Proper 22, A

Isaiah 5:1-7

Matthew 21:33-46

Martin Luther once claimed that sometimes you have to squeeze a Biblical passage until it leaks the gospel. This is one of those biblical passages.

Honestly, I started this week already wrung out – wrung out from headlines of the incomprehensible random deadly violence in Las Vegas, wrung out from evolving news of death and violence on a huge scale in Myanmar, wrung out from continuing escalation of preparations to perpetrate mass destruction by nuclear weapons.

The Gospel, long my ally in a search for hope and peace and love and justice, this week greeted me with beatings and stonings and killings, followed by plans for divine retribution, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death,” paving the way for notions of an exclusionary, aloof, angry, vengeful God. I cannot in good faith preach this version of God. This is not a God I know.

So, we squeeze for the Gospel, for the Good news.

First, some context. Jesus is having a tough week. He’s no longer preaching and teaching and healing from boats and mountainsides. He’s in Jerusalem. He’s already tipped over the money changers’ tables at the temple, He’s challenged the religious authorities on their own turf. He’s angered powerful people with a truth they had no wish to hear. His end approaches and he is running out of time for subtleties.

Jesus tells His harshest critics and most adamant enemies, this wild, violent, improbable story – one which his audience of chief priests and pharisees would recognize immediately as hearkening back to Isaiah’s love song. He manages to have the religious authorities pronounce their own sentence by their own sense of justice. The brutal words of retribution, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death”, come from the mouths of the chief priests and pharisees – not from the mouth of Jesus. Jesus replies, pointedly not with “yeah verily and forsooth”, not with confirmation of that death sentence or inevitable propagation of violence, but rather with scripture from the Psalms,

‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes’?

Jesus, stripped of all power, all influence, stripped even of his life, becomes the cornerstone, the steadfast base for the creation of new spiritual life.

The pharisees and the chief priests the tenants of the beloved’s vineyard have lost sight of the expectations of the Lord: justice not bloodshed, righteousness not cries. The loss of the kingdom follows their own break of relationship with the Lord of Hosts, not vengeful retribution of a cranky God.

“The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls,” says Jesus

“How often it is,” says the Rev. Suzanne Guthrie,
“How often it is”
while straining to see an answer
upon the distant horizon
I stub my toe
against the solution
at my feet.” (Suzanne Guthrie, Edge of the Enclosure)

It would be easy to distance ourselves from this story. The Pharisees and chief priests represent the villain in virtually every Gospel story, particularly in Gospel of Matthew. Matthew preached to a vulnerable Jewish religious minority, threatened by the establishment as represented by those groups. Indeed, this text has been preached for centuries in its strict allegorical sense: the landowner as God, the vineyard as Israel, the wicked tenants as the Jews and the Cornerstone as Jesus. It thus provided centuries of scriptural justification for antisemitism.

Even stripped of the misuse of this text encouraging antisemitism, banishing it safely to the confines of ancient history relieves us of the burden of its violence and retribution, as well as responsibility for that vineyard. It also robs us of the drips of good news leaking from this story.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.” We are the tenants now. We hold responsibility for protecting God’s oceans and skies, for loving God’s children – especially the unlovable ones, for feeding the hungry, for protecting the powerless, for speaking truth to the powerful, for re-envisioning justice in light of compassion rather than retribution, for squeezing out the Good News.

“And for me, this week,” writes one pastor, “that good news means in part that violence does not and will not have the last word. That the only response to violence is not more violence. That tragedy and death and loss and hatred are, in the end, no match for love and life and forgiveness and peace.” (David Lose)

Fr. Flor McCarthy, S.D.B. offers this:
Let us pray – Lord, you planted me on this earth.
You fenced me around with the love of family and friends.
Their care towered over me.
In the shelter of this tower I grew in safety and peace.
I put out early blossoms; I filled up with Leaves.
People had great hopes for me.
You had great hopes for me.
But now the year of my life is passing.
The harvest is approaching.
What fruit have I to show?
What if after all this care I had nothing to offer but sour grapes?
May you Lord have mercy on me,
and with your patient urging
help me to produce the fruits of Love.
Amen.

Proper 20, A

Jonah 3:10-4:11

Matthew 20:1-16

“They shall publish the remembrance of your great goodness;” the psalmist declares. “they shall sing of your righteous deeds.”

Except nobody really seems to be singing about God’s righteous deeds today. Jonah certainly isn’t. Jonah is angry. “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. Jonah understands the goodness of God with crystal clarity, and that very goodness has got him so bent out of shape he’s practically a pretzel.

