Gotcha!

November 11, 2007

Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Haggai 1:15b-2:9; 2 Thessalonians 1:13-3:5; Luke 20:27-38
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman

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If you’ve seen any part of the presidential debates, you know that so far, content is overwhelmed by how well the participants can play the game of “Gotcha!”. This game was in high relief in last week’s Democratic contest when Hillary Clinton was the target of a fair amount of the evening’s energy. If you followed any of the afterplay commentary, each candidate rushed to interpret how the Gotcha! had landed and scored points. Mrs. Clinton played her hand by claiming a foul, but that only agitated more “Gotchas!” from a whole new set of participants.

As you well know, Gotcha! is less intent on stimulating a rich conversation about important issues than tripping up opponents in misstatements and flip flops. This motivation seems as true of the supposedly independent journalists as it does of the candidates. The more inconsistent statements that can be garnered, the greater number of points awarded to the questioner. This gamesmanship surely contributes to our perception of the aspirants as irrepressible chameleons who shape the colors of their message so as to offend the least percentage of voters, depending upon their context.

Of course, provoking the Gotcha! attack is not all bad. If a candidate becomes the focus of someone’s Gotcha! energy, this confirms that his candidacy is bona fide. I noticed that Mike Huckabee, the erstwhile Baptist minister and Arkansas governor – who had been trolling towards the back of the Republican pack – said this week how pleased he was that Fred Thompson had attacked him. That gave his candidacy credibility and created some buzz.

Gotcha! is a dicey game, of course. Its ultimate purpose in the political realm is to depose contenders. This may or may not have anything to do with principled positions and effective leadership, but it certainly makes for a television game show set. Long gone are the days when folks would show up for an intricately argued political speech of, say, 7,500 words from an awkward, rather unattractive individual, as they did for Abraham Lincoln in February of 1860 when, as an obscure aspirant from Illinois, he spoke at the Cooper Union here in New York down on 7th Street.

By way of comparison, that’s nearly four times as long as most of my Sunday sermons. Most historians credit that speech, which outlined Lincoln’s position on slavery, as launching his ride to the White House. We have nothing equivalent to that today, in which sustained, purposeful argument wins out over sound-bite marketing. We’re as much to blame for that as the candidates, of course, given our short attention spans.

Now Lincoln did have to engage a 19th century version of Gotcha!, which played out in the pages of newspapers and broadsides, until he attended that fateful performance at Ford’s Theatre five years later. Lincoln finished his last Gotcha! there on a night that just happened to fall on Good Friday.

Gotcha! isn’t limited to the political realm, of course. For instance, I bet all of you can tell some hair-raising versions drawn from a place of employment, especially as it pertains to career advancement or ducking blame. I suppose it’s only the most naïve who remain unaware of the Gotcha! currents and undertows in their various workaday and social environments. It’s an important political awareness to possess whether or not one is a deft player in a rough-and-tumble sort of way.

And then, I have witnessed it ravaging family systems, between spouses as well as between parents and children. Within families, Gotcha! always plays out destructively, because the notion of winners and losers is never a healthy dynamic within those intimate and supposedly nurturing relationships.

This gamesmanship came to mind as I read the little vignette from Luke we heard earlier. The story falls within a larger context that has Jesus teaching in the temple, where he’s asked a series of questions from a variety of people who are all playing a first century version of Gotcha!. His success has attracted a lot of attention and some now want him deposed. Perhaps if they can trap him in logical inconsistencies he’ll lose some of his glow.

Then as now, the fact that these righteous and learned types are after him means that Jesus has most definitely been noticed. I suppose he could take that as a positive development, but then, he wasn’t running for political office.

The subject of today’s Gotcha! has to do with the matter of resurrection. The Sadducees were a conservative religious party in Jesus’ day and as the text reports, did not believe in it. So their little game sets up an extreme scenario in which a woman’s husband dies. According to religious law, it was the obligation of the former husband’s brother to wed his widow. This man also dies, and after wedding each of the rest of the five more brothers, she also dies. So the Sadducees then ask, “So, Jesus, which husband will she be with in the resurrection?” And man, they think they really have him caught.

