Sermon 8.17.25 Our Interpretation Problem

Sermon Begins at 18:37

Jesus pulls no punches this morning does he?

And his message for us is this:  As humans, we have an interpretation problem.

And this is what I’m moved to preach to you about this morning; our interpretation problems.

The playwrights and history writers of ancient Greece knew something about the conundrum Jesus addresses in the gospel today.

Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Diodorus, etc…

They knew that the build up to a tragedy nearly always hinges on an interpretation problem.

After the famous Spartan 300 failed to hold the pass at Thermopylae, and the invading Persians began to make their way to the city of Athens in 479 BCE,

Legend says that an oracle was received by the Athenians about how they could defeat the Persians;

“You will be saved by your wooden walls.”

A bit opaque, wouldn’t you agree?

And the Athenians also thought it was opaque.  What does it mean to be saved by your wooden walls.

They had very little time to debate.

Some of the leading citizens and military leaders insisted that the wooden walls that would save them were the walls of the Acropolis.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Athens, but essentially, it is a valley that leads down to the coast, and in the midst of the valley are a few massive plateaus.

The central one, on which the ancient Greeks built many temples is the Acropolis.

On most sides, it is a shear cliff.

At the time of the Persian invasion, the Acropolis had a wooden wall built around its edges.

These wooden walls, the theory went, were the walls that would keep the Athenians safe during the Persian siege,

Tragically, the Persians figured out how to climb the shear cliff face unseen and open the gates for their army, causing the destruction of the Acropolis and many many Athenians.

Returning back to the run up to the battle, there was a second group who had an interpretation of what “wooden walls” would save Athens.

Some interpreted that to mean that the Navy would be the salvation of Athens, and indeed at the Battle of Salamis in the waters just south of Athens, the Greek forces tallied their first victory against Xerxes and his Persian armies.

Within a few months, other Greek city-states gathered armies to rebuff the invasion and won the decisive victory at the Battle of Plataea.

The Persian general Mardonius - with an interpretation problem of his own - thought he had seen the Greek forces retreating and he rushed into unfavorable terrain.

He lost almost his whole army and his own life.

And we could go through examples from the tragedies of the Greek playwrights, where the crux of the tragedy almost always hinges on an interpretation problem.

Oedipus failing to really hear Tiresias’ warning in Oedipus Rex, Jason of Argonaut fame failing to here the warning in Medea’s rage at his infidelity to their marriage.

So many of the tragic events of our lives and in the lives of history and fiction understand that the crux of a tragedy is a failed interpretation.

To make this biblical, let me ask you this; in our Isaiah passage for this morning, does the destruction come from outside of the vineyard or from within?

It begins with God’s love song to his grape vineyard, Judah and Jerusalem.

But despite all of the tending that God did, somehow, inexplicably, wild grapes.

So, God removed the wall and the hedge, stopped tending the garden.

How should we interpret this passage? Did God destroy the garden? Or was it destroyed by its own turning away from Justice and Righteousness toward bloodshed and violence?

How should we interpret this passage?

I want to say to you today that how we interpret this passage in the United States of America today matters.

Does the greatest danger come from the outside, or from within; from enemies abroad or from our own cruel hearts?

Jesus says, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, `It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"

It is a warning - for those who know how to hear - that tragedy follows misinterpretation.

And Jesus desperately wants us to hear this message.

The problem for us is that with so much noise surrounding us all of the time, how do we even know WHAT we’re supposed to interpret?

Do we get carried away on every small disturbance that crosses our news feed?

Do we possibly think of something as no big deal, but it turns out to be a very big deal?

Do we get led astray by one thing that takes all of the oxygen out of the room, while the real thing is surreptitiously sneaking around beyond our notice?

What are the signs that we should be interpreting?

The hallmark of disinformation and conspiracy theories is that they have all of the signs – all of the data points - but the way they connect the dots leads to wild and improbable interpretations.

And it has gotten to the point where even the tragic results of these interpretations aren’t enough to slow down the next erroneous interpretation and the next tragedy.

I mean, we’re living in a world where the interpretation of January 6^th 2021 is still up for debate.

Where crowds of people who regularly display those American flags with the thin blue line attacked the same police that they say they support.

And nobody sees the contradiction, because instead of accepting the simplest answer; that people who had been lied to attacked people they say they support,

They reinterpreted their already bad interpretation to assuage their cognitive dissonance and started talking about the “deep state” conspiracy.

My interpretation problem this week was that when I saw a video of ICE agents jumping out of a Penske truck with masks on and carrying assault rifles, I immediately equated them to the nazis who invaded Lincoln Heights, jumping out of a Uhaul with masks on and carrying assault rifles.

In the continuing War on Gaza, there are yet more interpretation problems. 

Last year, Benjamin Netanyahu interpreted the story of Esther in a particular way – comparing Haman, the evil chancellor to king Ahasuerus, to Hamas.

This was intentional, because the end of the Book of Esther is a bloody reprisal by the Hebrew people against Haman and his supporters; the murder of thousands of people according to the Book of Esther.

The problem is that though the October 7^th attack was horrific, the reprisals and continuation of reprisals is now religiously underpinned by a biblical folk tale that ends with revenge porn, written by a people who dreamed of escaping their Babylonian captivity.

