Raxweblog

Anti-depressant.

2012-02-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 40:21-31.

I.
The prophet is writing to the people of God in exile in Babylon. It has been several decades in which they have languished in servitude in a foreign land, with the imperial government striving to erase their identity and uniqueness as a people and faith. During that time, it has been difficult to maintain their faith in the face of what appeared to be the defeat of their God and the triumph of the gods of Babylon. Many Jews would have given up, accepted the obvious evidence before them, and cast their lot with the victorious, powerful, prosperous empire. Many more are simply depressed and discouraged, three generations of Jews are now accustomed to living in Babylon and struggling to maintain their own way of life.
Chapter 40 begins with the famous words, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” The prophet proclaims that the exile is over. The Babylonian Empire has fallen; a new King, named Cyrus, has taken over. And he is going to release the Jews and let them go home.
This is an unexpected miracle, something they never dared hope for, and even now they are having trouble believing it. It’s like they don’t want to get their hopes up and don’t fully trust this new thing that seems to be happening. I mean their prophets and other leaders have spent decades convincing them that this catastrophe really was all part of God’s plan; that their ancestors had grievously and repeatedly sinned, bringing down this punishment on them. They had no reason to imagine that they would ever go back to Jerusalem. They must have considered it their fate now to be a landless nation forever.
That the Jews are able to keep it together under these circumstances is a miracle in itself. The other nations the Babylonians gobbled up were properly digested and assimilated. But at least some of the Jews kept their faith through it all.
They also know that the prophets of the past who prophesied good things were usually false prophets. The ones that said that God would not allow Jerusalem to fall, or the people to be defeated and sent into exile, their words did not come true. So it’s no wonder that they are slow to believe this prophet who is now telling them that their time of punishment is over and they are going home. Maybe they think that they would believe it when they see it.
Can we blame them? We have no frame of reference to relate to this story. If we lost a war and saw our nation destroyed and were forced to go live in the conqueror’s capital city, the smart money would not be with sticking with this same religion this same God who apparently could not protect us. How many of us would stick with this loser God? How many of us would not run enthusiastically after the gods of prosperity and power?

II.
The prophet is trying to convince them that this deliverance is really happening and their salvation and liberation is now at hand. And the first thing he does here is remind them of what they already know. He has them remember their own tradition and theology. He has them recall exactly what God they are dealing with here. It’s like he has to remind them of what they learned in Sunday School.
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?  Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?  It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”
In other words, “you have always known that the God we worship is not some local deity, but the Creator of everything who is above everything and ultimately exercises lordship over everything and everyone.” He appeals to the transcendence and power of the Creator God.
Then he immediately reminds them that times appearing to be bad are built into the very created structure of nature itself. “Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.” People are like seeds. When they are planted they can still be blown away in the wind and amount to nothing. God has a larger plan than our tiny agendas. We are like grasshoppers to God. We try to provide for ourselves… but God has fashioned the ecosystem in an unfathomably larger way. Our little projects may get blown away; but that could just be part of God’s grander plan for wholeness and fulfillment.
What look to us like acts of capricious destruction, what insurance companies like to call “acts of God,” or even horrible political catastrophes like war and exile, even these may be part of God’s larger intentions. “All things work together for good, “ says the Apostle Paul. Nothing is ultimately out of God’s control or ability to redeem and reclaim. Nothing is outside of God’s saving will: not war, not exile, not economic downturns, not torture, not famine, not cancer, not racism, not heart disease… nothing. Nothing will ever separate us from God’s love. For God’s love is built into the very fabric of nature simply by virtue of the fact that God created it.
Who created everything? To whom does everything belong? “[The One] who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name, because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.”

III.
The good news is that even the things that happen to us that look for all the world like absolute contradictions of God’s will, not even these can subvert God’s will in the end. God bends the most twisted and wayward strand, and weaves it back into the beauty of the whole, spectacular quilt of creation. Our job is to be in tune with this the most profound and basic movement of reality, so that, even when faced with the worst horrors imaginable, even the ones that take our lives and the lives of our loved ones, we can step back with confidence and simply wait to see how even this will be redeemed. Even this will be embraced into submission to God’s will. Even this will be shown in the end to be something God used, redirected, reformed, reshaped, and reoriented to reveal God’s goodness and love.
But sometimes it is simply more comfortable, in a very sour way, to wallow in our negativity and depression. The prophet recognizes this. He asks: “Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God’?” God doesn’t know or care about me. God has no concern for my rights and needs and desires. God hates us. We are just lightning rods for God’s wrath.
Sometimes it’s just easier to mope in self-pity, expecting only intensifying disaster and increasing loss, than to pick ourselves up and do what is required to get ourselves in tune and participating with what God is doing. Sometimes it’s easier to harbor resentment, or look for scapegoats to blame our defeats on. Paranoia, hysteria, hatred, rage… these can all be far more satisfying emotions than trusting in God’s transcendent love.
My personal preference, though, is doom and gloom. Perhaps this is why I identify so closely with the exiles, and why I frequently find myself turning to these chapters of Isaiah. These words are better than Zoloft!
Because what God is saying here is basically, “You can mope in the corner if you want. You can satisfy your anger, fear, and shame, if that makes you feel good. But know this: that I created this whole place and ordered it and destined it in love, and nothing will get in the way of that. And even the bad things that happen, I will turn to good. You can get on board with this, and work with my will for justice, peace, love, healing, hope, and goodness, and so have life. Or you can cherish your precious negativity, perpetuating lies, doing vast damage in the world, and die.”

IV.
Take your pick. God is always placing this choice before us. Choose death, or life. Choose curse, or blessing. Choose anger, or joy. Choose fear, or hope. Choose shame, or forgiveness. Choose evil, or goodness. Choose slavery, or freedom.
God’s movement is always from one of these poles to the other: God is always bringing light out of darkness, life out of death, and goodness out of evil. And Isaiah is a witness to one of the more spectacular evidences of this truth. But he knows that it doesn’t become real for the people unless they embrace it. If they choose not to participate in God’s movement here, they will miss out. They will be left behind, nursing their negativity, while God’s future dawns.
God “does not faint or grow weary…. He gives power to the faith, and strengthens the powerless.” In other words, the powerless are invited to participate in God’s power. By following God and joining in the inexorable movement of God’s love in the world, we receive God’s power. And we hear those famous words about what this means. “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
No matter how consuming the fire that burned up your forest, God is always drawing strong, new, young growth from the ashes. God made the world and ordered the whole place for life and growth and blessing, so that nothing is ever lost and nothing every gets fully destroyed. Even earthquakes, floods, fires, diseases, droughts… they all play a part in keeping the system going and keeping the story of life alive.
Do we really think that our little lives are weighty enough to stop God’s will for creation? I don’t. Rather than holding on to our hurts, wouldn’t it be easier to, as they say, “Let go and let God”?
+++++++

Prophets.

2012-02-04T12:28:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

I.
The situation of the book of Deuteronomy is that the children of Israel are gathered on the east side of the Jordan. They have come out of the wilderness where they have been wandering for forty years after having escaped from slavery in Egypt. And their leader, Moses, gives them one last, long teaching. He knows that he will not be going with them, that he is about to die. So the book of Deuteronomy is his instructions and advice, warnings and reflections, to guide them as they move into the land that God has promised the people.
One of the questions they have now is: What are they going to do for leadership once Moses is gone? Who will be the one who delivers the Word of God to them? How will they know God’s will for their lives? How will they make sense of the world and of unfolding history?
Just before this passage, God, through Moses, has forbidden them from turning to occult practices like divination, sooth-saying, augury, sorcery, spell-casting, or the consultation of ghosts or the dead. These were all ways that people used, and sometimes and in some ways still do use, to determine God’s will. God says that these methods are abhorrent and disloyal. The nations they will be displacing in Canaan use them. But these are not how God’s people discern God’s will. So rule that out.
The people are also deeply conscious that they do not have, and could not possibly survive, the intimacy with God that Moses has. They know that direct contact with God, even hearing God’s voice first-hand, or feeling God’s fire, would be lethal to them. This they learned on Mt. Horeb when Moses climbed right up into the clouds and lightning, which scared the living daylights out of the people. At that point the people were quite content to receive God’s Word second hand, through Moses. As long as they didn’t have to get any closer to this awesome God of fire and thunder.
But they are also still very conscious that, without Moses, they have no access to God’s Word at all. They had become dependent upon him. And they worry about who would lead them once Moses’ time with them was over.
How do we know God’s will? How do we know what God wants, as opposed to what we want for ourselves, or what others want? How do we distinguish the voice of God in our lives from all the other voices that are always yammering at us from the world, or even from inside our own heads?
This is an important question because sometimes we go off very enthusiastically on a course of action we are convinced is God’s will, when it really isn’t. Other times God is practically yelling in our ears what we are supposed to do and we don’t hear it.

II.
The answer is that God will “raise up for them a prophet” like Moses “from among their own people.” That prophet will communicate God’s Word to the people. So God establishes this institution of prophecy. The implication is that in every generation, God will chose someone as the mediator of God’s Word.
A prophet is chosen by God. No one decides to take up this career. You could not send your son or daughter to prophet school. One does not choose to be a prophet. God chooses prophets. The prophets who followed Moses had no credentials. They do not get this job by taking over their father’s position. Prophets are not elected by the people. Neither would the King, even one of the relatively good kings, select true prophets. A prophet is not necessarily a wealthy or powerful person; just the opposite. Sometimes God calls a priest like Ezekiel, and sometimes it is a shepherd like Amos. God calls whom God wants to call to this unique line of work.
The reason that those other occult methods of divination are rejected by God is that they involve human initiative. They try and force information out of God by throwing dice, or cutting open an animal and reading the entrails, or trying to open a line of communication with the dead. They use methods and techniques to compel God to divulge something.
But prophecy, like God, is totally free. It exists over-against all the official institutions of the society, and calls them and their agendas into question. All of them.
I recently heard an interview with Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in which he said that the prophets were universally critical of all power; there was not some specific ideology or political/economic philosophy they advocated. They pointed out how all of them fell short of God’s will. Their job was to be the critics who knew that any system will fall into idolatry if we do not exercise constant vigilance and perpetual reform.
So the prophets function as a brake against the idolatry that always takes root when the people are left to themselves. Without God’s Word, expressed through the mouth of a prophet, the nation will succumb to idolatry and injustice. And injustice is always punished by God.
The Word that prophets communicate to the people is invariably critical of human institutions, while ever hopeful about the future God has promised. Basically we could sum up the prophet’s message as: “What you’re doing is wrong, and will attract God’s wrath; but in the end God is faithful and will forgive and deliver us.”

