This is a true story, but one that is a bit out of season -- its a story that is more appropriate for Advent and perhaps this is a reminder that we are getting there. A visiting preacher went to preach an Advent sermon at a southern church. And as it often happens, the preacher was invited to lunch with at the family of one of the church members, where she met a young boy named Kyle, the five year old son of proud parents, and it was clear to her that she was about to have a performance done on her. Kyle was a very bright kid and this time he had memorized the entire Christmas story and could recite the whole thing, and he liked to repeat it in front of guests over for dinner. The parents were very proud of his accomplishment and invited her to sit down on the couch to hear Kyle's narration. Now Kyle favorite part of the story was where it said, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will to all people." Well, bright eyed Kyle began and was moving fine and going strong, until he came to his favorite part and somehow at that moment his little mind went blank and he forgot what came next. Glory to God in the highest... but he just couldn't remember. Now, his parents were coaching from the sides, "Come on Kyle, you can do it, come on Kyle. Remember, Glory to God in the highest ... and his eyes just lit up and he remembered. And he started once again, and he said, "Glory to God in the highest ..... and I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!" I love that story, because Kyle gives a reminder to all of us, the people of the book. We've learned the story so well, we've committed it to memory, we've learned it by heart, but at the most critical moments we forget the most important parts.

In Mark chapter 12, where we left him last time we talked about this, Jesus is caught up in a frenzy of entrapment. He looks up at the Sadducees, who together with the Pharisees, Herodians and Scribes and says, almost in exasperation, you are wrong. And the reason you are wrong is that you know neither the scripture nor the power of God. This is in Mark 12:24.

Yes, sometimes we get the story wrong and at other times we don’t know the power of God. I had a letter from President Jimmy Carter this week – not a personal one, unfortunately. But he wrote to Baptist pastors and leaders to explain why he felt that he needed to cut his associations with the Southern Baptist Convention. He writes, "I have been disappointed and feel excluded by the adoption of policies and an increasingly rigid SBC creed, including some provisions that violate the basic premises of my Christian faith." I think he is referring to the article on the family that they included in the Baptist Faith and Message a couple of years ago – one where they said that wives must graciously submit to their husbands!

At that time, I read an article about a a discussion between a pastor – a conservative one, and the Southern Baptist leaders on the question about interpreting scripture. The pastor asserted that you read and interpret scripture standing on Jesus. Jesus, he said, is the final authority, because apart from Jesus, scripture has no meaning. Not so, said the fundamentalist leaders of the SBC, scripture stands on its own. In fact, we don’t need to interpret scripture at all, we just need it to speak to us. And I am quoting this as faithfully as I can remember it. And I want to tell you, that argument borders on Bibliolatry – or worship of the Bible. The Bible is authoritative to me. I base my life on its story and its principles, and try to live by them out as faithfully as I can, everyday. But I don’t worship the Bible, I worship Jesus – and therefore interpret the Bible from the stand point of Jesus. I tell you this, because this is precisely the problem Jesus was having with the Sadducees, that day. These people know the letter of scripture, but I think they don’t know to interpret scripture standing on the power of God.

On Tuesday, and amid the uncertainty of the presidential vote, an important story got buried, that was playing out in the State of Alabama. Alabamans voted to remove a section of the state constitution passed in 1901which said that the legislature shall never pass any law to authorize any marriage between a white person and a black person.

What is amazing to me that it took 36 years after civil rights legislation to remove this provision of the Constitution of the State of Alabama. It's not that African Americans and persons of European or Asian descent could not marry in Alabama, as the United States Supreme Court had struck down the law many years ago. Still, there was anecdotal evidence that in some parts of the state, local officials would not issue a marriage license to interracial couples. And, there was opposition to removing this section from the state constitution from Confederate Heritage groups. That there are people today who would oppose such a measure is amazing to me. But even more incredulous is that their objections are based on particular readings of scripture – that scripture becomes the ideology to support their hate and to keep people subservient. I think Jesus would say to them You are wrong. You know neither the scripture nor the power of God. Still a majority of Alabamians voting in Tuesday's election voted to remove this section of their state constitution. And we say, "It's about time."