Now, before I get political, let’s come to the principle of the matter: good interpretation requires that we have good data, a good conscience, and a proper rationality grounded in a healthy and ethical skepticism of our own perceptions.

So, let’s talk about rationality and perception for just a minute.

Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.

In that book, Kant laid the groundwork for dismantling much of the rationalist positivism of the Enlightenment.

(just as a footnote, what I mean about rationalist positivism was the pervading idea of the time that if any human had a certain set of data points, human reason in and of itself would lead each person to the same logical and reasonable conclusion.  Our ideas of “common sense” come out of this kind of rationalist positivism. I think, in the age of “truthiness” and “alternative facts” that we can mostly agree that this kind of trust in human rationality is untenable)

Kant claimed – against the arguments of rationalists – that we don’t observe the world as it actually is.

When we see something, or hear something, or use any of our other senses, those perceptions enter into the interpretive structures of our minds and come out as an interpretation of the world, not a reflection of the world itself.

For Kant, there is no pure reason, no pure rationality. Therefore, we should interrogate our reality, our perceptions of reality, on a regular basis.

And yet, because of the Enlightenment, we still go around acting as if our perceptions of the world reflect the world as it actually is.

We keep going around as if any points of data can be connected together by our reasoning faculties and that whatever the output, it must be the truth.

We already know that data can be skewed, that stories can be so ideologically tainted that even the facts can’t be confirmed.

We already see that our images and videos can be manipulated to make us see something that is grossly misleading.

Some of you may remember the Economist magazine ran a cover photo of President Obama after the BP oil spill in Louisiana, where a coast guard admiral and the parish president Charlotte Randolph were cropped out of the photo to make it look as if the president was alone and dejected.

Kant said that we could be misled by the world as we see it. Imagine what he would think about the state of our media, where we can’t even trust that what we are shown is an accurate portrayal of the world.

And the rise of AI is going to make things even more complicated.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that about 75% of the videos that Facebook pushes to me at this point are AI generated.

And there are times when I look at something and can’t tell, so I just have to assume that it is AI generated.

Artificial Intelligence is crude right now…

You see a video of a scuba diver using a circular saw under water to get a car tire off of a seal.

It looks a little strange, but it could be believable except that everytime the camera moves the barnacles and moss that are stuck to this poor helpless seal keep moving around.

It’s laughable, but it’s also so realistic that unless you had those subtle clues, you would completely believe that what you were seeing was real.

What happens when AI actually gets really good?

What happens to our ability to interpret things then?

And what does it do to our ability to trust, if we wonder what is fake and what is real?

We are moving into a new promised land, a Brave New World; what can we put our trust in that never fails?  How can we make sure that we are interpreting the world around us as faithfully as possible?

As the world changes so rapidly that we have a hard time keeping up, what remains stable, gives us grounding?

What is the solid rock and what is the sinking sand as the old song says?

I would suggest to you that the moral and ethical clarity of your baptismal covenant is one;

Renouncing things that destroy the creatures of God, Satan and the spiritual forces of evil in this world, and the sin that draws each of us away from God;

Accepting those things that have drawn you to God; Jesus our Savior, Grace and Love, Obedience to His call on your life; even when – and especially when – it is inconvenient.

Continue to tell people the Good News of Jesus, Seek and Serve Christ in every person you meet, strive for justice and peace, respect the dignity of every human being.

Continue in the faith of the apostles who taught us to share community and communion together.

Your baptismal covenant is a solid rock in the midst of troubled waters.

A second one is your family.

Jesus was absolutely correct that in troubled times, families can be torn apart.

I’ve seen this in my own family as we fail to interpret the times in the same way.

As we celebrate the Black Family Reunion this weekend, we hear over and over from the leaders and speakers about the importance of the black family, and fighting against the powers that are trying to disintegrate them.

Too many of our kids don’t have enough stability at home to trust that they are safe, so they turn to other things and other people to get their solace.

If our kids continue to interpret the world as a place where they need to imitate the bravado of drug dealers, have a gun to survive, and steal their daily bread to get fed…

More families will lose sons and brothers, sisters, wives, friends and neighbors.

This is one of the reasons why our Justice HUB is so important to the life of our neighborhood.

It’s why we are trying to get a new worship service rolling that will help bridge the gap between our Common Prayer that we all love and the cultural expression that will make it approachable.

It’s why we are starting an afterschool program, which you will be able to volunteer to help with.

One single, safe adult can be the solid rock for a kid; the difference between self-belief and hope, or continuing the cycle of trauma on the streets.

We need to be interpreters of the times and put ourselves in the place where healing is needed.

The answer to the questions of our time is to put faith in those things that are stable and solid;

To enter with courage into the changing world and to tell people about that which is unchangeable.

Our job is to proclaim the gospel and its timeless ethos in a world that changes everytime the wind blows.

St. Andrew’s, we have to be about it.

Healing will come from nowhere else in the world than from the faith of those who are willing to stand in the breach with Jesus.

You stand among so great a cloud of witnesses; interpreters of their times, keepers of the faith; those who clung, those who ran the race, looking to Jesus and persevering in the troubled waters.

What is the interpretation of these days that will carry you through?

That faith abounds, that faith will carry you through, and that – Jesus help us – the perfecter of faith is on the side of those who interpret with integrity.

Amen.