III.
What God is doing here is embedding what we might call a kind of charismatic element into Israel, almost as a counterweight to other, more conventional and stabilizing institutions, like the priesthood and the monarchy, that would also develop. God wants to make sure that there is always this free voice, accountable solely to God, who speaks God’s Word to the people unencumbered by allegiances to any other power.
God’s free Word, then, is what is spoken by the prophets. They are the vessels, the conduits, the vehicles of God’s Word. The Word of the Lord comes over them and they speak this Word to the people.
Then, hearing the words of God through the prophet, it is up to the people to obey. Once they have heard, it is on their own heads whatever happens as a consequence of their disobedience.
God then tells Moses that a true prophet will not speak in the name of other gods. In other words, God’s prophet will not look to other authorities, “other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.” If a prophet is appealing to any other source, he or she is a false prophet. If they appeal to history or tradition, if they appeal to pragmatism or popular opinion, if they appeal to a particular philosophy or theology, if they appeal to the hierarchy of the church or the government of the state, if they appeal to the dogmas of a particular economic theory, if they appeal to nationalism or some mythic story of a people… then they are not God’s prophets. Even if they speak for a certain religion or spirituality, liturgical practices or missional strategies, they are not God’s prophets.
Those prophets, God tells them, “will die.” They may not drop dead right there on the spot. But they do not participate in God’s life. Their words are merely human words and they do nothing but reinforce the bondage of various forms of sinfulness that bind us. Their words lead to death.
Make no mistake. The true prophet of God is responsible and accountable to God alone. The true prophet will be critical of all those things I just mentioned. The true prophet will almost always be unpopular. Prophets do not win elections. They don’t get invited to give the invocation at the inauguration of the President. They don’t sell a lot of books. They are often dismissed as traitors and enemies because they rarely have anything good to say about those in charge or the prevalent institutions.
God insists that this kind of figure be authorized. It is an essential component of God’s people, along with priests, judges, and, eventually, kings. Against all these powers trying to spin things to their own advantage, God places this other figure to stand up to them and tell them, in the name of God, “NO!”

IV.
In a sense, the prophet is an engine of progress because they are never satisfied with where the people are. They are always calling the people beyond the status quo, they are always calling for improvements in the way people live, they are always placing before the people the vision and promise of God and God’s Kingdom of justice. They constantly sow dissatisfaction and a sense of yearning for a better world. They are always calling for the people to live up to God’s Word.
And God’s Word does not just refer to the Scriptures. It does not say here that prophets should read this book that Moses is writing, and teach the people what it says. No. To prophets, God’s Word comes directly. Not only that, but prophets were universally unafraid to contradict the written text if that’s what God was telling them to do. Because from Amos and Hosea to Jesus and Paul they knew that the text could become an idol like anything else. So they criticize even perfectly biblical practices, like sacrifices, holidays, the monarchy, and various purity laws.
In the end, the Word of God is Jesus Christ. He is “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” We know that a prophet’s words are from the Lord when they not only express criticism of our human institutions, but when they express the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If a prophet says something you can’t imagine Jesus saying, they’re not a prophet of God. If a prophet says something that would make the rich richer and the strong more powerful, they’re not a prophet of God.
That is how we know whether a prophet is giving us words that God has commanded. They don’t refer us to other gods or powers; they only refer us to Jesus. He is the Word; he gives us the words. All other words lead inexorably to death.
In the gospel reading for today, we see that even the unclean spirits, even evil demons, recognized Jesus as “the Holy One of God.” They recognized him because they understood that he was a threat to them. As prophets are always threats to the forces, ideologies, traditions, and structures that possess, and bind, and strangle us. That’s how they know that he is the prophet that is to come into the world.

V.
I think that God’s people continue to be driven by the Spirit of prophecy when we also make it clear that we are bound to no one and nothing but God. It becomes our role as well to cast out demons in the sense of help people find freedom from the many forces that would keep them bound and crippled. This could be obvious things like addiction and destructive habits. But it could also be more subtle ways we are possessed by forces that we might normally think of as good. The “other gods” and the “unclean spirits” in our lives are frequently things that society has decided are beneficial. The prophets were critical of everything, because anything can become an idol.
We too must have disciplines in which we separate ourselves from whatever possesses us and gets in the way of our relationship with God. For an idol is usually a good thing that we have made into the highest and only thing. And it can be any number of good things, like food or success, family or nation, health and security. it can be the way we have learned to cope with the world, which might have worked when we were little but now doesn’t work at all but we don’t know how to behave any differently.
When we turn away from idols we do not turn to a cynical worship of nothingness. God gives us the Word, that is, God gives us Jesus Christ. He is the one who emerges when all our idols have been revealed as empty, bankrupt, toxic, and crippling.
Above all we are prophets when we in our lives reflect him. Idols are all false and illusory; Jesus Christ is real. And when he becomes the center of our life we are real as well. Saying no to our idols means saying yes to Jesus, and devoting our lives to following him.

Jonah.

2012-01-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

Jonah 3:1-5, 10

To recap: The basic story of Jonah is that God calls him to go and preach to the city of Nineveh. But he attempts to escape from God’s call by getting on a ship headed for Tarshish, which is in Spain. But God sends a terrific storm from which Jonah saves the ship’s crew by volunteering to be thrown overboard. As soon as he is in the water the storm stops. Then he is swallowed by a big fish and lives in the fish’s belly for three days until the fish vomits him out onto the beach, back in Israel. That’s where we pick up the story this morning. Jonah is laid out on the beach, covered in whatever extremely aromatic slime was in the guts of that fish.

Then God, in effect says, “Alrighty then, let’s try this again.” And we read that, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’” This time, Jonah picks his sorry butt off the sand and starts on his way to Nineveh. (Presumably he takes a bath at some point.)

Now, Jonah does not want to go to Nineveh. The Ninevites were not nice people. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the nation that attacked, conquered, and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, dispersing 10 of the 12 Israelite tribes, which are basically never heard from again (unless you’re a Mormon). The Assyrian army was infamous for its excessive brutality. They practically set the standard for barbaric atrocity that was imitated by subsequent empires. Violence like that perpetrated by the Assyrians had really never been seen before. They all but invented genocide and gratuitous mass slaughter.

Jonah probably hated them, with justification. Later he says that the reason he does not want to go to Nineveh is that he is afraid God would be merciful and not punish them. But at this point he has learned through bitter experience that he cannot escape from God’s call. Either you will do what God wants, or God will make your life miserable until you do.

We too board “ships to Tarshish,” as it were. We too try to escape from the demands of God in our life. And if we’re blessed we find ourselves puked onto a beach with another chance.

One of those ways we run away from God is addiction. In Twelve-Step groups for people recovering from addiction, many do not realize their need for healing until they “hit bottom,” as they say. Until you regain consciousness on a deserted beach, or literally in the gutter, having spent the last three days in the belly of a giant fish, or you might say, in the depths of depravity, debasement, destitution, and debilitation, can you really affirm the words of those first three steps: “We admitted we were powerless… [and] - that our lives had become unmanageable. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”

Jonah, had to admit something like this. He was powerless. His life had become unmanageable. He has no choice but to turn his life over to God in obedience.

II.

Jonah hikes to Nineveh, which is in present day Iraq. It is such a large city that it takes three days to walk from one side to the other. He gets a third of the way inside this metropolis and announces a very simple and direct message: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

The message is one of destruction, retribution, punishment, disaster, and defeat. Nineveh is in for it, says Jonah. He communicates no hope, no way out, no opportunity for repentance, no possibility of reprieve. He just flatly states that Nineveh will be destroyed, or perhaps conquered by come other power, in 40 days. He probably feels pretty good about it, too.

He doesn’t say why this is going to happen. He doesn’t list their many grievous sins, war crimes, economic injustices. He doesn’t list all the people they have killed, raped, or stolen from, or the whole nations they have destroyed forever. He just goes into the city and announces, “God says you’re all toast! Deal with it.”

Then comes the miracle. The people repent. We expect something to happen between verse four and verse five. But, with classic biblical understatement, the story gives us nothing. We are simply told, “And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.” Word apparently spread like wildfire through the city. We are about to be destroyed! Quick, proclaim a fast!

Fasting, that is, not eating anything, and wearing the very coarse, itchy, ugly cloth that sacks were made of, basically burlap, was a way of visibly and tactilely demonstrating remorse, sorrow, grief, and repentance. The Ninevites express abject sadness and guilt for what they have done. They believe God. They realize that what Jonah said is true, that the city will be overthrown – either by natural disaster or invading enemy – and they understand that they deserve it.

In the verses we didn’t read (6-9), we hear about the reaction of the King of Nineveh. He also proclaims a comprehensive, even ridiculously thorough fast that includes animals! And he proclaims, “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.” He identifies the issue as violence. Then he adds sitting in dry dusty ashes to the regime of fasting and wearing sackcloth.

Violence was Nineveh’s addiction. They were masters at extreme violence. This is precisely what the King has the people renounce. And it was like renouncing their very identity, giving up the very approach that created and preserved their empire. Assyria was synonymous with violence and mayhem.

III.

“When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.” God changes his mind. God has mercy on the Ninevites, and forgives them. Or at least God withholds the promised catastrophe and spares their city.

In the book of Ezekiel, God says, “I take no pleasure in the death of anyone.” We do not have a God who is always looking to expose our sin and punish it. God is not about vindictiveness or retribution. God loves us and will jump at any excuse to forgive and spare us. If God can withhold punishment from the Ninevites, one of the most violent and murderous nations that ever lived, surely God is ready to forgive anyone.

What God is looking for is humility, sorrow, remorse, grief, and penitence. God is looking for people to set aside their hubris, self-righteousness, pride, violence, vindictiveness, hatred, superiority, and drive to dominate others. God doesn’t want to hear our self-serving explanations and justifications for our bad behavior. God doesn’t want to hear our lame, smug excuses. These responses only indicate that we are blind and enslaved to our own sinfulness. We are still addicts and continue to draw down upon ourselves and others the destructive consequences of our own actions.

The Ninevites have some sense and presence of mind to realize their situation and respond with some integrity and authenticity to the news that the day of reckoning is coming. They change their ways even though they have no hope of avoiding the punishment which God eventually does not administer.

They do not dismiss Jonah’s message as crazy; they do not fall into denial about what was coming; they do not froth themselves up into a patriotic frenzy – Nin-e-veh! Nin-e-veh! – drowning out the criticism of this unknown prophet from a small, conquered country. They don’t tell him he is just envious of their success and he should go get a job.

Would we be so convicted and penitent, were someone to proclaim the imminent end of our systems and regimes? If our great city faced being overthrown, would we look inward and change our ways, hoping that “God may relent and change his mind; … and turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish”? Or would we claim to be the best and the strongest, and that nothing like that could ever happen to us? Would we proclaim ourselves exceptions to God’s laws?

IV.

