(next in the series Lessons in the Beginning)
Texts on Sunday, September 18, 2005
Genesis 38: 1-30; Matthew 28: 16-20
There’s a phrase people throw about as if it were gospel: The end doesn’t justify the means. No? It had better! When people invoke that little proverb, usually they are outraged by someone else’s ends or means. Furious, they want to bring the wrath of the gods down on the malefactors. But all those gods were fired long ago, so people reach for an authoritative-sounding rule. “The end doesn’t justify the means!” All they really get is their own loud voice. During the fury unleashed in New Orleans, did the end of feeding starving people justify smashing store windows and taking food? Who lingers over such questions? We see that that end justified those means. It’s not a rule; it’s something you choose to see. Was Tamar’s sexual deception moral? You heard Judah’s insight. She is more righteous than I.
In the late 1960s, my father preached some sermons on “situation ethics” while a book with that title was making the lists. The idea was simple but it proved very controversial. At least one family left the congregation because their pastor said that ethics belong to situations, not stone tablets. Recall how split the nation was on matters of war and race and poverty and sex. (The more things change . . .) Recall how fervently parents of teenagers wished to control them by pinning morality down as things that were always bad or always good. Long hair: bad! Wave flag: good!** It is so much easier to navigate the seas of society if safe shores and dangerous reefs can be identified on a chart without ever going near. That is the function of ordinary moral conventions, to keep the vast majority of people on the same course, never experimenting with new relationships or insights. Western society teaches that a fully mature citizen can be raised from infancy in twenty years or so, and that if he or she will always consult the moral compass of the social group, a successful, satisfying life will follow. Religion, according to this convention, is just the effective machinery for indoctrinating the masses with the rules.
The Bible stories keep sabotaging this machinery. Again and again, we find a different concept of maturity. It comes from the East, not the West. Far from our being graduates of the moral school at twenty-something, the Bible, with other great spiritual traditions, claims that a well-raised, fully grown young adult is just beginning the course of human development. He can drop out; she may quit the school, but if she pays attention, she will persistently be coaxed through conflicts into new ways of being and seeing. The Genesis stories are like an album of songs on this subject, how the growth of a people hangs on its heroes’ willingness to undergo subversions and revolutions in their beliefs, so that their spirits might be regenerated in new birth and so that some in the next generation might go higher, higher, pioneering further into the wilderness.
Consider Tamar. Perhaps she is twenty or twenty-five when her husband dies. By social convention, it is the duty of the head of the family to provide a young widow with another husband from within the family. Judah has no small interest in doing so, for her firstborn boy will inherit all his wealth. No wonder Onan wouldn’t cooperate. But Judah ignores Tamar too–and therefore ignores his own interests. He pays no attention to the seriousness of the situation. Judah stands for our natural desire to quit the school of spiritual development. We do not attend well. We do not pay attention to our need for practices and a community to channel spiritual energies upward. We are often very bored by the claims for human possibility made by the spiritual traditions. We slide like crocodiles in and out of the waters of pleasure and pain, eating what comes along. The future of the nation hangs in the balance while Tamar languishes. When Judah’s wife dies, he mourns for a week, then goes on with his business. From now on, he’ll buy sex if a female offers. But the desire to thrive–eros–is gone from him, though he is by no means exhausted. We are often like this. Mired in our losses, our guilts, and our doubts, we do not look out for our own growth.
Tamar, sheathed head to foot in widow’s black, hidden and childless in her father’s house, powerless, it seems, to shape her future, awaits a good or a bad fate from her father-in-law Judah. Will he rise to his own interest and make growth possible? Or must she face forty or sixty years of withered, fruitless, sexless, childless, bored pity from the townspeople? What would you do? No–what will you do? For though we know we are like Judah–free and careless–we are also like Tamar: pent up, with energies suppressed or repressed or unexpressed, but wise and urgent. She will not stand for this! She is like some inmates I know wearing life sentences who after too many years in the house awake to themselves and decide to do something, anything, to begin to grow again. Tamar stands for that spiritual intelligence deep inside you by the very grace of God which will not anymore shuffle about the house doing yesterday’s chores. Before she leaves the house, Tamar is already expecting.
The world as it is has no interest in your inner development. What you were at twenty-five, plus your money and your children, is all the world really wants from you. It has a large investment in your accepting everything else just as it is. Your inner growth would threaten the world as it is. That is why the politics of every powerful nation seduce the national religion and bring it into their tent, with the intent to turn the spirit of personal and social transformation into a humble, silent, ignored wife. The world does resist those who aim to grow. It has a large armamentarium of punishments and rewards to keep people in line, amused and distracted by foolishness and afraid to make new choices. This is the meaning of Tamar’s bold risk. Long before any analysis like this one brings the story to the door of your mind, you feel the charging horses of her moral wisdom–how hard she is working against her world, inside and out, to realize her courageous claim on new life. Anyone of any age whose person was not abused easily attends to the incomparable memory of sexual desire; its illimitable rolling ocean of demand in the presence of the desired mate. Our bodies are wired for this naturally. But we tell and retell this story to re-wire our spirits with a like lust for God and God’s justice. Spiritual growth depends on desire for God so hot that it spurs our courage to spurn concern for what people think. Tamar stands for a wisdom in you and me which knows how to use whatever desire is left in us to run great risks straight into the teeth of our own resistance and the world’s so that we might give birth to new life. Judah and Tamar, we are them both. Now they meet.