We all remember Jonah from Sunday school – perhaps more for his imagination-stimulating time in a piscine belly than for the rest of his story. A refresher. Jonah is a prophet. Sort of. He doesn’t exactly follow in the footsteps of your typical prophet. God tells him to go to Ninevah – home of Israel’s enemies, a dissolute and decadent bunch and spread the word of God. Expressing his disinclination for the assignment in actions rather than words, Jonah hops on a boat going the other direction entirely, into rather nicer territory. Demonstrating an omniscience that should surely not have been surprising to a prophet, God finds him out and raises a horrible storm that convinces the sailors to dump him out as fish food. Eventually delivered from his unpromising position in the digestive tract of the sea creature and called a second time to prophesy to Ninevah, Jonah opts for obedience, but an obedience without enthusiasm. Jonah trudges across the land repeating a mere 8 words over and over, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Ninevah’s shocking response belongs in the Prophet Hall of Fame. First of all they didn’t kill him, which is the best you can realistically expect as a prophet – it’s a very dangerous occupation – but even more than that, his words found purchase. He gained not a few followers, but a complete capitulation of the entire population right down to the livestock. His words, his acts, saved 120,000 people and their chickens and their cows. Thanks be to God! Far from jubilant, Jonah sulks with the drama of a teenager caught out after curfew.

Fast forward 500 years. Peter, presumably speaking for all the disciples asks, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?’ Jesus makes some generally reassuring assertions, then tells the parable we just read. One homiletics professor describes this parable as the scriptural equivalent of cod liver oil: “You know Jesus is right, you know it must be good for you, but that does not make it any easier to swallow.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven, p. 100).

Parables mean to place us into a situation, make us identify with the characters in the story. True confessions: when I read this story I take my place in the field early or maybe with the 9:00 crew on a particularly humble day. Their anger is my anger; their envy my envy. No matter how many times I read this text, I feel the unfairness of the largesse offered to the newcomers after all my hard work. No matter how many times I read this text, I am surprised by the landowner’s question, “are you envious because of my generosity?” Well, yes actually. Or frustrated anyway. Its not fair! God’s not fair!

Fair is not a God concept, not a Kingdom thing. Love, yes. Grace, most certainly. Justice, again and again. But we cannot equate justice with fairness.

There is a marvelous cartoon with 3 people of differing heights, 3 boxes of the same height, and a fence with something interesting happening on the other side. In the first pane, labeled “fair”, each person stands on a box. The tallest towers over the fence, the medium-sized fellow can just peek over, and the smallest cannot see, even on tiptoe. In the second pane, labeled “just”, all three stand looking just over the fence – the tallest with no assistance, the second on one box and the shortest on 2.

As long as fair means getting what is deserved God will not be fair. As long as fair means offering more (money, attention, effort, whatever) buys you value relative to God’s other children God will not be fair. That is the human world, not God’s. It’s Jonah’s world, where Jonah hated his enemy so deeply that he could not rejoice in the salvation of an entire country. It’s the laborer’s world, where enough is not enough if someone less worthy also gets it. It’s our world where we measure our lives against the yardstick that is another person’s life – He who dies with the most toys wins, might makes right, etc.

That is not God. God is not fair.

Not fair when God values the last to come just as much as the first to arrive. Not fair when God calls us back again and again even after we flee defiantly in the opposite direction from his call. Not fair when God sits with us in the belly of whatever whale of a problem has swallowed us whole. Not fair when God takes in that one last worker, the one no one else would hire. Not fair when his unlimited, unstinting grace washes over us all buoying us up in the endless ocean of Godly love. God is not fair. Thanks be to God!

Proper 19, A

Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13
Matthew 18:21-35

My mother will tell you – assuming she is not all concerned about being proper and diplomatic at the time – my mother will tell you that my father is prone to a certain amount of hyperbole. Just to be sure I was telling you the truth with this assertion, I asked Mother yesterday, “Would you say that Dad has been known to engage in a certain amount of hyperbole from time to time?” She snorted. The woman actually snorted – the mere question represented its own hyperbole. I remember dinner conversations with Dad as being filled with colorful language and images, enormous numbers and over-arching pronouncements. At various times in his career he was working on projects that he could not actually discuss in any detail at the dinner table, so his stories suffered a dearth of actual nouns, but never did we experience any shortage of active verbs, vivid, graphic adjectives and dramatic adverbs. My husband asserts that hyperbole appears to be an inherited trait, and so it may be. But it serves a purpose.

If, in fact, my father and I indulge in a touch of hyperbole now and again, for the sake of making a crucial point, we travel in good company. Jesus uses the technique frequently – always to good purpose – with today’s lesson being one of the most famous of them. 10,000 talents Jesus’s unforgiving servant owed. The absurdity of the size of that debt does not quite come through to our modern ears. Biblical scholar Eugene Boring ran some numbers. King Herod’s annual income from all taxes from all his territories was a mere 900 talents per year. This suggests 10,000 talents would exceed all of the taxes of Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria as well. (Info via Rev. Frank Logue, Sermons that Work). On a more individual note, one single talent was worth about 130 lbs. of silver – 15 years of earnings for a typical laborer. The servant owed the king about 150,000 years of labor! (David Lose, In the Meantime). Hyperbole. To make a point. The question is, what point…exactly.

I’ve heard it said that there are really only about 6 or 7 sermons ever written. They all just take different forms from week to week and pulpit to pulpit: The love sermon, the resurrection sermon, the justice sermon and so on. Jesus spends a great deal of time on the subject of forgiveness – even the old testament doesn’t stint on the subject. Witness Joseph’s gracious reaction to his brothers in our first reading. Surely forgiveness sermon has earn a place among those precious 6, but it remains perhaps the least popular of the whole bunch. “Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “until they have something to forgive, … And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger.”