Even so, one of the most blatant examples of how ethnic and religious communities tried to keep each other apart is found in the Bible itself. In the time of Nehemiah and Ezra, when the people of Israel came home to rebuild their country after exile and captivity, you read this at the end of the book of Nehemiah: "In those days also I saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon and Moab; and half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod and they could not speak the language of Judah, but spoke the language of various peoples. And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pull out their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, "You shall not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves....shall we act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?" (Nehemiah 13:23ff)

The exiles were returning from captivity and Ezra and Nehemiah wanted to create a pure religion. So they told the people to put away those foreign husbands and foreign wives, put away those children who could not even speak or read the holy language. Its not that they did not know of God’s love and acceptance of all people, they were trying to establish a new society and they were trying to do it by their own wisdom. The only way they knew to create a pure religion was to separate themselves. This, despite the fact that they were explicitly told by the prophet Zechariah not to do things on their own but to depend on God: "'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit' says the Lord of hosts." They could find justification in scripture for what they did. This was a part of a Nehemiah’s reform based on the law of Deuteronomy. Jesus would have said, You are wrong. You neither know the scripture nor the power of God.

But you know, God has a great sense of humor. When God’s children begin to live as if they have no idea about God’s power or God’s spirit, and assume that they can live only on the basis of the law they run in to trouble. Right about that time, God inspired an unidentified author to communicate through the touching, romantic, utterly human story of Ruth, how God's greatest favor on Israel came; through, believe it or not, an inter-racial marriage; the marriage of Ruth (a Moabite, a foreigner, a person of another faith) to Boaz. They were great-grandparents of David, Israel's greatest king, who was the ancestor of Jesus, our savior. As you may have noticed, the story of Ruth is a part of our lectionary these days. It’s a short beautiful love story. You should sit down and read it through sometime. And remember how God would have used that story to breakdown the separations that Nehemiah and others were creating with the intention of fostering a pure religion.

From his very first sermon at Nazareth, Jesus attacked such bigotry. In that sermon, in Luke 4, he told the story of the widow of Zarephath. "There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there came a great famine in the land and Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow." This would be as if a rabbi in Jerusalem today stood up in Ariel Sharon's hearing and said that God had visited a Palestinian Muslim widow in Hebron, whose husband had been murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces, rather than visit any of the needy widows of Israeli troops. The congregation became so furious, so enraged at the suggestion that God would care for a foreign widow thousands of Israeli widows, or Naaman the Syrian leper, (which is the other story he told them that day) over thousands of Israeli lepers. You may remember that the people in that congregation tried to throw Jesus off a cliff. And with that began Jesus’ on going struggle with the religious structures of his day.

That’s an incredible story. God’s prophet Elijah went to Ahab, the king, one day – and it was as if he declared war. The king had become a worshipper of Baal – a prosperity religion. He believed that these fertility gods will give prosperity to their followers, and rain for their crops whenever they needed it. But Elijah says Oh No That Won't Do. He asked the true God of heaven to demonstrate that heaven could not be manipulated by the worshippers of good luck.

So God shut up the heavens for three and a half years, and there was no rain at all, and no prosperity and no food. And Elijah himself got hungry, and God said Go. Go over to the widow of the Philistines. She'll feed you. He goes, and not to rip her off of her last meal, as it seems to her at first, but to help her survive by helping him survive. God’s revolution is to be built by the contribution of a poor widow. The gifts of little people, peasants, workers, unemployed, outcast--she not even a believer--are to be used by the true God to preserve the prophetic voice in Israel. So her last little tortilla is shared, her little flask of oil keeps filling itself up and never runs out, and there is enough food. "And she, and he, and her household ate for many days."

