Luke 4:22-30
Hebrew Psalm Psalm 71
Hebrew Scripture Jeremiah 1:4-10

We are defined by stories, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape our culture, the stories of our faith, for we emphasize the story of salvation over minutia and legal codes. Some stories double back on themselves, stories reflecting other stories, like Jesus and the Last Supper with his disciples, an echo of Passover and the paschal lamb, which becomes our common feast of broken bread and the shared cup, a story we will re-tell again this morning. The traditional Nativity story, a mash-up of two overlapping stories, becomes the locus of countless other stories, Saint Nicholas become The Santa Clause, Rudolph with his nose-so-bright, George Bailey and It’s a Wonderful Life, and most of all, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and Ghosts, that timeless tale.

For a story that focuses on Christmas, that has the holy feast itself in the title, A Christmas Carol is remarkably free of explicit religion. There is no midnight service, no babe in a manger. Charles Dickens’ Christmas feels secular and civic, long before we had watered down Christianity to social convention. The young Scrooge is not seen in worship, but instead at Fezziwig’s party. In fact, you could be excused if, like some scholars, you came to the conclusion that Dickens was irreligious or anti-religious. It is true that you can find a powerful critique of certain forms of Christianity in his work’s, from Arthur Clennam’s four wretched Sundays in Little Dorrit to three obnoxiously Christian characters of Bleak House, held in contrast to the quietly Christian conduct of Esther Summerson. But you would be wrong in your assessment, wrong in stripping Dickens of his Christian commitment. Dickens is critical of two things: the stern and gloomy religiosity of those who would be called dissenters and non-conformists in his day, the hellfire and damnation type; and the showy religiosity of those who would save the souls of the poor with no interest in saving their bodies, his age’s equivalent of the supposedly righteous that walk by the beaten man in the ditch. This critique of showy but empty religion goes right back to Jesus, and Dickens only follows where Christ has already been in his story of the Good Samaritan.

In 1861, Dickens wrote that “one of my most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint reflections of the teachings of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are derived from the New Testament; all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, forgiving.”

While many of Dickens’ works fairly claim the title classic, there is one that is nearly A Christmas Carol’s equal, the tale of an orphan boy called Oliver Twist. Filmed again and again, from the 1922 version starring Jackie Coogan as Oliver to the 2007 miniseries with Timothy Spall as Fagin, it also inspired Lionel Bart’s 1960 musical, itself becoming a film and winning the Best Picture Oscar for 1968. You will find productions of Oliver! The Musical in community theaters from coast-to-coast every year.

Early in the musical, Mr. Bumble attempts to sell the boy, who had audaciously asked for more gruel, wandering the streets singing “Boy for Sale.” We are to believe the boy is worthless, indeed, that the parish workhouse must actually pay to rid itself of the noxious lad. Oliver eventually ends up with Fagin and his band of boy criminals led by the Artful Dodger, but Dickens being Dickens, the plot turns a corner, and Oliver is soon safely in a home of upper middle-class respectability, ending the first act.

The musical’s rebuttal to Bumble’s bumbled attempt to sell the lad comes early in the second act, when Oliver and ensemble sing “Who will buy?” Instead of a worthless boy, it is a glorious morning that is for sale, and the wares of daily life as street vendors call outside his window.

Since the original novel was serialized over the course of twenty-six months, it took the first readers a long time to learn the secret of Oliver’s identity, and the novel’s version is way more complicated than the version we typically find on film, but the uptake is that Oliver is a long lost son of the upper middle class, and the novel ends with him returned to that station, adopted by his late father’s friend, Mr. Brownlow.

Like most old stories, there are some contemporary critiques of Oliver Twist. Fagin is at best a caricature of a Jew, at worst, an embodiment of antisemitism’s worst lies, like Shakespeare’s Shylock a man of criminal greed and cruelty. Second, Oliver’s value is not that he was a poor boy with a kind heart and amazing potential, but that he was secretly a boy from privilege. Though we might note, in considering this last charge, that the upper middle class, tremendous privilege in that age of deadly mass poverty, doesn’t come off looking good either, especially the respectable and hypocritical upper middle class men who supervise the parish workhouse. But the story is the story, classic and loved, and as long as we are aware of the issues, we might still be able to enjoy Dickens clever plot, larger-than-life characters, and moral, for as he wrote, humility, charity, faith, and forgiveness do triumph. We might find ourselves singing along, asking “Who will buy this glorious morning?”

