Sermon: Betrayal

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Betrayal

By Charles Rush

August 5, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 5.9Mb) ]

emailed 30 or 50 people and asked them for stories about betrayal, not that I know any experts on infidelity… I got some marvelous responses… but none of them do I use here.

I did, however, get quite a few jokes about the 1st Adulterer along the lines of “What does the President say to Mrs. Clinton after sex? I'll be home in half an hour.” And that was the only one remotely appropriate for Sunday morning…

We live in an interesting era when it comes to sexual fidelity. When polled, people express more empathy for monogamy and slightly more outrage about infidelity than a decade ago. Yet, the statistics on behavior are about the same, with more than a goodly number of people who have strayed at one point or another. The author Gunter Grass probably speaks for our era when he says ‘I am not faithful but I am attached.'

I was in Manhattan having dinner recently when I overheard a heated discussion at the table next to mine. The man said to his significant other ‘Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time.'

It reminded me of a mean joke that was made in yesteryear about Viscount Waldorf Astor, who owned Britian's two most influential newspapers, The Times and the Observer. It was said of his American wife Nancy that she had a wider circulation than both papers put together.

And if our sitcoms about Generation X are to be believed, sexual infidelity appears to be a regular enough occurrence that it the rising generation sees it as no big deal. They seem to live by the credo of Mae West who once remarked ‘I never loved another person the way I love myself.' Perhaps that is where we are headed.

But the jokes about infidelity and the reality of actual betrayal are quite different aren't they? Betrayal has so many faces but let's stay with sexual betrayal for a moment.

Susan Lewis was eating dinner with her husband one evening, when out of the blue she asked him ‘Sean, are you having an affair?' He squenched his face and just said ‘get out of here'. The conversation changed and they went on to something else.

A couple weeks went by and one day they were walking off the soccer field. Out of the blue she said to him again ‘Sean, are you having an affair?'

‘What are you talking about Susan?' and he went into a couple paragraphs about what a ridiculous idea that is.

A couple more weeks go by and she asks him the same thing. A little fight ensued between the two of them over who was the most irrational, who had the wildest imagination, who understood trust, etc..

A few more weeks go by and they are at a cocktail party one night. Susan is talking to some people when she happens to see her husband out of the corner of her eye. It is a casual exchange really. He had exchanged a few words with another woman and they walked on to other people. In that moment, Susan knew that was the woman. She knew who she was but they hadn't actually met. She was divorced, with a couple of children herself.

This thing started to sort of grow in Susan's head. She found herself thinking about it, wondering about, getting anxious about it, at the oddest times of the day.

One night she had just finished reading to the kids. Her husband was out of town on business. She called a babysitter to come watch her children, picked up the phone book and looked up this woman's address, got in her car and drove over to her house.

She is looking for house numbers in the rain. There, parked in front of the house, is her husband's car. She walked up the front walk to the door. She was going to ring the bell and she stopped. She reached for the handle on the door and it turned. She walked into the foyer and looked to her left into the living room. And there, on the floor of the living room, was her husband making love to another woman… in flagrante delicto…

Quite a long time later I asked her about what happened and her response was instructive. She said ‘I had no real image of them making love. My memory shielded me, I think. But there was one image I could never really get out of my head. It was my husband using his body to shield this woman in her nakedness. He didn't come running over to me. He didn't reach towards me and try to comfort me. He just protected her. That was really too much. I couldn't let go of that.'

That kept playing and playing. In her novel ‘Heartburn' Nora Ephron writes ‘When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened… without wondering what was really going on.'

It seems to me that the dialectical polar pair with faith is not doubt, though theologians have long held to that, and there is even some suggestion to that effect in the bible. The opposite of faith is not skeptical inquiry, God can handle that. The ying of faith has its yang in betrayal. That is what our story is about this morning. Jesus brings all of the disciples together for the Passover, to share a meal as a community of love, of solidarity, a community of spiritual unity and trust.

He too, has something of an intuition and he says ‘I tell you, one of you will betray me.' Leonardo da Vinci's depiction of the Last Supper captures this very moment, when all of the disciples break into gossip with one another. ‘What is he talking about? What do you know that I don't know?'

Almost collectively they turn to him and say, with incredulity in their voice, ‘who is it that will betray you, Lord?' It is like walking into a basement full of teenagers. You can smell alcohol in the air and you say ‘has anyone been drinking?' They look back at you, ‘Whaaa?' Who is it that will betray you, Lord?

Jesus has an enigmatic answer ‘He who dips his hand in the dish with me.' Of course, that is everyone. And they all eventually fall away, with an eerie predictability almost as though it were scripted from the foundations of the universe. Nothing is scripted like that but some parts of our character are so predictable they appear like that.

And there is a pathos in his answer too. ‘He who dips his hand in the dish with me.' In other words, it is someone I have shared most intimately with, someone I have mentored, someone I care about very much, someone I share meals with. This is a most inside job. There is nothing quite like that breech.