I am a big fan of disaster movies. Sometimes I think the role of the prophet today is sometimes taken up by disaster movies. A lot of disaster movies have someone like Jonah, who announces that catastrophic destruction is imminent. Usually it’s some kind of scientist. The disaster could be anything: and asteroid hit, floods, volcanoes, super-storms, monsters, a shift in the Earth’s magnetic or gravitational field, earthquakes, disease, or alien invasion. In the formula for these movies, the prophet is invariably ignored, dismissed, or persecuted. I can’t think of a single disaster movie in which the people respond like the Ninevites, with immediate repentance and humility.

Disaster movies are effective because, deep down, we know they are a faithful representation of our attitudes and likely responses. We rarely listen to those who point out the coming disasters that we and our violence have brought upon ourselves. We do not admit our injustices and atrocities. We are much more concerned with sustaining and increasing economic growth – our main cultural addiction – than we are with hearing about its costs and consequences.

What the Ninevites did in repenting in humility, sorrow, and remorse, is almost unimaginable for us.

And yet it is the only way to avoid the coming catastrophe. It is the only way to get out of suffering the consequences of our own violence and injustice. It is the only way to show to God that we really have turned away from all that and chosen instead to live in peace and reconciliation.

Is this not the life that Jesus the Messiah comes to exemplify and give to us? Does he not live in simplicity, walk lightly upon the Earth, reject violence, and practice forgiveness, welcoming inclusion, healing, and generosity? Is this not the life he was calling his disciples to in today’s gospel reading? The people that live like Jesus cannot commit heinous acts of mass murder, or pump poisons into the environment, or be content to see neighbors in abject poverty, or reduce everything to commodities to be bought and sold, or foreclose on people’s homes, or leave people without health care.

The Ninevites would not have fasted or worn sackcloth or sat in ashes forever. Eventually they would have had to resume something like daily life. One hopes that this daily life for them would have been newly informed by their preservation and forgiveness, that they would have gone forward deeply conscious of their responsibility to live very differently from the way they lived before, in violence and injustice. One hopes they would have learned to live more like Jesus.

And I have that hope for us as well. That all may “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”

That is the urgency of evangelism today. Not so much that people might go to hell, but that we have to stop making the world a hell for so many people. We must turn away from violence and live more like Jesus. If we do not we will perish. But if we do, we will have realized Jesus’ inaugural proclamation: “The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is at hand! Repent, and believe the good news.”

+++++++

Junk History.

2012-01-19T12:23:00.000-08:00

I recently read an excellent book of poems by Susan Ludvigson, called Trinity. She addresses spiritual themes, mainly through the eyes of Mary Magdalene and Emily Dickinson. I enjoyed it. She even tells the wildly apocryphal story that suggests that Jesus did not die on the cross but faked his death, and survived to go to France with Mary and raise a family. That obviously isn’t part of the story as I know it. But even if I have a different viewpoint, her excursus is not threatening to me and raises interesting possibilities and perspectives. I know folks whom this would mortally offend. But as an English major from way back, and an emergent – which is to say, open source – Christian today, I am able to listen to different stories and embellishments and sometimes glean something valuable from them.

That being said, Ludvigson includes a “Note” at the end of her book, in which she briefly tells the Mary-Magdalene-and-Jesus-go-to-France-and-raise-a-family legend, I guess so we don’t think she just made all that up. Then she adds a final sentence: “Some recent studies by scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to bear out the essential elements in the legend.”

Now, the vast consensus of legitimate scholars date the Dead Sea Scrolls a couple of centuries before the common era. Therefore, it is impossible for them to have anything to say about events that happened after that, like in the first century. However, there are a few writers -- Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Robert Eisenman and others -- who have concocted a bizarre reading of the scrolls in which they are made refer to events around the time of Jesus and Paul. In order to do this they have to attach secret meanings to the words (like: when it says “Damascus” it really means Qumran; that sort of thing) and hype up a lot of circumstantial and coincidental material. (Baigent and Leigh are the guys who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the book upon which The DaVinci Code is largely based.)

They also attach dark conspiracies to the fact that the Scrolls were mostly suppressed and kept secret for decades, alleging that it was the Vatican preventing their subversive story from getting out. Many of the Scrolls were in fact kept locked up for years, but this was a matter of disgraceful scholarly laziness, hubris, control-freakiness, and maybe greed, more than anything else. It was reprehensible and quite un-scholarly, but not a vast conspiracy to suppress a “truth” that threatened the Catholic Church. We can see this from the fact that anyone can now purchase a copy of the complete Scrolls and read them for themselves. Yet still, only this bunch of writers, who approached the texts with a preconceived agenda, come up with their eccentric readings. Presumably only they have the secret wisdom necessary to interpret these ancient writings correctly. Right.

Those readings would not bother me were they admittedly fiction or poetry. But this group of writers apparently wants us to believe that they have exposed the actual historical truth. And this claim is ridiculous.

Why otherwise smart and intellectually responsible people get sucked into this kind of nonsense is beyond me. Would Ms. Ludvigson tolerate someone who wrote a book claiming to “prove” that “Emily Dickinson” is really a secret code for Robert Frost? I don’t think so. It might be an interesting poem or novel. But to claim it as historically true would be idiotic.

By allowing herself to succumb to this ideology she denigrates her otherwise fine work. It may be wonderful and meaningful as poetry; but it’s not history, and to reduce it to history is to drain it of most of its value. Her work rings far truer as poetry than when she tries to add value by pretending that it has some historical basis, especially when she relies upon dubious and second-rate scholarship.

Tingle.

2012-01-18T16:41:00.000-08:00

1 Samuel 3:1-20

I am guessing that Samuel is about 8 or 10 years old here. You may remember the story before this. His mother, Hannah, prays for a child and God finally gives her Samuel. She has promised to dedicate the boy to God, so when he is only about 2 or 3 she leaves him to live in the Shiloh temple with the old, blind priest Eli and his corrupt, irresponsible sons.

Thus is the future of Israel somehow nurtured and reared in the belly of a system that is doomed, even though it doesn’t know it yet. Samuel learned the priestly duties from Eli. And he would have witnessed the mercenary, depraved, and cynical abuses of power by Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phineas. They were using the temple and religion as a way to feed their own gluttony and lust. They did not give God what was God’s due.

Samuel sleeps every night in the sanctuary itself. Samuel apparently has a bed right inside the room where the very Ark of the Covenant rests. Eli is in another room, but Samuel sleeps in hearing distance of the Ark.

And one night he is awakened by a voice calling his name. So he goes to find Eli, assuming that the old man is the one calling. But Eli tells Samuel to go back to bed, probably saying that it’s only a dream. This happens three times until Eli realizes that the boy is hearing the voice of God.

This is something that hasn’t happened in years, and Eli probably has to ransack his memory to recall what one is supposed to say when the voice of God calls. This is a time, much like ours, in which the voice of God is not heard very often. “Visions were not widespread,” it says. That is an understatement about our time. Meaningful, reliable visions are virtually non-existent today.

The priest, Eli, is also almost blind. So there is no possibility of vision there, literally. He represents the religious and political establishment of his day. They go through the motions, doing the rituals, saying the words, performing the sacrifices, leading the prayers, advising the people, probably organizing warriors when the nation was in danger. But there is very little understanding of the content and meaning of what they were doing. There is no vision of or from God. People can’t see where they are going or what the point is. They don’t even really know who they are anymore.

And then there is the corruption represented by Eli’s worthless sons, who steal from the offerings to God and even sexually abuse the women who come for worship. Israel is mired in blindness and corruption.

II.

But now this boy is hearing a strange voice and Eli knows very well Who it is. So he instructs Samuel how to respond if he hears this mysterious voice again.

The next time the voice occurs to Samuel, he says what Eli told him to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And then the Lord actually comes and stands there in the sanctuary to speak to Samuel. And the message is that Eli’s family is through as priests of the Lord. God is tired of their corruption and Eli’s irresponsibility in not stopping the misbehavior of his sons. This priestly order is over. God does not yet say that new leadership is coming to Israel, or who that new leader may be. But we can assume that it has something to do with this child who is now receiving visions and voices from the Lord. In other words, God is announcing through Samuel a change in leadership.

We live in a time of change as well. Whether we are talking about the church, or about our society, or even the entire world, we find ourselves in the midst of great, even tumultuous, transition. The old order is finished. Much of what we always knew and depended on is being swept away.

The old regime is perishing, as all old regimes perish, weighed down by its own sinfulness. Just as Hophni and Phineas abused their power for self-enrichment, so also the leaders and classes that have been in charge among us are deflating under the pressure of their own greed. We see it over and over again in Scripture: systems that fall into injustice are inevitably overthrown. Eli’s sons did not give God what God wanted. They used their place of privilege to enrich and satisfy themselves. They thoroughly abused the people’s trust and made God look bad.

When the people in positions of power do this, it means the system is doomed. And what are we to say of our own time, when clergy and coaches are using their positions to satisfy the most base lusts, and bankers and politicians seem to suck more out of the system than they contribute, and the powerful accrue an increasing percentage of our wealth? And judges are more concerned with advancing their careers than protecting the weak? How did Phineas and Hophni become the exemplars of leadership among us? I’ll bet they said that questioning their behavior was the sin of envy, against God, too.

The church is not exempt from this by any means. What are we to say with our own obsession with the infamous 3-b’s: buildings, bucks, and butts? These are among the crass, materialistic, and quantitative measurements of the “successful” church that we could have learned from Eli’s sons. I am wondering if this whole regime of the church isn’t over too.

III.

God says he is “about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears it tingle.” And then God says that Eli’s family will be punished for their blasphemy. What does this mean about making people’s ears “tingle”? Some other translations talk in terms of shock or ringing.

I think that when people hear how the privileged and powerful house of Eli is brought low and removed from their place of authority it will make ears tingle two different ways. If you are among the privileged and powerful yourself, your ears may tingle with fear, trepidation, anxiety, nervousness, and alarm, feeling that “if this could happen to Eli and his sons, it could also happen to me.” That person would have the choice of either changing their ways and abandoning their abuses, or circling the proverbial wagons and arming for defense, or going on a rampage to pillage as much as possible from people before the inevitable reckoning.

The other groups whose ears will tingle will be those who had resigned to life being corrupt and evil, who now hear that justice will assert itself. The bad guys will actually get their comeuppance! “There is a God!” as we like to exclaim when something beneficial happens that we did not expect.

Our ears tingle when we hear about something anomalous happening, something that goes against our expectations and turns part of our world upside down. I think our ears should be on a constant tingle whenever we hear the word of Scripture, because the Bible is almost exclusively about the upending of the world, the ignominious fall of mighty empires, and the lifting up of the poor, the slaves, the sick, and the grieving.

In this case, God takes the responsibility for the religion out of the hands of the privileged men, and gives it to a boy.