Now, when I got to this point in the story this week, I had a thought that had never occurred to me before. Rather than immediately considering the ins and outs of an afterlife, I began to wonder about this from the perspective of the woman. I mean, the fact is the law treated her as property to be passed from one man to another. She has throw-away value here, just a powerless pawn to help the self-righteous make their case. Granted, she’s a fictional character, but the fact this little fiction makes perfect sense to the questioners reflects the truthful situation for women at this point in time. They don’t see that, of course. They ask their question from within their own constricted frame of reference and world view.

This got me to wondering whether the Gotcha! scenario of winners and losers fosters this sort of take-it-for-granted approach to people more generally. That’s how my mind drifted to Lincoln’s Cooper Union address about slavery. Surely no class of persons fit the prototype for throw-away pawns better than America’s slaves. And you don’t have to spend much time with the journalism of those days to discover their terrible and dreadful role in the gamesmanship of Gotcha!.

Returning to our own time, I’m thinking you would surely agree with me that our sound-bite politics can’t do much more than make pawns out of persons whose lives are directly affected by macro policy decisions, whether we’re talking about abortion, medical care, immigration, or given that today happens to be Veteran’s Day, the treatment of our veterans. Indeed, on the matter of immigration, I often feel as though the shallow conversation could easily apply to ranchers fighting about cattle crossing onto someone else’s property, something that, say, a fence might solve. There’s little real engagement about real people living in real time going about living real lives with real constraints in competition with others’ rights and desires.

Now friends, I’m not promoting any specific politics here. Gotcha! is an addiction for Democrat and Republican alike. Today, I’m an equal opportunity critic. I’m simply telling you what happened to me as I started thinking about this little story from Luke, a story that seems to solve a riddle about the specifics of the afterlife, but winds up blowing open the conventions of the day. Because that’s what Jesus did, really.

And by the way, that was his real crime. He blew up the conventions of the day. That’s in large part why he wound up on a cross in just a few more chapters. You will notice that among other outcomes, his response to his questioners released the woman from bondage. Jesus claimed that in her future she was no longer held by the constricting protocols the self-righteous took for granted. In her future she was free. Given the rest of what he had to say, I think we can take this as emblematic of the truth for anyone who lives in any sort of bondage in this life, and by the way, that’s everyone, so far as I know – even you and me.

Their question had it wrong; it did not frame God’s reality. That’s the challenge I heard in the text this week. It’s the challenge Jesus always presents to those who have the ears to hear. He constantly attempts to re-frame his listeners’ perspective. He speaks from the point of view of a much, much larger frame of reference.

Friends, when we engage the gospel it’s prudent to assume we have something radically new to learn, whether we’re old-hands at this church stuff or neophytes. We can never be satisfied that we finally have what God has in mind pinned down. The moment we do that is the moment we start siding with the Sadducees. And in that moment, our religion sides with those who hold the jailhouse keys.

Whenever we crack open the pages of the Bible, or for that matter, the moment we open ourselves up in prayer, we should do this with humility and a desire for the grace to listen for the new thing that we’ve missed. This same openness is what allows us to extend God’s hospitality to ever-widening circles.

So here’s where I went with this line of thinking. I arrived at a new commitment to pay attention to the limits of my own point of view; to consider how it suffers from the ravages of a Gotcha! type of gamesmanship that springs up within our political, social, economic, even religious cultures. I will pay attention to how this tends to minimize and demean the lives of real people. I will assume that at least some of what I think I know takes others for granted in ways that I cannot see. And I will attempt to have my eyes fixed on God’s future where every sort of human bondage finds release, even my own. For as Jesus said, our God is a God of the living.

I’ve said this as a declarative statement, but I intend it as a prayer. If you’re willing, you could add your voice to my own. I would gladly welcome the company.

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