In the late eighties when mergers and acquisitions led to massive lay-off's, Brent Scofield was asked to be part of a merger team that was to downsize his software company from 700 to 70. He was the CEO of the company that had been acquired and the new companies first order of business was to ask him to work with four exec's from the acquiring firm to fire 630 of the employees that he had recruited and developed over the past 12 years. It was far more drastic than he anticipated, but at some point he sensed it was also inevitable. So he worked with the management of the firm that had bought them, trying to do the ugly in the least ugly way. He did what he could to try to help out a few people but in the end it was butt ugly. Lay-off's came in waves. This team would meet in the conference room, determine the list. The next day, a division was called to a group meeting to discuss reorganization- what a euphemism. Then they proceeded back to their offices where an envelope met them on their desk with a thumbs up or down, the huge groups of downs being escorted out of the building by security. Day after day this went on, former colleagues sneering at Brent on their way out the door as he stood in the conference room with the hatchet guys from the new management team. He was feeling worse and worse, with hardly any comrades left save the new management team that had formed something of a bond of stealth together. Brent had effectively fired 95% of the people he had worked with for the last decade, people he had built up, who had sacrificed for him and put together what was once a winning product.

On the last day of cuts, after the last division meeting, he walked back to his office to gather his wits. It was a moment before he noticed that an envelope sat on his desk. He opened it, and looked through the glass doors of his corner office where he could see the four other guys on the new management team huddled in the hall. The security guard motioned to him to follow him out the door. His personal belongings had already been gathered in a box. As he walked by the other four, no one said a thing.

You think you are together. You have been making plans. You thought you knew what was going on. You made personal sacrifices so that these people could develop well being. You trusted. The bastards, they can't get away with this.

Once the trust is gone how hard it is to rebuild. Emotions of a visceral, primordial kind explode within you, sometimes so great that you scare even yourself that you could feel with this depth of feeling. And every time you see these people, those feelings come back. Certain images play in your head over and over and you can't really get rid of them. They seem to have a life of their own and just randomly pop into your mind and completely take over what you were thinking about. People who have gone through a divorce, for example, report that these thoughts and images sometimes go on for years. Like the pain of grief, you learn how to take them out of their box and put them back in the box when they are done so that you are not immobilized by them for years, but they are a reality to be dealt with. It is a spiritual fissure that has to be delicately traversed time and again.

So many of our protracted struggles around the world are fueled by the exploitation of these fissures rather than dealing with them delicately. I could list innumerable examples but just take one out of the headlines, Serbia. The present struggle can be traced back centuries to the Ottoman Empire when the Turks who ruled the region made adherence to Islam a requirement for Civil service and privilege in business. Some of the folks converted, some did not. When the Hapsburg's later ruled the region, the Christians reversed fortunes and bestowed privilege on their own, inflicting persecution on the Muslims. The principal reasons this conflict has outlived its allotted nine lives is that the people of this region are all ethnically related. Every side feels betrayed by their own and there is no hurt so deep as that which happens in the tribe. It can live on forever, it seems. Almost invariably, when you meet someone from this region: Orthodox, Muslim, or Roman Catholic, they will begin a discussion of the issue with a long litany of horrors that the other two groups have perpetrated against them. And the longer you let them go unchecked, the more animated and alive they seem to become. They go on and on and on and soon you think ‘this is an impasse for which there is no bridge.'

How can that bridge be made? And that brings me to the table. For the ying of our lives is betrayal in its many facets, I've only mentioned a couple today but we are more full of guile and cunning and moral compromise than we can admit to ourselves much less a pollster on the phone.

How can we get beyond betrayal? The long march of human history suggests that we can't really. At least, we don't. What is surprising about Jesus is that he serves us at the table anyway. He doesn't ignore our moral and spiritual malaise. He doesn't pretend that it is not important or that it doesn't hurt. But God meets us anyway, intimately, personally, humanly.

I'm no longer sure that you can really understand what it means that God reconciles us to Godself unless you can also understand the depth of what it means to be betrayed. Whatever else salvation means, it points in a direction of a process that is as profound and difficult and uncertain the reconciliation of two people, one who has betrayed the other. It is no less than re-establishing that trust that can't really be re-established on human terms because the human hurt is overwhelming. It has to hope for some divine opening that makes a new way possible where we cannot, a healing way, a reconciling way, perhaps through a most ordinary event like a touch, a glance, a meal shared together.

The story of the table is a story that the reconciling grace of God is bigger than our selfish betrayal. Despite the worst of what we can be on our weak days, God still comes after us. Difficult as it is, impossible as it may seem at times, there is a way to be healed, and that healing is what God wants for us. God wants a return to the trust. That is the simple and profound power that is available today sharing together a simple meal. May God's grace wash over you through the Supper this day. Amen.