“Samuel,” it says, “lay there until morning.” He can’t sleep. Could you? I suspect Eli wasn’t resting easy either. The text says, “He opened the doors of the house of the Lord.” No doubt he opened these doors every day. But the text gives us this little detail here because it symbolizes the way Samuel’s whole ministry will open up what had been a closed and corrupted system. Samuel will bring God’s word to the people; he will make God available to the people; he will open up the barriers that separated God from the people, abolishing the idea that God was confined in a certain shrine, tended to by an insider class of specialists. The Word will now go forth.

Now it is not about who your father is, but your experience of God’s word. Now your lineage doesn’t matter. All that matters is God’s call. This call will be confirmed in the following chapters, as Samuel leads the people to victory over the encroaching Philistines.

IV.

Samuel reports to Eli in the morning. He is apparently reluctant to repeat what the voice told him, because Eli has to threaten him to spill it. And then Samuel tells Eli everything. Eli’s family is to be stripped of the priesthood and delegitimized. The Lord’s word is uncompromising and definite; there is no hope of appeal.

Eli does not get angry. He certainly does not punish the messenger. Neither does he show a lot of grief or even surprise. He simply says, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.” So Eli shows trust in the Lord, in the end. He knows what’s what; he knows the Lord well enough to know that he and his family were in for it. He appears to acquiesce in the Lord’s judgment. He submits to the word of the Lord, even though it is spoken against him.

Eli does stay in charge until Samuel grows up. By then the people recognize the real prophet of the Lord, and Samuel takes over.

The point is our need to hear, recognize, and submit to the word of God. We see a similar dynamic at work in the gospel reading. Nathanael does not recognize the Word of God, Jesus, when first he hears about him. He rejects the idea that anything good can come out of that backwater town, Nazareth. Philip has to invite him to “come and see.”

The Word of God must be experienced. He must be seen and heard; we have to go to him with openness. When Jesus and Nathanael have that conversation, it ends with Nathanael’s remarkable confession, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” He submits to the Lord. This is the only appropriate response when confronted with the Word of the Lord. You do it. You participate in what God is doing.

These stories remind us that God is way bigger than we are, and that God is in charge. What God wills for the world will happen as inevitably as the tides or the sunrise. You cannot stop it. If you try, you will be ground under by God’s tectonic movement.

And we know in Christ that God’s movement in the world is always for love and justice. The sins of Hophni and Phineas are out of synch with God’s will; they are rejected and turned over. Their family, which had been on top, now sinks to the bottom. God brings a new messenger, Samuel, to convey the Word to the people.

How many of us, when informed that our world is about to be turned upside down, would answer with Eli: “It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him”? How many of us recognize God in the form of an apparent nobody from nowhere?

But that is practically the nature of God’s Word. It almost always comes as a surprise, with a message that challenges everything we have always accepted about the world. In fact, it is a good rule to say that if the Bible is saying something you agree with, you’re probably not reading it right. Eli was wise enough to realize this. If Samuel had said, “Uh, yeah, Eli, God says everything’s cool and you’re doing a great job,” Eli would have seen through that immediately.

Are we ready for our world to be turned upside down? Can we interpret that as a good thing? Because that is the good news. And our job is to put ourselves in a position where we can receive this as good news for us as well.

The good news is that, contrary to what we have been told to depend on, God is coming into the world for healing and justice, goodness and love, righteousness and peace, blessing and redemption. May we have the presence of mind to say with Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And may we have the trust of Eli that, when we hear what God is doing, we may say, “It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him.”

+++++++

Misfits.

2012-01-12T18:34:00.000-08:00

A pastor friend of mine reports that the members of her congregation refer to themselves as “the Island of misfit toys.” The reference is to the stop-motion animation version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (the one with Burl Ives as the snowman/narrator) that has aired on TV every December since 1964. In the film, the Island of Misfit Toys is an arctic sanctuary for toys that are inexplicably weird and hence unwanted by most children. The population includes King Moonracer, a winged lion who acts as the island's ruler. Then there are the misnamed Charlie-In-The-Box, a spotted elephant, a “Dolly for Sue" (who apparently has some psychological problems), a toy bird who swims instead of flies, a cowboy who rides an ostrich, a train with square wheels on its caboose, toy boat that sinks rather than floats, a squirt gun that shoots grape jelly, an airplane that cannot fly, and "a scooter for Jimmy," whose misfit issue is unidentified.

That churches are now beginning to see themselves in this way, as a collection of misfits, rejects, losers, and inappropriately-abled people, is actually a good thing. It means that we are more like the people Jesus himself actually attracted. The original disciples were not successful, wealthy, powerful, beautiful, or even particularly healthy. They were misfits: the people who met Jesus were sick, possessed, or disabled, they were prostitutes, tax-collectors, and menial laborers. There were a handful of disciples who may have been well-off; but even these were unusual by their willingness to hang around with the rest of the motley assembly of losers who followed Jesus.

As early as the first century, the church began attracting successful people. But in the Letter of James we see that this demographic expansion was not necessarily seen as a positive development by the apostles. James severely castigates rich Christians for bringing their secular values and hierarchies into the church (James 5:1-6). But by the time Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, this battle was largely lost. And it largely stayed lost until now. The church did always appeal to misfits; and throughout history movements like the Franciscans repeatedly upheld what is really the “Christian wing of Christianity,” (to paraphrase Howard Dean). Jesus always had followers among society’s losers. But since the religion was officially wedded to the government, this became a minority, secondary movement. The mainstream of the church preferred to fawn over, embrace, and try to become rich, powerful people.

I’ve been in churches where the recovering alcoholic or the disabled person who visits worship is ignored, while if a successful man with the beautiful family shows up, they have people falling all over themselves to welcome them and encourage them to join. If you called a large, growing, successful, wealthy, multi-staffed congregation “the island of misfit toys” you would offend them and invite an argument… if it were not so ridiculous. Would Jesus recognize a large sanctuary filled with well-dressed, prosperous, healthy, well-behaved, white families be recognizable to Jesus as disciples of his?

If the church is going to be the church it has to be able to accept the designation as an “island of misfit toys.” In other words, a church that does not welcome and include – indeed, that is not primarily made up of – the broken, the losers, the sick, the rejected and excluded, the poor, and the marginalized, is not the church of Jesus Christ. Indeed, the church that is true to the Lord Jesus would be a veritable archipelago of misfit toys, stretching across the whole planet.

The church that has spent the last 30 years in serious shrinkage, trading its upper-middle-class members for a smaller number of misfits and losers, may be a church that is actually becoming more faithful. It may be transforming from a large country-club, to a smaller gathering of faithful disciples of Jesus. It may actually be growing small enough to grow by reaching out to even more misfits and losers.

There are far more misfits and losers out there in the world than there are successful, well-off, healthy, winners. The church has to apply itself to reaching out to the misfits and losers, many of whom do not already relate to the church because of centuries of knowing themselves to be unwelcome.

That particular church whose pastor told me that the members define themselves as “the island of misfit toys” has another interesting characteristic. Much of the current membership was “unchurched” before they joined. Here is a church that has had more success in bringing people to Jesus Christ, than many churches with more a lot more members and money.

In evangelism, therefore, we need to go out and actively look for the misfits and losers around us. That is to whom God sends us. That is with whom we are called to identify… because that’s who we are ourselves. The disabled and the defeated, the failures and losers, the sick and marginalized, the poor and indebted, the unemployed and uninsured, the workers and the service-providers, the disaffected young and the forgotten aged… these are the people who comprise the field ready for harvest today. The successful are still quite welcome in the churches, of course… but increasingly they will have to learn to be comfortable with and equal to the rest of us, the broken, humbled, needy people who are hungry to hear the good news as a promise of healing and empowerment.

In the film, all the misfit toys are gathered and distributed to appreciative, loving children. So in real life. The Lord Jesus gathers his people to him, and sends them out as witnesses to his healing, restoring, welcoming power. We may be misfit toys, but in Jesus Christ God declares us worthy, and connects us with exactly those people who most need to know God’s saving love.

+++++++

Full Immersion.

2012-01-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

Mark 1:4-11

John the Baptizer appears, we are told, in the wilderness. Wilderness was a loaded term for Jews. The wilderness of Sinai was where most of the Torah, the first 5 books of the Bible, takes place. It was the place where the people met God, and where God slowly and painfully shaped them into a nation. The wilderness is where God gave them the Laws by which to live. The wilderness is where God sustained them with miraculous food and water. They spent a whole generation out there until they were ready to assume possession of the Promised Land.

The wilderness is the place where people were closest to God. The prophet Elijah went into the wilderness to meet God. Other prophets like Jeremiah lifted up the wilderness as well. Jesus himself will go farther out into the wilderness and meet the devil right after his baptism.

Wilderness was also away from civilization. It was wild and undomesticated. It was dangerous. It was largely outside of the jurisdiction of the Roman/Jewish political and economic regime.

And the wilderness was a hideout for revolutionaries and dissidents, beyond the easy reach of the Roman army. If you’re part of an urban, imperial society, good things do not happen or come out of the wilderness.

John is proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Christians have always wondered why, if Jesus is sinless, he had to go through baptism. He had no sins to forgive. He had nothing to repent of. At least according to orthodox Christianity.

But repentance means both a turning around and a change of mind. When Jesus is baptized it also represents for him what it meant for everyone else who came out from Jerusalem and the Judean countryside. It means a turning away from their regular lives, controlled and dominated by the rules and values of the Roman Empire. And it means a changing of your mind so that they no longer think according to the way the Empire wanted them to think.

And if forgiveness means “release,” it means they are to consider themselves set free from the matrix of sinfulness which characterized existence under the heel of the Empire.

We don’t have to enter the rather pointless and theoretical theological debate about whether Jesus personally committed any acts that would be considered sins. The fact is that living under the Empire made sinning unavoidable. The normal acts of daily life, no matter how innocently undertaken, involved a person in the system of oppression, exploitation, and injustice that the Romans and their allies imposed upon the Jewish people. Buying and selling, paying taxes, working at a job, even worshiping at the Temple, was all a tacit participation in this system. You couldn’t separate yourself from it unless you literally went to a place where you had no contact with the economy: the wilderness.

II.

This is why people needed to be cleansed and purified, and why it had to be out in the desert that this happened. Just participating in the imperial system was defiling. It involved slavery and economic inequality and supporting a brutal military regime and subtle forms of idolatry. Just existing in this system left you symbolically soaked in the blood of oppressed people. You went out to John to get this washed off of you. You went out for forgiveness, that is, to be released from this bondage.

The little description of John tells us of his radical non-participation in the Roman economy. He didn’t wear their clothes; he didn’t eat their food. He lived on what God, not the emperor, provided, even out in the desert. It was all about bugs, leather, camel-hair, and so forth.