Oliver himself had no idea what was inside of him, did not really know his true self, his true nature. Neither did Jeremiah.

Jeremiah’s call narrative, this morning’s second reading, is not atypical. God calls, the prophet says “sorry, you got the wrong dude,” and God says, “no, you are the one I am calling.” Jeremiah is not as resistant as Jonah, not as mentally ill as Ezekiel, though to be fair, the latter’s mental illness does give us some spectacular imagery. No, Jeremiah just doesn’t think he’s the right person for the job. He doesn’t know about himself what God already knows about him.

Now, I’m not suggesting we fall off into the theology of the puppet master God, the “purpose-driven” life where God has an individual plan for each and every one of us. We don’t need to re-hash the reasons why that is problematic, theological back alleys where God is a mugger wielding disease and tragedy as weapons of choice. We don’t have to resort to that sort of God in order to hear what God is saying to Jeremiah, to every prophet, to Moses, who stutters and stands before a burning bush. God says change the world. Change lives. Change hearts. I know what is inside of you, even if you don’t. You can do this. And it is really important that you try.

Who would buy that Joseph the carpenter’s son had something to say? Who would buy that the local boy could be a prophet? Not the other locals, that’s for sure. They cannot hear God’s Word because they are judging what they can see, but carpenter’s son is no more true of Jesus than shoeless orphan is of Oliver, than stuttering shepherd is of Moses, than only a boy is of Jeremiah.

Both Jeremiah and Jesus, the servant of God and the son of God, lived in stressful times. Jeremiah’s ministry comes at the end of the Hebrew people’s long and slow decline. The glorious years of David and Solomon saw a nation created from a loose confederation of tribes, saw a city belonging to the Jebusites transformed into a fortified capital for the Hebrew nation, saw constructed on the heights a Temple dedicated to Yahweh. But it had fallen apart. The people had become divided, their rulers corrupt, unable or unwilling to adapt to the changes that were happening all around them. They bickered and lied and flip-flopped as Assyria gained strength until the breakaway Northern Kingdom, called Israel or Samaria, was conquered, destroyed, and mostly depopulated. Two centuries later and here is Jeremiah in what is left of the once great Hebrew nation, the once great Kingdom of David and Solomon, a small rump state centered on Jerusalem and called Judah. And once again, the world was changing, and the Hebrew kings were aligning themselves with their enemies, playing games. Jeremiah was not called to be a diplomat. He was called to speak truth, truth on behalf of a God he loved to a people he loved in a nation he loved. Who can forget the scene as the king burns Jeremiah’s written message?

And here is Joseph’s son, so grounded in scripture, and they cannot hear him. The rebuilt Temple looked better than ever, expanded and improved by Herod the Great, but his three sons, puppet kings that included Herod Antipas, were not Hebrew. Real power was in the hands of an extortionate tyrant in Rome. Jerusalem had been militarized, the people split into factions and always willing to turn on each other. And they did. Their chant was not “Lock her up!” or “Lock him up!,” but was instead the deadly chant of a Friday morning. “Crucify him!” They preferred a bandit over a prophet.

Who would buy the idea that God’s plan included these odd and upsetting individuals? Who would buy that’s there was more than meets the eye when it came to David, a young shepherd? Amos, the arborist who crossed a border? Jeremiah, so infuriating? To this bumpkin from Galilee who claimed to be a rabbi, who went around healing and changing lives?

Who would buy that the Way of Jesus isn’t about the Temple or any other building, not about strength and power and organs and painted ceilings, not about Crusades or control of the Supreme Court?

Humble.

Charitable, which doesn’t mean just charity the way we use it today, but means sacrificial love, as it had meant for Paul centuries earlier.

Faithful.

Forgiving.

This is Dickens’ understanding of truly following the Way.

Just. Loving. Humble. These are the words Micah would use for the Way.

We carry the heavy chains of our sins and the heavy chains of our doubts, for we do not believe. We must believe. Lord’ help our unbelief, for our sake, and for the world’s.

God sees what is inside you, who you might yet become, spark and seed and eternal love. Love so powerful, of created for creator, of creature for creature, that it need never die.

This is the story in which we find ourselves, a story with twist and turns and surprises, a story those on the Way of Jesus have told their children from generation to generation for two thousand years, a story we are still living.

May we always tell the story. May we always believe that we are more than meets the eye, that our story is not over, and neither is the story of our neighbor.

Who will buy this glorious morning? This glorious people? This amazing living tradition?

Me. I’ll buy.