Forgiveness messes with our sense of self image as well as our sense of right, and justice and balance. We balk at staring our own indebtedness in the face while simultaneously resisting any suggestion another should not pay us our due.

How many times should I forgive?, asks Peter. As many as 7? Jewish law dictated a maximum of 3. Peter wasn’t always the brightest bulb on the string, but Peter got the idea that forgiveness was important. He more than doubled the going offer of available forgivenesses. Peter, like so many of us, suffered from the notion that God sits up there with God’s big ledger, jotting down offenses, tracking mistakes, noting foolish behaviors. So we follow along in the image we created of God, carefully recording that which hurts us, pains us, grieves us. We fail to understand that “What God really is holding,” as one astute preacher writes, “is a [not a ledger but a] dance card with all of our names on it, just waiting for the Holy Spirit to kick the dance off with a swing piece so God can sweep us off our feet and into the arms of grace. And then [God] hands us off to that dance partner who is always stepping on our toes, so we can teach the steps of forgiveness to them.” (Thom M. Shuman, Midrash, personal communication)

The Spirituality of Imperfection describes psychology research which suggests that forgiving another is indelibly attached to the experience of being forgiven. “We do not forgive; instead we discover forgiveness in both its forms – both that we have been forgiven and the we have forgiven. Spirituality’s mutuality holds true here as everywhere: we are forgiven only if we are open to forgiving, but we are able to forgive only in being forgiven.” The unforgiving servant created his own torture – “By refusing to be forgiven and refusing to forgive, he had already created his own little Alcatraz, where he sat in solitary confinement with his calculator and kept track of his accounts.” (Barbara Brown Taylor)

The ledger, the reckoning is not important Jesus effectively says. 7 times? No – 77, or 7 times 70 – the number cannot even be definitively translated. The numbers (my apologies to the mathematically minded among us) the numbers aren’t the point. Just more. More than you can track. More than you can imagine. More than they deserve. More than they ever can deserve in 150,000 years. The numbers aren’t the point. The relationship is the point.

Rather than sinking under the weight of your own sinfulness, or struggling against an inability to forgive that Anne LaMott describes as feeling “like drinking rat poison, and then waiting around for the rat to die.” – rather than these consider this pastor’s approach, “Connect with God’s glorious forgiveness. Consider the One to whom you owe everything—your breath, your life, your hair color, your love of summer flowers and fall vegetables, your strength to shovel winter snow, your delight in spring’s cherry blossoms. Consider the One who has carried you thus far in life—the One who gives you your capacity to love, and your call to be part of this faith community, the One who picks up the slack when you are stretched too far, the One who walks with you on the path of grief and promises you new life, the One gives you fire in your belly to serve those in need. (Rev. Barbara Heck)

This is the dance of life and love in Christ. The ebb and flow of living forgiveness, giving and receiving, knowing and bestowing, back and forth in the rhythm of the Spirit. O bless the Lord, my soul! Amen.

Proper 18, A

Matthew 18:15-20

A number of Christian denominations have taken a stance against the use of tobacco, along with any number of other dubious pursuits: alcohol, dancing, gambling, going to the theater and so on. When those denominations thrive, as they often do, in parts of the country dominated economically by tobacco, they tend, despite their official stance, to overlook the fact that a large percentage of their congregation make their living from the noxious weed. One preacher tells the story of a Pentecostal Church that suffered no such selective blindness.

Each spring, the tobacco farmers at Pentecostal Holiness could expect a visit from the preacher once they planted their crops. In accordance with the scripture we heard today, the Preacher would go to the farmers and read them both that scripture and the section in the Pentecostal Holiness Discipline forbidding involvement in “the tobacco trade”. Assuming the farmer persisted in earning his living in the same way, the preacher would repeat his visit a few weeks later accompanied by a few of the elders of the church. Later in the spring, the preacher, the elders, and the women and children of the congregation would gather together to perform the solemn duty of excommunicating their fathers and husbands and brothers, after which everyone went home for Sunday dinner. After the harvest, the preacher, the elders, the women and the children would all gather together again to joyfully restore their fathers, husbands and brothers to the bosom of the church, hopefully in time for the church to collect a tithe on the proceeds of the sale…. (Thanks to Rev. Delmer Chilton for the story).

The struggle between those who would take the words of scripture at face value and those who allow interpretation is not new. In the last century BCE two Torah scholars, Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai founded differing schools of rabbinical thought. It is said that the Rabbi Shammai binds and Rabbi Hillel loosens.

According to one scholar “… the terms “to bind” and “to loose” are best understood with reference to a practice of determining the application of scriptural commandments for contemporary situations. … Jewish rabbis “bound” the law when they determined that a commandment was applicable to a particular situation, and they “loosed” the law when they determined that a word of scripture (while eternally valid) was not applicable under certain specific circumstances.”