This would have reminded people of the prophet Elijah again, and the fact that Elijah’s career was one of steadfast resistance to the corrupting regime of King Ahab. Ahab also worked to assimilate and accommodate the Israelite faith to the religion of the economic elite, which was based on the agricultural fertility god, Baal.

The content of John’s actual proclamation is: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

He says that someone stronger than he is coming. John is only strong enough to resist the system by separation. He can’t confront the rulers directly; when he does he gets arrested and it costs him his head. John is able to wash people symbolically clean of their complicity in the system; but that is only temporary. The people will eventually have to go back home and immerse themselves in the sinfulness of life under the Empire again. What John does for them does not really last; but it does provide a preparation for what is to come. When they go home they have this memory of this experience. And even if they are back in the system, they are increasingly ready for something else, something new, to emerge.

This new person, the One who is coming, will take the battle out of the wilderness and into the towns and villages of Galilee and Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem itself. He will organize these people who participated in John’s movement and establish new communities based on God’s values, and this movement will blow through the nation and through the whole Empire, spreading like wildfire. He will be the agent of God’s Holy Spirit.

III.

So, Jesus comes down from his home in Nazareth, which was a place nobody expected anybody important to come from. He comes from the region of Galilee, which was not only looked down upon by sophisticated, urban Jerusalemites because it was so full of Gentiles and dominated by Greek culture, but was an infamous source of political rebels and revolutionaries. This is where Jesus comes from.

And he comes to John in the wilderness, at the Jordan River. Now the Jordan River was not insignificant either. It was the river that the Israelites had to miraculously cross when they entered the Promised Land after the exodus. It was the boundary of the Promised Land. That’s where John goes, to the place representing the liberation and independence of the people.

It is as if he is saying, just as our ancestors made the final crossing from slavery in Egypt to liberation in Canaan here at this river, so now those who come to me here will re-experience that liberation by being immersed in the same river. God’s redemption, God’s forgiveness and salvation, is figured in being baptized in these waters. It is about repentance: turning away from the injustice and oppression of Egypt; it is about forgiveness, release from bondage, escape from the murderous, exploitive sins of Pharaoh, escape even from the faithlessness of the people in the wilderness. The water of the Jordan meant all that.

That’s why John went there; that’s why Jesus goes there. And he chooses to participate with these people, and with us, in this water ritual of immersion. When he goes down into the water, it reminds us of the way he has come down from heaven, to the earth, becoming flesh to dwell among us; and when he emerges from the water it is a foreshadowing of his resurrection, when he will be lifted up from death and from the earth.

This motion of baptism, the simple movement of going down and coming up, now becomes the enduring pattern of the Christian life. To follow Jesus means to follow him in conforming our lives to this pattern. Just as he comes down into the world, so we follow him when we embrace humility, identifying with the needy of the world, realizing our own profound need for his healing and the release from our own habits and actions and their consequences. This is what he means when he tells us to take up our cross; it means nothing less than following him to death. Baptism is a symbolic dying and rising again to new life. In baptism we die with him and we are raised with him in a resurrection like his, says Paul.

IV.

When Jesus goes down into the water, and reemerges into the sunlight, we are told that: “He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Jesus has come down from heaven, the Word of the Father, by whom all things were created at the beginning. But he doesn’t start his ministry until he first performs this visible ritual. It kind of ratifies and makes public the truth of who he is and what he has come to do. In him and in this act of being baptized, Jesus summarizes the whole of the Scriptures and the entire story of salvation.

If we are going to be his disciples, we are going to have to follow him. Following him means we realize that we are in the world for a purpose. And that purpose is to witness to the new community that Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. This new community is a rejection of the powers and systems that rule the world under sin, in its separation from God. Jesus restores the relationship between Creator and creation, and he invites us to live together in the power of this new relationship.

In his ministry he will plant seeds of new hope and trust in the soil cultivated and turned over by John. He will heal, and liberate, and teach, and feed, and welcome, and bless, and proclaim God’s Kingdom. His communities are places where those practices and values reign and flow and shine.

May we also remember how in our baptism we follow him into the world, choosing to live with and cherish the broken and the lost, the rejected and the outsider. And in following him down, we also follow him up, in the new life of liberation, peace, redemption, and release.

+++++++

Death Eaters.

2011-12-02T10:22:00.001-08:00

Apparently, some presbyteries fund their administration/operations by using an endowment based on the liquidated assets of closed churches. I find this despicable. It is part of the larger pattern in our declining denomination: living off of dead people.

There is no way to avoid the perception that, in taking this approach, a presbytery is basically closing churches in order to reduce the per capita assessment, by which it supports the presbytery administration. Bluntly put: it is to feed off dead churches. Some presbyteries are actually able to keep their per capita very low because they close so many churches. How lucky for them to have so much death around them! It’s a buzzard’s paradise!

There’s so much wrong with this practice that I don’t know where to begin. First of all, I know for a fact that small churches are often already paranoid about the motives of their presbyteries. They tend to feel that the presbytery is just waiting for them to fail and close so it can swoop in and gobble up their property. I have had to reassure many small churches over the years that the presbytery has no designs on their property, that presbytery does not want to close any of its churches, and that selling property is something the presbytery does not need the hassle of bothering with. How can I give churches this reassurance if is the explicit policy of a presbytery to use the income generated by closed churches to keep the per capita assessment on larger churches low?

Secondly, it is another reason to keep the administrative costs of a presbytery inflated beyond what the presbytery really needs or wants to pay for. If we valued it, we’d pay for it directly. Since we don’t want to pay for it, we clearly don’t value it; but the powers-that-be come up with a scheme to pay for it anyway, using someone else’s money. This is ass-backwards and wrong.

Administration is the death of mission. Yes, mission requires a certain minimal degree of administration to keep going. But the trend in our society and in our institutional churches is that administration automatically gets bloated, and even assumes control over the mission, at which point it stops being Jesus’ mission and become the self-serving administration’s mission. When administration is allowed to define mission, “mission” is almost always reduced to mere institutional self-preservation.

In the current environment, churches are going to be closed. The assets of closed churches will go to presbyteries. What should they do with that money?

I propose that all such legacies and any income generated from them be designated for the planting of new congregations, the redevelopment of present ones, and educating people for this work.

The Future of Stated Clerks.

2011-12-02T09:02:00.001-08:00

Under the old Presbyterian Form of Government it was often the job of the presbytery Stated Clerk to interpret, uphold, and clarify its detailed rules. In this role, the Stated Clerk had to be able to give balanced advice uncontrolled by whatever the agenda might have been of the presbytery or its entities, like the Executive Presbyter, or the Committee on Ministry, or the Presbytery Council.

Now, however, the new Form of Government, emphasizes flexibility and permission giving. This means that there is less daylight between what the Book will permit, and what a presbytery decides it wants to do. In the new Book, more authority and responsibility is given to local councils (presbyteries and sessions) to organize themselves and undertake actions according to their sense of their own mission in their specific situation. This means that the Book of Order has a more general and less immediate influence on our daily work, while we will be more directly governed by the details of the administrative manual of the local presbytery. Thus we see that the role of anyone charged with mediating between the Book of Order and the presbytery is greatly diminished.

As a Stated Clerk I see the need quickly to rethink and retool for this new way of operating. For we clerks do have skills and expertise that presbyteries will require as they reorganize for mission in new ways. But we have to see ourselves less as “canon lawyers” and more as functional and critical enablers of mission.

For one thing, we carry the institutional memory of the body. While it may no longer be expressed in terms of detailed legislation to be enforced, where we have been as an institution is still relevant to the decisions we are making today. This is true even if our awareness of our past tells us more about what not to do and what didn’t work, or at least won’t work today. Having this longitudinal scope is essential if a presbytery is going to avoid some mistakes of the past. The Stated Clerk is the one person in the structure of a presbytery who has this awareness and access to this data.

Stated Clerks and session clerks, are, in a sense, storytellers. We keep the story of the body. We maintain the coding which constitutes the presbytery’s identity, it’s “dna,” if you will. On one level, this story is written in the Minutes of the presbytery. But on another level, presbyteries have what we might call an “oral tradition:” the collection of anecdotes, memories, habits, and even legends of the council. Stated Clerks, especially those who have been around a while, are the ones most likely to have access to this awareness and insight. We maintain and integrate both the written and oral history of the body, making it available to inform the body’s current witness.

Stated Clerks also have extensive knowledge about organizational structures and relationships. This means we give cogent and sometimes pointed advice about the promise and the consequences of particular arrangements and decisions. Instead of saying, “The Book says you can’t do that,” now we can say, “That might work, but here are the pitfalls and liabilities of such a course of action; and here are some examples of where that sort of thing worked well and how they did it.” Now we have to have the presence of mind and communication ability to say the presbytery should determine its actions, not just because of what the Book and its history of interpretation says, though that information is important to have. We have more importantly to ask the questions concerning the degree to which a course of action is effective, efficient, fair, authentic, biblical, or faithful.

In other words, the role of the Stated Clerk is quickly evolving into one that has more to do with assisting a presbytery in turning its vision into actual structures, procedures, and practices that work. We are moving from being referees to being advocates for best practices. In addition to interpreting the streamlined Book of Order, we will be more about interpreting, organizing, and structuring the mission of the presbytery.

Over the past few decades presbyteries have evolved a staffing pattern that normally includes two professional leadership figures in our presbyteries: the Stated Clerk (usually part-time, but who may serve for many years) and the Executive (usually full-time, but who doesn’t always last that long in any one place). Under the new Form of Government (and, unfortunately, prodded by diminishing finances) many presbyteries are combining these jobs. But merely folding the responsibilities of the Stated Clerk into the job description of the Executive will not be successful. This approach does not take the Stated Clerk role seriously. Rather, it thinks of the clerk as a mainly secretarial, bureaucratic position. Still worse, some Executives seem to think they are removing an obstacle to progress when they assume/eliminate the Stated Clerk’s job.

Leaving aside the question as to whether many Executives have any clue about progress, Stated Clerks have in the recent past served as obstacles to initiatives that went against the old Form of Government. We are still called to serve as obstacles to initiatives that violate the spirit of our polity or the Scriptures, or are just plain dumb. But more important is the emerging positive role of the Stated Clerk. He/she is the figure in the presbytery best equipped to oversee organizational development and transformation.

In a more general sense, this role remains faithful to the Stated Clerk’s calling to interpret the Constitution. It’s just that now the Constitution, at least the Form of Government section of it, is different. The old Form of Government was often interpreted in a regulatory manner. But now, to interpret this Form of Government faithfully will have to do with helping a presbytery discern and organize itself for mission.

Thanksgiving.