Our lectionary passages in Mark are just incredible. Two Sundays ago, Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem where he is preparing for a direct action – a serious showdown with the religious and political establishment who do everything they can to oppress the people and maintain their political and economic power. And on the way, in the section between two stories of healing the blind, between 8:22 and 10:52, Jesus is trying to build up his disciples, his core team – but they are not getting it. He says, three times, the gravity of the showdown – that he was going to be betrayed, killed and rise again. And he tries to teach his method of direct action: three times in these specific words, the first shall be last and the last first, and many times by his what he does. You know, where Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi learned how to do political actions, don’t you? But the disciples were not getting it. Peter’s rebukes Jesus when he said for the first time that he was going to die, they argue about who is the greatest, they try to stop a stranger from casting out demons prompting Jesus to say, he who is not against us is for us -- and they keep the little ones coming to him – the very ones on whose behalf Jesus is engaging in this revolution. Mark is very frustrated with them He points out how blind the disciples are.

If in chapters 9 and 10 we have ordinary people not getting it, in chapters 11 and 12, we have smart people, teachers of the law deliberately trying to thwart Jesus. In chapter 11 Jesus enters Jerusalem and goes on the offensive against the religious establishment. From the end of the 11^th chapter through chapter 12, Jesus finds himself in the middle of a theological cross-examination. Priests, scribes, elders and other assorted defenders of the letter of the law are swarming all over him: "By what authority are you doing these things?"

Then comes the parable of the wicked tenants pointed directly at the religious authorities. Then comes a question about taxes to test his citizenship, which Jesus expertly evades. And finally, a real brainteaser about seven brothers who do their brotherly duty by marrying each other's childless widow, only to find themselves all in heaven without a clue as to who gets to call her "my wife." With a deep sigh he says, You are wrong, and the reason you are wrong is that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. (12:24)

That's when a nameless scribe, who has been hanging out on the fringe of the crowd, moves in for the kill. His question is the question, the let's-get-down-to-it-and-see-if-you-bleed question: Which commandment is the first of all? And Jesus gives the answer which is the final answer to all the questions that were being asked – You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And he commends Jesus – a sort of "Well done you good and faithful teacher" – can you see the arrogance pouring! But he got it right. He may not know how to live it out, but at least he seems to know it. In fact, this is it, isn’t it? All our theological structures, all our traditional interpretations, even our morality – our sense of right or wrong and good or bad comes down to these two commandments. Jesus’ response to this man is so different from his responses of his other critics. "You are nor far from the kingdom of God," he said.

Mark wraps up this section on Jesus’ confrontation with the religious authorities with a warning to his disciples. "Beware of the scribes," he said, about the ones to whom he said, You are wrong, you know neither the scripture nor the power of God, "who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and pleases of honor at banquets! They devour widows houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive greater condemnation."

And then he sat down opposite the treasury where people were putting in their offerings. This was obviously in that part of the Temple called "The Court of the Women"--probably because Jesus had women disciples with him, and the presence of women meant they couldn't go on into the Court of Israel. So they were sitting where they could see the thirteen trumpet shaped boxes that received the gifts of the laity. And he saw that there were wealthy people, who gave generously, dropped in large sums. Jesus doesn't denounce their gifts or their giving. He notices, indeed they all notice that "many rich people put in large sums." And then, along comes a woman with two copper coins and she puts in everything. And Jesus puts her gift in perspective, along with the gifts of the rich. "My view is that the widow has put in more than all those who are giving to the cause, for they all give out of abundance, but she, out of poverty has put in everything she has, her whole livelihood."

Can you see the difference? The disciples don’t get this idea of the revolution that Jesus is leading them to. They are more concerned with who gets to sit on the right and the left of Jesus when he comes in glory. The religious authorities deliberately try to trap him. They are afraid of his revolution because it will shake down their oppressive religious and political structure and dethrone them. Isn’t it interesting that the people Jesus upholds are the widows. The widow of Zarephath who gave the morsels of food she had to eat and die, and the widow who gave the two last coins she had for her livelihood. Those who are willing to make a complete surrender to God’s work in their lives are the ones Jesus needs for his revolution.