“In (Matthew) 5:21-23, Jesus binds the law prohibiting murder as applicable to anger and insults”. “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” [But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell of fire.]
“In (Matthew) 12:9-14, Jesus looses the prohibition against performing work on the sabbath with regard to works of healing and then declares, “It is lawful to do good on the sabbath.” The latter pronouncement would potentially allow sabbath prohibitions to be loosed in a great many other instances as well.” -Mark Allen Powell, December 2003, Currents in Theology and Mission (Vol. 30 Issue 6)

Jesus was talking to his disciples in today’s foreshadowing of conflict in community. So, now, today, what do we as those would follow Christ do with all this? How do we deal with all this binding and loosing? How do we avoid the trap of 2 or 3 on this side of the aisle agreeing to ask for one thing and 2 or 3 on that side agreeing to ask for the opposite and each 2 or 3 together considering themselves justified by God in the asking and guaranteed by God in the getting?

Back to our Rabbis: The Talmud tells the story of a gentile who approached Rabbi Shammai. He desired conversion, but only if Shammai could teach him the Torah as he stood on one foot. Shammai took offense at the ridiculous demand, and drove the potential convert away with his measuring stick. Hillel, notoriously slow to anger, honored the gentile’s request and converted him saying, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.”

Jesus clearly anticipated conflict because, well because Jesus wasn’t stupid, and people are people. Where 2 or 3 of them are gathered together, Christ may be among them, but so are at least 2 or 3 or maybe 4 sets of opinions, and sets of priorities, notions of justice, senses of right and wrong.

In his book The Great Divorce, the British writer C.S. Lewis paints this picture of hell. “Hell is like a vast gray city, Lewis says, a city inhabited only at its outer edges, with rows and rows of empty houses in the middle—empty because everyone once lived in them has quarreled with the neighbors and moved, and quarreled with the new neighbors and moved again, leaving empty streets full of empty houses behind them. That, Lewis says, is how hell got so large—empty at the center and inhabited only at the fringes—because everyone in it chose distance instead of confrontation as the solution to a fight.” (Quoted from Barbara Brown Taylors, The Seeds of Heaven)

Jesus delivers us in this script from the hell that is grey isolation within our own walls of internal righteousness, not just in his instructions (1st, to to them, 2nd go with others and so on), but most especially in his delineation of consequences: Let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector”. It sounds so harsh, so just for one recalcitrant to all the normal behavioral remedies. Until we remember Jesus. Remember Jesus? Jesus who consorted with tax collectors. Matthew himself was a tax collector. Jesus, perpetually in hot water for his behavior with Gentiles – the woman at the well? The canaanite woman whose daughter had a demon? The roman centurion whose daughter was sick? Jesus did not shun them, punish them, excommunicate them. He loved them, healed them, blessed them.

We have choices: “we can bind ourselves into our separate camps and polarized positions. We can loose each other out into a world without the benefit of Christian fellowship, driving each other from the church with wounds that bleed for years to come.

Or we can loose ourselves from our pride and our ever-present need to be right. We can loose one another from assumptions and stereotypes and bitterness. We can loose our church communities from the fear of church conflict. And then we can bind ourselves together with the unbreakable love of Christ, a body tested, refined, healed and flourishing with new life.” (The Rev. Whitney Rice, Sermons that Work, 2014)

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “That’s what we are called to do: to confront and make up, to forgive and seek forgiveness, to heal and be healed—to throw a block party smack in the middle of the deserted center of hell and fill the place with such music and laughter, such merriment and mutual affection that all the far-flung residents come creeping in from all their distant outposts to see what the fuss, the light, the joy is all about.”

Amen and amen

Proper 17, A
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

Christianity has been accused of many things: sometimes with justification and sometimes without. It deserves the credit for great acts of courage, and self sacrifice and love; for hospitals, shelters, soup kitchens, and charities. It bears the blame for horrific acts of hatred exemplified in the crusades, pogroms, support of slavery and white supremacy, and shaming of non-conformers of whatever stripe. Christianity stands accused of being unreasonably optimistic, disgracefully intolerant and even, particularly among certain age groups, of being mind bogglingly boring. Christianity has never, so far as I know, never, ever, in all the charges leveled been accused of being logical.

One writer kept a list… (Debie Thomas, Journey with Jesus – edited list)
God is One, and God is Three….
Jesus is God and Jesus is human…
He’s the beginning and he’s the end.
The Bible is God’s Word, …[the Bible is] a library authored by humans.
Creation is good, and creation is broken.
We bear God’s image, and we carry deep flaws.
To give is to receive.
To die is to live.
To pardon is to be pardoned.
The weak are strong.
The foolish are wise….
The kingdom of God is coming, and the kingdom of God is already here.”

“The messiah will save the nation; the messiah will die humiliated.”

Rocks are not known for being flexible and Simon, newly christened Peter the Rock is no exception. You are the Messiah, Peter said. And Jesus gave him great kudos for that insight. The cornerstone of the church. Except for Peter “Messiah” meant something quite specific. Something involving horses and swords and armies and vanquished enemies and well, winning. Jesus’s sudden illogical paradox caught him by surprise – suffering and torture and death had no part in his salvation plans.