2011-11-23T20:10:00.001-08:00

One of the traditions we have in my family is that as we sit at the table on Thanksgiving we go around and each of us says one thing for which we are thankful. One circumstance in our lives for which we are grateful. One event we are glad we have known or experienced, especially over the past year. It gives us an opportunity sometimes to say something silly and funny, or even ironic; but also to recognize very important relationships or milestones.

Thanksgiving is a national holiday, ostensibly it is a secular holiday as well. It is, like July 4^th or Memorial Day, celebrated by just about every American no matter what their religion or lack of religion. It is at the same time a very spiritual holiday. It is a time of year when we bring into consciousness what we have received and realize and express our gratitude for it.

We leave it up to each family or individual to understand to whom or to what we are grateful... but there is this tacit and implied belief in the very word “thanksgiving” itself that we are grateful to someone or something other than ourselves. To date no one at our Thanksgiving table has yet said anything like, “I am grateful to myself for buying myself that new car.”

No. Implied in the idea of gratitude, of receiving a gift, is that of another who is the giver. To say “thank you” means that there is a “you” whom we are addressing, even if that “you” is not named, identified, known, or recognized. Even if we say the giver is the impersonal universe or blind fate, simply by addressing it as a “you,” we personalize it. We make a giver out of it.

This whole idea of gratitude is in every case at least a subtle recognition that we are not alone and independent in the universe. Our life comes from beyond us, somehow. To approach our lives and the things in our lives with gratitude is fundamentally different from simply taking, using, consuming, and exploiting. The holiday is still called “Thanksgiving;” it is not called, “Face-stuffing Day,” or “Eat-All-You-Can Day,” or “Consume-as-Much-as-Possible Day,” or “Black Friday-eve,” at least not yet.

No. There is still room for us to reflect on ourselves as recipients, as people who have received gifts from another. For people of faith this means, I think, paying attention to that Other, the ultimate Source of what we have and enjoy.

II.

One of the most remarkable and subtle little verses in Scripture, one which has the most wide-ranging implications, yet which is also dramatically and chronically under-appreciated, is the first verse of the 24^th Psalm. “The Earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” This one little verse expresses something virtually presupposed in the whole rest of the book. It is the root cause of our gratitude and thanksgiving.

If we lose sight of this knowledge that everything belongs to God, we fall into serious misunderstanding leading to even more serious bad and destructive behavior. We start to imagine that things belong to us and we may do with them as we please.

Often children — and many adults — understand things this way. They somewhere acquire the idea that being given a gift means ownership, and that ownership means some absolute power of disposition over the thing. “It’s mine! I can do whatever I want with it!” is the argument. We have this idea that we may do whatever we want with the things that are said to belong to us. They may be exploited, misused, transformed, sold, or even destroyed. It is hard sometimes to get it through the head of a child that, “No, just because something is yours does not give you the right to destroy it with impunity. We need to take care of the things we have.”

Our children are not born with this understanding of things but they get it from us. It is we who often have this notion that ownership means absolute power over something. It is we who get resentful if the government tells us what we can’t do with our own property. It is we who have this idea that property is something we can exploit, develop, poison, or destroy according to our will.

The catastrophic effects of this ideology are all around us and becoming more pronounced. It is the precise opposite of thanksgiving to assume that the world exists for me or for us to use as we desire. There is here no sense of responsibility to any Other who presents us with gifts; for gifts imply responsibility. A gift implies a donor. And a donor might have some idea of what the gift is to be used for. In thanksgiving we recognize this. Thanksgiving places constructive limits on our use of things.

We expect a gift to be used according to its nature and purpose in being given. If we gave someone a beautiful, leather-bound set of the complete works of Charles Dickens, we would probably be disappointed were the recipient to say, “Thank you! I can use all this nice paper for fireplace kindling!”

The Native Americans, who are an integral part of our Thanksgiving story, would not have understood gifts and ownership as meaning absolute control over something. Ironically, their understanding was far closer to that of Psalm 24, than was the view and practice of the people who arrived in boats and actually had Psalm 24 memorized! To the natives you could no more own land than you could own the air or the sea. To them it was obvious to whom the land belonged: it belonged to the Creator.

III.

If we are able to keep this perspective in mind, of to whom our lives and world belong, it will change the way we live. It will enable us to live with thanksgiving, and it is something we express when we give thanks.

The universe, the creation, the Earth, and everything and everyone in it belong in perpetuity and exclusively to the One who created them. Ultimately it is the Creator who owns and is responsible for the whole place. All matter, all energy, all resources, all life, all people, all belong to God alone. Which is to say that we, the human race as a whole or individual people, finally and truly own none of it.

The most we can say is that the Earth is something that has been placed in our care. We are managers; we are stewards; we are custodians; we are caretakers. But we are not owners of even so much as our own bodies, let alone the vast resources of this planet, let alone the whole universe. Nothing inherently belongs to us. We have absolute freedom over nothing.

But we are indeed the caretakers, the Creator’s agents, which is itself a great privilege and responsibility. And it is for that we give thanks, as expressed in Psalms like 118 and 136: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures for ever.” We give thanks, as we hear in both these Psalms, for what God has done for us in delivering us from the power of evil. Our relationship to the Earth and to the Creator is one of thanksgiving and responsibility; it is not one of ownership or control.

Rather, all of these things are given to us, placed in our charge, by the Creator, to be used and developed according to the Creator’s wishes. And we see the Creator’s wishes embodied in Jesus Christ, who walked lightly on the earth, saw God’s presence in all of nature, and gave his life for the life of the world.

IV.

I conclude with these famous words of Chief Seattle, which I take to be a cogent and incisive commentary, a midrash, if you will, on Psalm 24, verse 1. Chief Seattle says, “Teach your children what we have taught our children.... This we know. The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth.... All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves because the thankless and ungrateful attitude of people has always resulted in bad times for all. Idolatry and injustice lead inexorably to calamity, often natural disaster. But to approach the web with gratitude, the kind of gratitude our Thanksgiving holiday is really about, will enable us to live in peace and prosperity.

The Earth belongs to God. God is the One who weaves the web of life. To abuse the gift of creation is to insult the Creator. God expects us to cherish in thanksgiving the world placed in our care.

This is the meaning of Thanksgiving, is it not? To give thanks for what we are given by committing ourselves to fulfill the wishes of the One from whom all these blessings flow. To cherish the resources placed in our care by devoting them to the upbuilding of all in the community. To add value to what we are given by dedicating the lives sustained by such blessings to the doing of justice, the loving of kindness, and the walking in humility with the One who made all things.

+++++++

Sheep and Goats.

2011-11-23T20:05:00.000-08:00

Matthew 25:31-46

In Jesus’ great parable of the Last Judgment, the nations are all gathered into one great flock, sheep and goats together. The King then divides and separates the sheep from the goats. The goats are assigned to the King’s left, where they are cursed and sent into the eternal fire, and the sheep are on the right. They are blessed and go to heaven.

Now, I am an urban/suburban person. I don’t really know from sheep or goats. What may have been obvious to Jesus’ hearers when he talks about sheep and goats, is a mystery to me. So I had to look up some facts about these animals.

The King addresses the sheep first. What are sheep like? Why would Jesus use the image of sheep to talk about the redeemed and blessed ones? What were the qualities of sheep that made them a good image of disciples, for jeus?

First, sheep have a reputation for not being very bright. (Actually, I understand that they’re smarter than cows but not as smart as pigs.) But maybe their skittishness makes them seem less intelligent than they are. Sheep have an innocence and vulnerability about them. They are famously docile and credulous. They are so trusting that they could easily be led “like lambs to slaughter,” as we say.

I don’t think Jesus wants disciples to be stupid. But there is this childlike openness and trustingness that he values.

Sheep also are known for having poor eyesight. When they respond to the King they ask, “When did we see you?” On the other hand, sheep do have excellent hearing. With training they can even recognize their own names.

Finally, sheep were known for their flocking ability. Especially in the face of danger, sheep regularly cluster together in a tight group. They are therefore somewhat communal animals.

Jesus refers to his followers as sheep, lambs, or a flock on numerous occasions. He identifies himself as the Good Shepherd, who takes care of and protects the sheep. Jesus does call individuals, but he establishes them as a flock, a group, a community, the church.

The sheep are the ones who hear Jesus and know his voice. They trust his voice more than they trust in what they see.

The lesson we learn from sheep is that we are not to judge by what our eyes see, because so often what we see is conditioned by our expectations and desires, our prejudices, biases, and self-interest.

Rather we are to listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd who feeds us, gives us water, heals us, remains with us and clothes us, and gathers us together, including even strays from other flocks.

II.

Goats, I learn, on the other hand, are considerably smarter than sheep. Their intelligence rivals that of dogs. But they do not have dogs’ loyalty. (Dogs, of course, are eternally loyal to whomever has a bone.) Goats will only become loyal to people if a relationship is developed over time. They will not follow you as readily. They will hang back and make their own decision. The intelligence of goats makes them less cooperative. They tend to be defiant, cunning, independent, and capricious. In fact the word “capricious” literally means “goatlike.” They are always conniving how to get what they want. Goats have been known to figure out how to escape from complicated enclosures, for instance.

The eyesight of goats is equal to humans. That’s not saying very much when compared to the eyesight of hawks, but their intelligence probably makes them seem to have better eyesight. They pick up on and notice things. So their response to the King’s charge has a different emphasis than the sheep. They answer, “When did we see you, Lord?”

But the big thing I want to emphasize about goats is their ravenous appetite. Goats are known for destroying whole landscapes because they will eat just about anything. The cartoons that show goats eating tin-cans, or that commercial where the goat is munching on office waste-paper, are accurate. They will eat all kinds of junk, just about anything they find in front of them. They are the consummate consumers.

Historically, some countries even banned goats because they are so destructive of crops. Today, goats continue to be used by people to clear out unwanted vegetation. They have been described as "eating machines" and "biological control agents". Herds are used to clear dry brush from California hillsides to prevent wildfires.

But goats will not actually swallow and digest everything; in the end, they are a bit more picky about that. But they will taste and chew up almost anything in order to find out whether it is good for food or not.

I wonder if it isn’t the omnivorous destructive appetites of goats that makes them an image for those rejected by God. I wonder if that doesn’t have anything to tell us in terms of our approach and attitude towards God’s creation.

In this sense goats remind me of people, especially people in our economic regime. We have mowed through creation like goats on steroids or a veritable plague of locusts, carelessly chewing up everything in our path. This is not even just because we need it for nourishment. We are addicted to consumption and growth.

We are laying waste to this planet for the sake of our own greed and pathological desire for more.

III.

If this is the ideology we follow, then it is not surprising that we have no perception of, or time for, other people around us who may be in need. We don’t see them as sisters and brothers, members of the same flock, whom we need to gather around and protect, whom we need to lift up and serve. We see them as competitors for scarce resources. We see them as unlucky losers.

