Luke 6:17-26
Jeremiah 17:5-10
SERMON “The LeRoy Scandal”
Long before Barbara Kingsolver gave us “Demon Copperhead,” there was another harrowing tale of a boy from West Virginia growing up in an environment of addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and prostitution.
Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, better known as J.T. LeRoy, began writing for high-profile publications like the Oxford American and McSweeney’s just before the turn of the century. In 2000, his autobiographical novel “Sarah” was published to rave reviews, the paradox of autobiographical and novel not withstanding.
“Sarah” was followed by “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” a collection of short stories also based on LeRoy’s childhood and borrowing a title from today’s reading in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. This second text became a 2004 film.
And so one evening, I left my office in lower Manhattan and headed over to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, where LeRoy was going to do a reading, accompanied by some of his celebrity supporters. The celebrities were there. LeRoy was a no-show.
LeRoy would eventually make some public appearances, always in sunglasses and a wig, described as reclusive or eccentric.
He, the person who made the public appearances, was she, 25 year-old Savannah Knoop. She, who wrote the various articles and three books, was Laura Albert, Knoop’s sister-in-law.
There have been two documentaries on the case, and if I am honest, I still don’t completely understand the why and how of it all, how so many people, including some who manufactured personas for a living, were duped.
The thing is, the writing was good. Laura Albert could have had a great career. Instead, she was found guilty of fraud for signing a contract in LeRoy’s name. Which all goes to show that as the prophet warned, the heart really is deceitful above all things.
Jeremiah, the prophet not the fictional West Virginia boy, was writing as the Kingdom of Judah was in its final years. His word is about faith and practice, but it is also about geopolitics. Religious leaders calling out despots for corruption and unrighteousness has been a thing for a long time, long before this year’s interfaith prayer service in Washington.
Like works by Kingsolver and Albert, the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah is a harrowing read. There is child sacrifice. There is the destruction of Jerusalem. There are crimes against humanity, not unlike the crimes against humanity happening in the same region today, including the displacement of entire populations through mass deportation. There is even a little bit of constructive or adaptive theology.
Essentially, however, the prophet Jeremiah holds to the tradition of transactional faith. You do good by God, and God will do good by you, you personally, your house or tribe, your nation. If you are suffering, you must have done something to deserve that suffering.
Despite 3500 years of evidence to the contrary, people still sell that same snake oil.
God won’t send hurricanes if we’ll just overturn marriage equality. God will bless America if white women would just stay home having babies and everyone else would remember their place, some degrees below white cisgender heterosexual males. And if you just send your money to Paula White Ministries, prosperity pastor to the President, you too can get rich. Don’t stop believing. After all, Paula White married a member of the rock band Journey.
If this magical thinking wasn’t toxic enough in the religious context, it bleeds out into the socio-economic context. Every message in our culture tells us that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor must have done something to deserve to be poor. It isn’t even subliminal.
This despite God’s clear preference for the poor, as seen in the Torah, the Prophets, and the Gospels, despite scripture’s constant focus on economic injustice.
Many have abandoned their faith because of the failure of transactional theology to keep its promises. If we abandon transactional theology, is there something left for us in this reading from Jeremiah? More broadly, is there something that makes a life lived reaching for the holy better than a life without?
Now, this is my day job, so you would hope that I believe in a life of faith. Not all ministers do. I do, and not just because of the vast body of research showing that life as part of a religious community produces better outcomes on all sorts of measures of health and quality of life. Jeremiah’s image of a tree planted by a flowing stream works for me.
Like the “woes” we read at the end of Luke’s Beatitudes delivered on the Plain, Jeremiah offers the curse… the curse that follows chasing after the wrong things. “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from me.”
We don’t need original sin or even scapegoating to understand that mortals are mortal and all flesh is fleeting. I know scripture can sometimes portray the carnal as inherently sinful, but that isn’t our gig. The body can be beautiful, usually is in all of its diversity. The thing is, from where we sit, we are the center of all things, but when we zoom out in space and time, we are one temporary node in a constantly shifting web of life, and if we live well, a beautiful temporary node, a flowering of creativity and love. But we do not flower on our own. We are entangled with all of creation.
When we limit ourselves to the material, to the flesh, we really are in a barren place. I love the sensual pleasure of good curry and the smell of a summer storm approaching, but you cannot outrun these bodies, beautiful in their finitude. Scripture tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, though I find that a bit heavy, a bit negative. We are what we are, the both/and of body and soul.
The stream then, that flowing source that allows us to bear fruit, is not some literal exchange that gets us Creflo Dollar’s private jet. It is our ability to tap into something bigger than ourselves, a living tradition, nature’s churn and rebirth, the million little Easters of the moment.
We get to that stream, we draw life from that stream, in our spiritual practice. I may often lean into the scholarly, but it is not my head that brings me peace. In fact, it is not me that brings me peace, as much as I am a child of God called in original blessing.
When I let go of myself, my ego, my false sense of being the center of the universe, only then can I make room for all that is holy and moving constantly around me, above and below me, before I was and long after I am gone.
I do that, I lose myself, in meditation and prayer, in music and hard work, parking the “me” in exchange for the “us,” an “us” configured not as versus them, but as inclusive and expanding always.
This is what Rabbi Heschel was getting at in our first reading about prayer, “the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts.”
We say in the Lord’s Prayer “thy will be done,” not “my will be done.”
When we are children, we are often taught a wordy way of prayer, all petition, little praise. But the Great Commandment says “love God above all things, and love others as you love yourself.” Praise before petition, selflessness before selfishness.
If we are still operating in that wordy way of prayer, Anne Lamott suggests the whole enterprise can be reduced to three words” “help,” “thanks,” and “wow.” She might be on to something. And we might lean into the “wow.”
If all you get from this sermon is that prayer might help ground you these next few years, that’s a win. But I want to push just a little further, push you towards the contemplative practices that exist in many traditions, from the Zen Master in lotus position to the Sufi whirling dervish, to the Christian contemplative in a quiet cloister.
We really start to hear the holy when we start listening, which means we need to stop talking, even our internal talk talk talk… And that is not easy. We are drowning in messaging, the overwhelming majority of it telling us we are broken, our families are broken, our nation is broken, but it can all be better for three easy payment and a vote for the right candidate.
It is true that our nation is broken, just not for the reason the bought-and-paid-for politicians, perverted preachers, and Madison Avenue are telling you.
And you, you may fall to your knees from the weight of the world’s evil at times, but you can also be lifted by the goodness of the world, even if that means reaching deep down for the goodness in yourself, because under all of your brokenness is a miracle, is divine mystery, is before and beyond, and there is more miracle and mystery in the next pew.
The life giving waters of the holy are flowing by you, coming from a place you cannot see, going to a place you cannot see. Be still. Bear fruit. Let God be God.
Amen.