Occasionally, in the labor room (if you’re someone who has the opportunity to hang out in labor rooms), you see a woman, doing what needs doing – coping as she can, in pain and sounding like it. A sweet, supportive partner comes to her, gently holds her hand and softly says, “It’s ok, honey. It’s not that bad. Just breathe, it’ll be ok”. “This.is.not.ok. It’s not going to be ok. NOT.OK”. The poor partner’s face at that point is much as I would imagine the face of the well-meaning but somewhat oblivious Peter’s as he tried to redirect Jesus – Jesus who knew well what his own labor of love would require, and that it would not be OK – not the way Peter meant.

Suffering comes. Suffering happens. Ask the people of Houston, where at least 50 people have died and 30,000 or more are displaced from their homes due to flooding. Ask the people of Southeast Asia where flooding has claimed over 1,000 lives and countless homes. Ask the people of East Africa (South Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia) who are starving due to drought. Ask the woman laboring. Ask families watching a loved one die. Ask a parent unable financially to care for her children.

Suffering – our own, other peoples’ – it is overwhelming and every instinct in us says to avoid it, protect ourselves against it, deny it. Just as Peter did. Just as the world does.

Jesus calls us to a different way. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” To be clear, Jesus does not enjoin us to search out, to embrace, or to welcome suffering for the sake of suffering. His invitation to take up the cross does not mean to accept or condone abuse of any kind. His entire life and Good News was based in protecting the vulnerable. His call to deny self and take up the cross bids us follow him in the way of freedom and peace.

Barbara Brown Taylor expresses it thus: “The deep secret of Jesus’ hard words to us, is that our fear of suffering and death robs us of life, because fear of death always turns into fear of life, into a stingy, cautious way of living that is not living at all. The deep secret of Jesus’ hard words is that the way to have abundant life is not to save it but to spend it, to give it away, because life cannot be shut up and saved.”

Paul lays it out in our epistle: Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

According to NPR, when Houston started to flood a furniture store owner, Jim McIngvale, known as Mattress Mack, posted a video online: “Come on over.” He gave out his personal phone number. When some storm victims couldn’t make it across flooded streets, McIngvale’s drivers went to collect them in his delivery trucks. McIngvale also has food for the evacuees – and he invited them to bring their pets, too. (Condensed from David Shearman, A Community Covenant, Midrash, personal communication)

One pastor shares this:

In the flood that is this life
some waters will sweep your home away
and others stop at your doorstep.
There is no choosing, no deserving
in their rising or receding.
On any given day one of us is picnicking,
another swimming for our lives.
For all of us some day waters will rise,
and with them,
beside us in the water a reaching out,
above the swirling flood a reaching out.
So many reaching out.
This is what we have to stand on.
Rev. Steve Garnaas-Holmes

One piece I read preparing for this Sunday suggested that a very real problem with Christianity these days is that Christians are too inclined to leave Christianity to Jesus. All the suffering in the world, all the messiness, and tears, and hate and anger and Christians fall into the trap of gazing at the cross murmuring “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for suffering for me – so I don’t have to.”
Guess what. You have to. We must become cornerstone or stumbling block. We cannot abstain. “Deny yourself”, He said. “Take up their cross and follow me.” Teresa of Avila wrote:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

We gather together in Christ’s name. Holy God, deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.

Amen

Proper 16, A

Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

“From fisher of fish to fisher of people to keeper of the keys to shepherd. It was the Rock’s final promotion, and from that day forward he never let the head office down again.” This is theologian Frederick Buechner’s synopsis of the spiritual progression of Simon bar Jonah, of Peter, the Rock, the cornerstone Jesus chose for His church. But Buechner’s description was the description of After – after Jesus rebuked Peter for completely and utterly failing to understand the journey the Messiah must travel. After Peter denied knowing his teacher, his friend, denied him not once but three times. After Jesus died and Peter went back to fishing. Today is Before. Today we are just at keeper of the keys. Jesus is alive and asking questions and Peter is Peter – bold and brash and bumbling unexpectedly into great truths.

One commentary contends that “Peter functions as a new Abraham. He is the first of his kind, and he stands at the head of a new people. Peter is, like Abraham, a rock (cf. Isa 51:1-2), and the change in his name denotes his function… Peter is not just a representative disciple, as so many Protestant exegetes have been anxious to maintain. Nor is he obviously the first holder of an office others will someday hold, as Roman Catholic tradition has so steadfastly maintained. Rather, he is a man with a unique role in salvation history. The eschatological revelation vouchsafed to him opens a new era. His person marks a change in the times. His significance is the significance of Abraham, which is to say: his faith is the means by which God brings a new people into being.” (Allison/Davies, Matthew, 642ff)

We, who profess to be Christian, who aspire to be the body of Christ, we are the new people. A new people underpinned, not by perfect understanding (remember Peter’s soon-to-be-evident complete failure to understand Jesus’s mission), nor by perfect devotion (remember Peter’s repeated denials), but by faith.

Creed informs faith, but does not replace faith. Faith lies in relationship. Faith lies, as the apostle Paul says, in presenting our selves, our fallible, flawed, fickle selves to God, open to renewal, to God’s transformation time and again.