So the goats’ answer to the question is to say, in effect, well, yeah, there’re these pathetic poor and sick and imprisoned people here, we see them every day. But when, Lord, did we see you? If we had seen you we would certainly have served you. You’re the King! It is in our interests to get on your good side and win your favor! Had we seen you, we would have bowed down and worshiped you! But we didn’t see you. All we saw were these homeless, unemployed, indebted, sick, undocumented, criminals, and such.”

The “goats” of this world do not see anything of value except insofar as it can be consumed. The balance and beauty of a landscape is lost on them; they see only the coal or the natural gas beneath, which can be ripped out and sold for a nice profit. We chew up mountains to get to the buried resources the same way a goat chews on an empty can to squeeze out a few drops of soup.

The “goats” of this world do not see people and villages, they see cheap labor they can suck some wealth out of. They see real estate. They have to do with the commodification of the world, that is, reducing it to its raw economic value. They ask, “What can I get out of this? How can I benefit from this?”

To this mentality the hungry and thirsty, the strangers and the homeless, the sick and imprisoned, are opportunities… not for service, but for exploitation. The “goats” would say: “What do you mean I didn’t help the needy? Look at all the stock I have in ADM, Suez, CCA, J&J, Citibank, and Cigna! I’m doing good by doing well!”

The goat nature of our economy, rooted in the goat side of our human nature, is what created poverty, hunger, and homelessness. And it is aggravating disease and incarceration. It is this goatishness, this ravenous wastefulness, that Jesus sees in the people who find themselves on the wrong end of the last judgment.

IV.

^“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.”

The criteria for making the cut between sheep and goats are very clear. The King does not give the nations a theological test, as if believing the right doctrine was what mattered. Neither does he assess everyone’s personal or sexual morality. Indeed, the King doesn’t even evaluate the nations on how well they kept the letter of the Law.

No. The only thing the King cares about here, the only criteria for dividing the sheep from the goats, the only question that matters in determining whether people are blessed or condemned, is whether they gave material assistance to those in need. What the King measures is the quality of our actions towards “the least of these who are members of [God’s] family.”

Because what we do to them, we do to him. If we reject them, we reject him, and then we cut ourselves off from the life he offers. If we serve them we serve him, and we participate in the life he offers.

And let’s remember who it is that Jesus is talking to? Who is his audience? You have to go back to the beginning of chapter 24 to discover it, but it’s the disciples. He is not talking to the nations and telling them what they should do. He is addressing the disciples and basically telling them that the nations will be judged on how they treated… them.

When he says “the least of these who are members of my family,” I see him opening his hand to indicate the disciples themselves. They are “the least of these.”

At this point, at the end of his ministry, we know who the disciples are. We know where they came from. We know who was following Jesus. We can go through Matthew’s gospel and find all these people who had joined Jesus’ entourage. The hungry and the thirsty, the strangers, foreigners, and aliens, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. That’s to whom Jesus’ ministry was addressed. That is who left everything and followed him.

Jesus’ disciples were these people. This was his flock, gathered together around him, supporting each other, healing and accepting each other, participating together in his liberation. These were his sheep. And the ones from the nations who are saved are the ones who show themselves to be sheep as well. They show this by the way they treat other needy people as equals, as people deserving of attention and salvation.

The church that Jesus envisions is the poor serving the poor, the needy serving the needy, the broken healing the broken, the hungry feeding the hungry. For we are all sheep, members of one flock, and he is the “one shepherd.”

That’s the vision he wants us to have, as he concludes his teaching ministry, and moves into his sacrificial work. He is saying to his disciples, “Always choose community over consumption, service over gain, generosity over cheapness, compassion over hardheartedness, and weakness over power. Then you will be choosing life over death. And in so choosing, you will be chosen… for life!

+++++++

To Hoard or to Invest?

2011-11-23T20:03:00.000-08:00

Matthew 25:14-30

I live in a house that was built about 55 years ago. It has a one-car garage. The Master Bedroom has two normal-sized closets. It has a very small basement, and an attic that is hard to get to. In its day it was a fairly good-sized house, I think. Certainly it was considered to be more than adequate for a family with three children.

Today, however, as I drive around some of the newer developments, I find that many new houses have two or three or even four car garages. At least one of the closets in the Master Bedroom is often a veritable room in itself, literally as large as one of the bedrooms in my house.

It is clear to me, then, that in the past half-century, we have become a nation that accumulates much more stuff. When I was a kid I don’t remember such a thing as a “garage sale.” At best the church might have an occasional rummage sale. But no one had enough overflow junk in their house to have to invent the garage sale until the 1970's. And back then there were no self-storage facilities, huge garages where you could keep your overflow stuff until you got a bigger house.

We have become, in the last three decades, a collector culture in which we are encouraged to acquire and hoard things, storing them, saving them, burying them in our basements, attics, and garages. We have become masters of acquisition. Indeed, the whole world economy has depended on our habits of acquisition.

A friend of mine is a real collector. Instead of books, he has on his shelves little collections of things. Here is a set of various Santa Clauses. Over here, different figurines of elephants. On this side a congregation of stuffed Disney characters. Over on that side, sets of coins.

In his attic he had, carefully filed and stored away, several years of Hess trucks, still in their original, unopened boxes. He had twenty or so years of National Geographics. He even had boxes of match-books, and more boxes of ballpoint pens.

In his dining room he didn’t just have china, but sets of plates and cups, some of them commemorative, and he could tell you right off the top of his head which items he was missing.

Now, this is kind of extreme, but I know just how he feels, because I am a collector too. I collect books, and CD’s, and those ceramic animals that come in tea boxes, and Bibles, and other stuff. I do realize however that it is a disease. There’s even a TV show about it now.

Sometimes I go into these anti-materialistic fits, and I will pack up boxes of stuff to bring to Princeton and sell to the used-book and used-CD stores. Later I will feel guilty that I might have unloaded something really valuable or that I might need someday.

But this whole collector mentality pervades our culture. Indeed, I think the economy relies on people buying stuff they don’t really need. On credit…. And I get nervous as I see children brainwashed into making collections of game cards, or cartoon DVD’s. Yet even I quietly put away my son’s Beanie Babies in plastic bags for posterity.

II.

But our addiction to stuff is killing us, I think. It is no accident that the same dynamic of congestion in our homes is also reflected on our desks, on our highways, and even in the arteries feeding our hearts. We are caught in this ideology of collecting, hoarding, grabbing, keeping, holding, and storing, and it plays out in terms of clogging, obstructing, weighing down, choking, blocking, and damming the flow in our lives.

I am convinced that our stuff is killing us. It is killing us because we are designed by God to be efficient channels of the gifts and energies of creation. God gives us raw materials and raw talents and our job is to improve them, add value to them, enjoy them... and pass them on. We are to pass them on so that others may enjoy them and add further value to them and so forth. So that from the naked resources we receive, we see the value and the meaning increased all the time.

When we block it, that process stops. Not only is value not increasing, nor people being helped; but we are personally dysfunctional. We are not filling our function. We are a disease in the system. We need to be removed from it.

This is what is going on with the servant who had been given one share in Jesus’ parable. The other servants, who had been entrusted with more, immediately went out and gave it away. That is to say, they invested it. And make no mistake, every time we give something away it is an investment of some kind. But this third servant does not give the money away. He buries it. He keeps it. He hoards it. He puts it in a box on a shelf in his attic.

He does this, he says, out of fear. He is afraid of losing it. He is afraid of what the master will do to him if he loses it.

And the lesson he, and we all learn is: To fear losing is to lose. More to the point: To fear losing is a basic and fundamental act of faithlessness against a God of abundance who has already promised that you won’t lose, you can’t lose... except by being afraid to lose.

Now, not too many of us bury our money in our backyards. But we bury it in other ways. We bury our resources when we trade them for useless stuff, which we then bury in storage in our closets, garages, and houses. We bury our resources when we use them only to feed our own desires, compulsions, comfort, and luxury. The master will come and say, “So, what happened to that million dollars I gave you over the last two decades?” And all you can point to are cars, clothes, household appliances, electronics, sporting equipment, stocks, CD’s (both kinds), insurance, and other stuff that mainly benefit only you and yours.

God’s gifts are given for the common good. They are to be used in making the world better for everyone. More bluntly, they are not to be hoarded, saved, stored up, and retained, but given away, redistributed, spread around. This is the profit the Master desires.

III.

When I was in college I used to go home for the summers. One summer my father hired me to do a job for him. He had this hobby of handicapping the races at Saratoga, and he gave me the job of going to the track and placing his bets. I had to do this according to very strict rules. He told me his picks, and I was to bet them only if they went to three-to-one. When he wanted to parlay, I was to take all the winnings from one race and place it on the next. And so forth.

The reason he asked me to do this was that he got too excited. He wouldn’t wait until a horse was at three-to-one; he wouldn’t sit out the races he knew he shouldn’t bet. In other words, he was too involved because it was his money and he was the one who stood to gain or lose.

I, however, didn’t really care that much about the races. And I certainly didn’t have any money to put on horses at the track. He knew this. He knew that I would faithfully carry out his instructions to the letter and not get swept away with excitement. He knew that between trips to the betting window I would be curled up with a book somewhere, barely conscious of the race at all.

This system worked very well, as I recall. It was all because of the fact that since this wasn’t my money I was free to do with it exactly as instructed. So, when I came home late at night, weighted down with cash, he would greet me, saying, “Well done, good and faithful son! You have proved trustworthy in a small matter. If I had anything big I would certainly put you in charge of it.”

But if I had simply locked the money he gave me at the beginning of the night in the car and gone to the library, fearful of losing it, what would have happened then?

And let’s not forget that the servants in the story are not doing this for their own gain in the first place. This is the master’s money and the master gets whatever return they can manage. The master is the beneficiary. The servants don’t get to keep one penny of what they make with their investments. They are not doing it to increase their own wealth, but the wealth of the master.

The Kingdom of God is like this. It is not about giving back to God just what God has given to us. It is about giving back to God more than what God gave us to begin with.

Neither is it about taking what God gives and making something out of it for yourself. No, it is about taking what God gives and making something out of it for God.

IV.

Someone once asked C.S. Lewis if we could take our books to heaven. Now this person, as well as Lewis, was a great reader and book-lover. And Lewis replied, “Yes, we may take our books to heaven. But only the ones we have given away.”

That is the mystery of this parable. We only have what we give away. That which we try to save and hoard and collect, we lose. That which we dedicate only to serving and helping and glorifying and feeding ourselves, we lose.

But that which we give away, we gain. The trustworthy servants in the parable gave away their bags of gold. And both end up with double what they had to begin with. That’s the kind of return you get when you give away the resources entrusted to you.