He thinks her to be a zanah, a whore, for she has covered her face. He wants her–or really, he wants himself; that is, he is eager to feel his vitality. But he doesn’t want that vitality to go anywhere. He wants no relationship with it. He is willing to pay for this limited experience–with a goat. Again the sacrificial goat! Is this how ordinary religious rituals function for the masses–a way of having God but having no growth from God? Still, the fact that they go in to the sanctuary at all means that the desire to experience some vitality is there, always present, no matter how little attention is paid. But Tamar, who is spiritual wisdom, refuses the terms of the old sacrifice. This is something new, something higher. She demands rather his signet, his cord, and his staff–the symbols of his identity. The signet is his unique personality. The staff is his power, his reputation, his wealth. The cord is his protection, his defenses, the binding of the soft part of the body, the closure against disclosure. All these things you and I put on when we joined society as a young adult: personality, power, and protection. All these God now demands of you: learn how to lay them aside at will, to go lower in order to be called higher. Wherever you do this, whenever you do this, you go in to God. The end justifies these means.
We do not see what we will become after we take off the accouterments of our past. Judah does not see. He goes in on her terms. And she conceives. At last she will grow, and he will grow, too. Human will and the wisdom of God are made one; that is the beginning of spiritual growth. But it is not easy. Much risk remains. When new growth begins, how fierce are the temptations of the old ways! First, Judah tries to fulfill payment of the goat. He wants to regain his old identity by means of the old ritual, but the effects of his old self are not to be found. To the people in the town where he met Tamar, he lies. He had thought her a common zanah but now he pretends he was performing religious duties with a temple prostitute. He asks, “Where is the qedesha?”–which means devotee, or holy one. He is trying to get back to his old way of being.
Then comes the news that growth is underway in Tamar. Burn her, he says. He will use the old patterns, any conventional means, to keep inner growth from changing his world. He is so like us, who are often willing to set the torch to any sign of growth we do not understand. Judah is that spirit in religion which would burn gay and lesbian out of the church, deny the testimony of other religions to see God, and use fire and terror on distant nations to distract itself from its grievous injustices. Spiritual wisdom knows that real union with God runs such risks in the world. And so, at the critical moment, wisdom asks, “Take note, please, whose these are, the signet, staff, and cord. By the man whose these are am I with child.” You yourself, O Judah, are involved in the great things now starting to grow. Here is the pitched moment. What will he do? Tamar–wisdom–has communicated to him privately. He can have her killed and retake his identity and guard his reputation and go on as he was. Or he can grow. There is no rule; it is something he will choose to see, or not. And you know his answer. “She is more righteous than I.” So speaks the voice of spirit and flesh made one. Something new comes into being, into seeing, something higher. This end justifies those astonishing means. Now great growth follows. From those who teach the old self to go down humbled before a judging, ridiculing world, a new nation comes forth.
One might think this interpretation to be a preacher’s pirouette on a strange little story, but pause in that judgment. This is the only story in Genesis about one of the heads of the twelve tribes from the son of Jacob. Who was Judah? The word “Judaism” comes from the “Judah.” So does “Judea,” as in
… a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled . . . and Joseph went from the city of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem.
Of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel, Judah covered by far the largest territory. David was born in Judah. He built Jerusalem in Judah. After the other tribes were destroyed in the eighth century B.C., Judah was the only tribe left to carry on the traditions of Yahweh worship. Judah the tribe required a story of its particular genesis, how it came into spiritual being in spite of its torpor and ignorance. This is it. According to tradition, Jesus and his father Joseph came from Judah, too.
And who is Tamar? In Tamar’s womb were twins. Does this sound familiar? How many enemy brothers and sisters we have met! But this round goes higher. The boys’ contest is complete at birth. First one comes out, then retreats, then the other emerges. They never fight. And that boy, the last who became first, is called Perez–the breach–for something new breaks out now. Perez will be eighth great-grand father to King David, tradition says. So Tamar’s wisdom is mother to David, and Judah father. So Judah, Jerusalem, Judaism, and you, too, devoted of Jesus, have a story of how true God comes alive in the wisdom deep in the womb and want of Tamar, who was ready to spring like a lion upon the means of men, so that God might break through the old ways to grow new eyes for Creation.
** We youth thought: “They hate our freedoms.”
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, September 2005
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