“Faith in Jesus is following him, serving those the world despises; it’s not a guarantee of earthly glory and success, but willingness to share the scorn that the proud heap upon the humble. Faith doesn’t found empires, but frees us to live as sisters and brothers of all nations. Faith in Jesus doesn’t tell us that we will defeat our enemies; it moves us to love, forgive, and be gracious toward them as Jesus was toward his.” (Sarah Dylan Breuer, blog Sarah Laughed)

Who do you say Jesus is? Within our culture, within our upbringing, we know the “right” answer. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus is our Lord and Savior. These are the answers that “they” give; the answers we ingested with our baby food; the answers which, at least within many of our social structures, are the correct and undeniable answers. There is nothing wrong with the answers. They just don’t actually answer the question. Jesus doesn’t want to know what other people say. Jesus blesses Peter not for getting it right, but for looking deep into his heart to the Word with a capital W etched there by God, and at least for that moment living that Word.

The Rev. Scott Colglazier describes this image: “Christ is a word that names the divine energy that was released into the world through the life of Jesus. Just as stars explode and new planets are formed, so in the life of Jesus a certain kind of Christ energy was constellated and released into the world, and this energy is still changing the people. This is nothing less than the energy or presence of God. Compassion exploded into the world through the life of Jesus. Unconditional love and inexhaustible grace was released into the world through the life of Jesus. Creative, transforming and inspiring goodness was released into the world through the life of Jesus.”

Who do you say Jesus is? The answers could be as varied as the parts of the body, as manifold as the functions of Christ’s body. We each must search our own hearts, find our own faith, discover our own answer, answers that may shift and change focus as we live into the life and love and transformation that is faith.

Who do you say Jesus is? Your answer to that question may well determine who you are willing to be.

I’ll leave you with this poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes:

Who do you say I am?

You are the Beloved,
you are my bread and wine,
my peanut butter and jelly, my chocolate.
You are my teacher, my rescuer,
lover of heaven, light of my way.
You are God’s selfie,
and my best mirror.
You are the One in whom I meet my many,
the world’s many, all of us one.
You are my breathing coach,
my soul’s midwife,
the reaching out in me,
lover that lights my love,
comedian in my tragedies,
pitcher my hope pours from.
You are the hole through which
God springs out of my life.
You are the one who knows,
and who never makes fun of me.
Trickster, host and scout,
you hide in every low place,
find the question in everything
show me the holy in everything.
When I burrow into my ruin
you are the one I met there,
preparing a table.
You laugh at my sin, hold my despair,
sleep in my boat, stand on my forgiveness,
walk my way, die my death.
You are my next life, germinating in me.
On my cross, in my grave you wait for me.
You are my resurrection.
And so you are for the whole aching world,
for this holy, spinning universe,
that sings in harmony for you
our thanks to God.

AMEN

Proper 15, A
Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

Many of you here are mothers or fathers or grandmothers or fathers or aunts or uncles, or at the very least have at some point in your past, however distantly, been children…with parents. I know the gist of this interaction sounds familiar. “Johnny, Mrs. Smith is talking to you. Don’t just play with your food. You need to answer her.” Or “Susie, we do not call people mean names. I don’t care if you don’t like her. It’s not respectful and it’s not how you would want to be treated.”

And so we find ourselves in a bit of a conundrum today as we meet up with Jesus, arguably the primary progenitor of the best of our code of conduct, here acting in manner for which we would would not tolerate from our children. He first ignores a desperate woman’s pleas, then calls her a dog (if possible an insult worse even within Jesus’s culture than in our own – the translation from the original would actually be closer to “dirty mutt”).

What do you do when Jesus acts in an unChristlike manner?

The question gives theologians a great deal of intellectual exercise. One teacher enumerates the possible theological thought calisthenics thus (paraphrased from Delmer Chilton):

1) Some see this as an acted out parable. Jesus verbalized what he knew his followers thought. He wanted to show how bad it sounded so he could then correct it. This is the “He didn’t really mean it,” explanation.

2) Others contend this represents an inauthentic saying, words put into Jesus’s mouth by the early church and the Gospel writer. In that case the key to our understanding lies in discerning why the early church would tell such a story of Jesus. This is the “He didn’t really say it,” explanation.

3) Others say Jesus was not referring to her as a dog but was simply using an old saying or a village proverb. No-one gets offended when we say “The early bird gets the worm,” even if it is used in such a way that they are obviously the worm. This is the “We don’t really get it,” explanation.

Some authors posit a fourth alternative to the “He didn’t mean it”, “He didn’t say it”, “We don’t get it” possibilities. They suggest the “He grew” hypothesis. He changed, He came to understand Himself and His own mission, His own words more deeply by the grace of God and the example of a passionate, desperate, faithful Mumma bear of a woman who would do what she had to do, endure what required enduring in order to protect her child.

This is the point in the sermon where I should really tell you which of these options represents truth. I’m not going to. I’m not going to because I don’t know. I don’t know if this is teaching Jesus or inscrutable Jesus or genuinely grouchy Jesus. I do know that by the end of this story there is no doubt that Jesus stands irretrievably with the Truth that the Kingdom of God knows no limits. All means all.

I read a snippet somewhere that suggested that if you go to church this Sunday; if you walk into church and sit down in your pew and listen to what the preacher has to say, and that preacher doesn’t talk about Charlottesville – about the ugliness and hate that marched openly through downtown America – if your preacher doesn’t talk about that, you need to get up and walk out. After the domination the subject has garnered in the news and on social media lately, others might be more likely to walk out if they have to hear one more word about it.

It’s tempting to me, because you are here, because you come and hear a message of love and inclusiveness, of compassion and justice week after week; because of the beautiful, loving work you do at Ruby’s, at Community Cafe, at the Christmas dinner, in outreach, in countless unseen ways; it is tempting to me to assume that we are all of one mind that Naziism, White Supremacy, antisemitism, racism, hate speech, deliberately plowing cars into people even if you don’t agree with them – are wrong. Just plain wrong without qualifier. They are not loving or compassionate or living according to the Gospel of Christ. I want to just assume that and move on and not talk about these things, but I then risk ignoring the kernels of festering fear or hatred or apathy toward the other that we may not even see in ourselves.

You may have heard this widely quoted (and widely paraphrased) poem:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.

It was written by Lutheran pastor named Martin Niemöller. Rev. Niemöller, this eloquent voice for empathetic activism, supported Hitler’s rise to power. He was also, by some reports, an anti-semite. He came eventually come to oppose Hitler and the Nazi platform, largely because of their stance against baptized Jewish converts. In 1938 the Nazis imprisoned him in Sachenhausen then Dachau for this opposition. He was released only when the concentration camps were liberated by the Allies in 1945. In 1959, he was asked about his former antisemitism by Alfred Wiener, a Jewish researcher into racism and war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. In a letter to Wiener, Niemöller stated that his eight-year imprisonment by the Nazis became the turning point in his life, after which he viewed things differently.

I told you I don’t know which interpretation for Jesus’s behavior was correct, but I can tell you that it is the “He grew” version that gives me the most hope for human-kind.

Jesus had just finished a powerful discourse when the Canaanite woman arrived. He eloquently illustrated that the externals don’t matter, rather what proceeds from the heart defines us. Then a brave mother fighting for her child falls at His feet. She’s a foreigner, different religion, minority, female, unclean. He lived into the culture He had always known. He ignored, then dismissed, then insulted her. She persisted. His eyes were opened to the truth of His own words, and He grew.

May God open my eyes to the kernels of festering fear or hatred or apathy towards “other” within me.
May God grant me the courage to confront and lovingly eradicate them, that I might grow in love.

May God open our eyes – the eyes of our church, our community, our culture, our nation, our world to patterns and systems and actions built on hatred and fear of “other”
May God grant us the courage to confront and lovingly eradicate them, that we might grow and heal in love.

AMEN

If anybody happens to follow these sermons on a week by week basis, they will have noted that the sermons have not appeared for several months. It is Lent now, and I am repenting of my tardiness. Over the next few days, quite a few sermons will be posted. Most of them will be hopelessly out of step with the season, but at least they should be caught up by the time I finish with the process. My apologies!

God’s blessings!

Sam+

PROPER 14, A

1 Kings 19:9-18

Matthew 14:22-33

In both the Old and New Testament reading today, we are shown the results of fear, especially the way fear interferes with discipleship. Elijah ran away from his assignment, in spite of defeating Jezebel’s prophets and working amazing miracles. Why? Because Jezebel threatened his life. He takes refuge in a cave. Notice what God asks him twice, “What are you doing here?” Both times he gets an evasive answer. Then he kicks Elijah out of the cave and tells him where to go and what to do.

In a very different kind of story we see another instance of fear. Jesus has sent all 12 disciples out in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. The wind comes up during the night and they’re still out in the middle of the lake in the early morning when they see Jesus coming toward them walking on the water.

The disciples were terrified. Jesus calls out to them, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Then Peter, the brave, bold, and brash asks if he can try it too, and Jesus says, “Come.”

So Peter gets out of the boat and starts walking to Jesus. But then he notices how strong the wind is and becomes afraid. Then he begins to sink. Jesus takes his hand to rescue him and says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

This story makes a direct connection between fear and doubt. Peter became afraid and that created doubt. The opposite of fear and doubt is faith. His fear undermined his faith.

Marcus Borg, who was a Biblical scholar, wrote a book called Speaking Christian, in which he discussed the ways that the meanings of theological words have changed during the 20th Century. One of the key words he deals with is FAITH. The prior meaning of faith was more like TRUST or TRUST IN. The current unnderstanding is more like BELIEVE, as in holding a certain set of beliefs or dogma.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the statement of faith we use once in a while in place of the Creed uses “We trust” rather than “We believe.” Trust is more like confidence in, rather than a statement of existence.

Peter’s fear undermined his confidence in, his trust of Jesus. Without that trust, walking on the water became impossible. Trusting God is what enables us to overcome fear.

So the question this raises for me is this. Whom or what do I trust? I began life trusting my parents, which lasted until I was about four. In varying degrees I have trusted my best friend, my dog, my teachers, my husband in the succeeding years. For some time I trusted only myself. None of us proved reliable!

We all know people who put their trust in money or success. It’s easy to see that misplacement of trust as a kind of idolatry when we look at others. But what about ourselves? It took me a long time to see the search for knowledge as a similar idolatry.

As I’ve mentioned before, a central tenant of AA is asserting your belief, or your trust in, a higher power. Many people who have found this program effective say that this acceptance of a higher power is crucial to recovery. I would say that it is also crucial to our lives as disciples of Jesus.

This week take some time to ask yourselves:

• Whom or what do I trust now? Completely?
• How do I combat fear, especially unwarranted fear.
• How often do I scare myself by imagining bad things happening?
• Am I afraid of dying?

One of the things that this story of Peter trying to walk on the water suggests to me is that Jesus is calling us to put aside our fears and doubts, to get out of the boat, and to trust him to hang on to us.

In prior sermons on this lesson I’ve pointed out how the boat has some parallels with the church. Look at the ceiling in this church. What does it remind you of? What is this space called? The NAVE; same root as the word navy.

Like the original disciples we’re gathered here in the Nave, and that’s good, but it’s only the beginning. We also need to get out and take what we learn here out into the world around us.

As you go, remember that both Peter and Jesus return to the boat safely. Don’t be afraid! Trust that God will go with us when we dare to step out as his disciples. AMEN

PROPER 7, A, 6/25/17

Matthew 10:24-39

John Dominic Crossan, probably the greatest living expert on the life and times of Jesus, has speculated that it’s quite possible that Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist, but even if not, he learned from John the importance of preparing his followers to carry on without their teacher. John did not do that, so when he was killed, his followers scattered and were not seen or heard from again. Last week and this week we hear Jesus teaching his disciples about the work they have been called to do, and warning them about what they will face when they do it.

The word disciple means “learner.” So Jesus takes every opportunity to be the teacher. Last week he even sent them out on their own to try to do what he has been doing. He tells them, “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons… See I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” He warns them of how badly they might be treated, beaten, dragged before the authorities, etc. But if they treat you badly in one place, just go on to the next.

In our reading today Jesus continues his teaching in the same vein. He warns that the authorities who accuse him of being the devil will treat them the same. He then encourages them by telling them not to be afraid – not once, but three times. The crux of the matter is that God will be with them, so there is nothing to fear.

Fear in this instance is the kind of fear you feel when the bully corners you in the school yard, or when you glance up as you cross the street and see a truck bearing down on you, or your boss has started criticizing you in front of others.

Do you remember another Biblical line? “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Fear in this statement is not the same. It is more a matter of awe, which leads to reverence, and to humility and to obedience. This sort of fear of God is what gives a person the courage to be fearless in this life.

Jesus takes the commandment of his Jewish faith literally: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength, and with all your soul. This is the first and greatest commandment…”

We have to remember this when we come to the final passage of today’s lesson: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword… Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

I expect that most of us found this reading jarring. I suspect that was its intention, but also that it would make people stop and think. If we become disciples, if we become life-long learners, we are going to change and that creates conflict with the people who want everything to stay the same – or even return to some golden age of the past. It’s inevitable!

And if we are not afraid to put God first, to love God more than anyone or anything else, we will come into conflict with people who don’t. Those people may well be family members as well as authority figures.

On the other hand, I’m convinced that if I could succeed in always putting God first, it would make me a much better parent, child, sibling, etc. It would make me a better family member, a better community member, and a better citizen.

Notice that I can still love others, even all others, just not MORE than I love God. To love someone or something else more is a form of idolatry.

Have you ever had any contact with a family in which the children are in charge? When the parents make a decision, the children whine and fuss until they get their way. How pleasant is it to spend time with such a family? What kind of adults will these children become?

How about parents who love their children so much that they act as though their children can do no wrong? I’ve met a few and it’s quite bizarre, because what they see and what I have seen are almost opposite behaviors. They seem to think that protecting their children in this way is helpful, but it only leads to more bad behavior.

I have had several friends who have severed all ties with close family members, and I was truly shocked by their action, but on closer inspection, it became clear that they were taking such action to save themselves from abuse.

It takes a special kind of courage to go against the norms of your community, but it may be the right thing to do. As a young person I did not have this kind of courage; I was too dependent on my parents. And then going along to get along becomes a habit that’s hard to break.

If you recognize God as the one in control, rather than yourself, you gain the courage to do what needs to be done, and you will do it with love and compassion. You can love yourself and love others freely, without becoming a doormat. You can take a stand without hurting or hating those who disagree. Because the second commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. That is: all your neighbors. And what part of “all” don’t we understand?

As I’m sure many of you know, a central tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous is that the key to staying sober is to turn your life over to your “higher power,” however you understand that. The AA members I’ve known readily claim that that teaching was central to saving their lives.

And that is what Jesus is trying to convey to his disciples. You have to lose your life to find it. You have to trust in a higher power to have your back, which gives you the courage and freedom to be the best you can be in all of your relationships, whether to family, community, country or universe. It frees you to become a life-long learner because it frees you from fear, and guides you toward becoming: becoming more loving, more compassionate, less attached to the rules and regs that separate us, more open to new experiences and new people.

While following this way of Jesus we will certainly cause conflict within the existing structures of society around us. However, it will also give us the tools to help in the transformation of our society into a fairer, healthier, and happier place for everyone. AMEN