That’s the spirit we come to you with in this season when the church is concerned with stewardship. Now, stewardship time is when the session gives you an opportunity to give away money... to invest it, to do with it according to the will of the One who entrusted you with it, the One who gave you your mind and skill, the One who gave us the raw materials of the Earth. And Jesus is right here promising that if you do give it away, it will produce a significant return. That return will be not to you personally, but experienced in ways that benefit us all.

It will be used to help the needy, the deprived, the dispossessed, and the hurting. It will be used to teach ourselves and others about the truth of God’s love for the world, revealed in Jesus Christ. It will be used to worship and glorify God, and to deepen our own spiritual lives so that we come to identify with all of God’s creation. It will be used to invite others to share with us in that love and service, and so fulfill their own destinies.

It will be used to help people to see that it is not what they collect, hold on to, keep, store, or hoard that is important. Indeed, these practices only kill us and stifle our spirits under piles of junk. Rather, what saves us is the way God’s gifts flow through us to others.

God gives us his Son that his life might flow through us. God gives us all things, that we might be a blessing to all. God blesses us with life and love, to share and distribute according to God’s commandments. This is the way God has given us to glorify and enjoy God. Let us keep faith with that sacred calling, not to be worthless and lazy servants, but to be trustworthy with what we have received.

+++++++

Be Prepared.

2011-11-09T17:12:00.000-08:00

Matthew 25:1-13.

Sometimes in Jesus’ parables about the Kingdom of God you have to wonder if it’s a place you really want to go to. Matthew 25 has these three incredibly powerful parables that he delivers just before he is betrayed and arrested and killed, and they are very disturbing. I mean this one, about the prudent and foolish girls waiting for the bridegroom to come to his wedding, it sounds pretty tame until you start thinking about it.

The lesson in verse 13 is, “Keep awake.” But they all fell asleep. So why isn’t the lesson, “Be prepared”? Why are the foolish girls treated so harshly for their mistake? Shouldn’t the prudent girls be encouraged to share their oil, instead of being so selfish and sending their friends off to the store in the middle of the night to buy some? Why doesn’t the Bridegroom at least apologize for being late?

It seems like the closer he gets to the end of his earthly ministry, the darker and less compromising are Jesus’ parables. And the Kingdom of God sounds less like the wonderful treasure found in an empty lot, and less like the home of an endlessly patient Father, and more like an obstacle course where only the strong survive.

The Lord tolerates no slackers, no forgetfulness, no absent-minded distractions, no cowardice or weakness. Jesus is looking over into the abyss, he approaches death, his words smoke with apocalyptic imagery. He has just finished a couple of chapters fulled with invective against the religious establishment, thus sealing his own death warrant. And from this perspective the Kingdom of God starts to look more like the forbidding, moated fortress that Christian comes to at the end of Pilgrim’s Progress, with a door that can only be opened from within to those who have proven themselves worthy.

In these last three parables Jesus emphasizes the awesome weight of responsibility, and the magnitude of the stakes involved. This particular parable reminds me of the even more uncomfortable one where he says “to those who have will more be given, but to those who have not even what they have will be taken away.” In this case, he means that you have to make sure you have enough oil in your lamp to last the whole night. The flame must be fed continually, and you can’t assume the bridegroom will come early at your convenience.

Not only that, but you cannot expect even your friends to share their oil with you because they should not be asked to jeopardize their own attendance at the wedding banquet. It is your responsibility to have enough fuel to last. Because in this case how well you prepare for this bridegroom and this wedding banquet will show conclusively what is really inside of you and that is all that matters. And you will have to face it and there’s no second chances.

II.

My father once told me about a funeral he did. It was for a young person who died suddenly. The family were technically members of the church, but they were not active. If they came twice a year that was pretty good.

When the person died, the family members were disconsolate. My father went to visit them. And they exhibited some characteristics of the stages of grief: bargaining, anger, denial, and so forth. But at some point someone asks him where God is and why isn’t God being of more assistance to them in their hour of need. Why is God so absent?

Later, reflecting with me on this situation, he expressed more frustration about people who think that coming to church twice a year is going to give them the inner resources they need to deal with an emergent crisis like a premature death in the family.

You can’t expect to play well in a golf tournament if you only play twice a year. You can’t expect to be a soloist in a concert if you only take out the instrument twice a year. You can’t expect a marriage to survive if you only express love to each other twice a year. You can’t expect to understand current events if you only read the newspaper twice a year. Why do we think we will be able to handle a spiritual crisis just fine if we only have even minimal contact with the Spirit twice a year? Attending church twice a year is just not enough to feed the flame of your own faith.

Some things you can do infrequently because all you need is a periodical tune-up. Go to the dentist; have your eyes checked; get the car inspected; clean out the gutters; that sort of thing.

But other things need constant care and maintenance. Faith is just one of those things that is like a burning lamp: if you don’t keep adding more oil to replace the oil that has been burned, it will eventually fizzle out.

These folks were totally unable to deal with their sorrow, and they wondered why it was so hard. But they hadn’t given themselves enough oil. Their flame was allowed to sputter out.

You have to make sure you have enough oil, which is to say that you have to keep the flame of faith alive in your heart all the time. You just can’t wait for disaster to strike and think that your faith can all of a sudden be rekindled into a flame strong enough for you to get through it. It doesn’t happen that way.

You can’t wait until the blackout strikes before you decide to go and buy batteries for your flashlight. The stores will be sold out of batteries, as I can testify from bitter recent experience. The batteries have to be in place and tested before the power goes out. The power source needs to be always available.

And if it’s not, it’s not God’s fault. God is not merciless and cruel because God doesn’t automatically suspend the laws of time and space in order to accommodate your shortsightedness or your denial about what will necessarily happen.

III.

When the time comes close for a baby to be born, the prospective parents keep an overnight bag packed and ready at all times. They know the baby is coming, they just don’t know exactly when. If the mother goes into labor and the bag is not packed, and due to this unreadiness she has to deliver in a taxi-cab... the baby, when she gets to be about 14, will be justified in asking, “What were you thinking?”

But most parents are prepared because they eagerly await the baby, they want to welcome the baby, they are called to be parents, this arrival will be the joyful focus of their whole lives. The baby can’t come soon enough, at least for the mother, in most cases.

You read the baby-care books, you take the Lamaze classes, you join the new parents’ support group, you paint the nursery and buy furniture, you have a baby-shower, you finally buy some life insurance... you do all these things so that when the baby finally comes you are ready! Or at least as ready as you can be.

And you enjoy getting ready because you are looking forward to this blessed event. You make sure you have more oil than you’re ever going to need for this particular lamp. You don’t want to have to go door to door in your neighborhood at three o’clock some morning, carrying a screaming infant, asking your neighbors if you might borrow some baby formula.

The prudent girls had enough oil because they were anticipating a happy event and they didn’t want to miss it. They were thinking ahead because they wanted to go to this banquet and nothing was more important to them.

The foolish girls, on the other hand... well, maybe they really didn’t want to be there in the first place. Maybe they harbored some resentment or jealousy towards the Bridegroom and had no reason to be as careful. Maybe they were too busy that day to get to the store. Maybe they put it off or just forgot to get oil. Or maybe they didn’t think he was really going to show up, and perhaps that would have been okay with them.

Maybe they were betting he was going to come much earlier, before they ran out of oil. But that is a risk you don’t take when you really care about something. If you want World Series tickets, you don’t put it off and assume something will be available at game time. No, you get to the box office 20 hours early and camp out in your sleeping bag.

But you see, all of these excuses mean, in effect, that they didn’t care. At least they didn’t care enough. It wasn’t the most important thing in their lives that they get into this wedding banquet, because if it were they would not have neglected to have enough oil. Indeed, they would have had gallons of oil and even spare wicks, matches, and a spare lamp, just in case.

IV.

The point is perpetual readiness. You have to be able to function in the darkness. You need enough of the oil of spiritual practice to feed the flame of your faith. You just can’t start praying, reading the Bible, and going to church when things get difficult, and expect it to be immediately effective.

But you know what the whole thing is predicated upon? You have to know that the Bridegroom is coming. Not only that, but you have to know that the Bridegroom is coming and it will be great! It will be worth the sacrifice. It will be worth sleeping on the pavement outside the box office. It will be worth lugging extra oil around, or spare batteries.

That’s what we sophisticated, modern folks have so much trouble with. We lack this conviction that the Day is coming, the end of the world, the completion of creation, the goal of history. We think it’s going to be like this forever... or at least for our lifetime.

But listen: not only is it not going to be like this forever; it’s not even like this now. The world is not what we think and perceive it is. We see a tiny corner of reality, and even that we see unclearly. The end of the world, the Kingdom of God, is right next to you, within you, all around you. It is, as Jesus says, “At hand.”

In the meantime, while we wait for the fullness of the dawn, we carry these lamps to remind us of the light and to give us a piece of that light in advance. The lamp we have is our faith, and it is fed by the things God has given us to do which anticipate Christ’s coming. When we hear the Word we are listening to some of that light. When we celebrate the Sacraments we are envisioning the coming daybreak. When we offer prayers to God we are opening our eyes all the wider to absorb the sunrise to come.

These are the oil we need to keep the flame of faith, and hope, and love, alive in our hearts. They constitute the fuel of our spiritual life. Without them, we descend into darkness so deep that even the Bridegroom’s dawn can take forever to find us.

But with them we are ready to awaken to the call, “Here is the Bridegroom! Come out to meet him!”

+++++++

Hypocrisy.

2011-11-01T18:37:00.001-07:00

Matthew 23:1-12.

Hypocrisy. I don’t know how many times I have heard people give as their reason for not attending church or even being a Christian, the hypocrisy of Christians. “I don’t go to church because they’re all a bunch of hypocrites.”

Jesus didn’t like hypocrisy either. Hypocrisy is exactly what Jesus complains about in his rigorous criticism of the scribes and Pharisees. That is, their actions do not match their words. They are pretending to be something they are not. They are not sincere or authentic in their faith. They say one thing and do another.

So the criticisms of people about the church today, and the criticism Jesus leveled against the religious establishment of his own day, are the same. This fact ought to give us pause, at least. Are we doing the same kinds of things that these religious leaders were doing in Jesus’ day? Do we place heavy burdens on people, which we are unwilling to lift a finger to move? Do we do all our deeds to be seen by others? Do we love to have the honor, recognition, status, and respect that, in the minds of some, goes along with being overtly pious? What about our leaders and ministers? Do we get off on public affirmation, or gain some vain satisfaction from being called “reverend?”

We Christians are infamous for our hypocrisy because of the way many acted, and still act. Back when we are considered the de facto established religion of America, many abused that power and influence. Hypocrisy I think is a liability mainly for people in power. And people remember for generations that we sang about joy with the sourest of faces, that we talked about forgiveness but were not good at forgiving others, that we preached peace and supported war, proclaimed justice while perpetrating injustice, affirmed God’s love while expressing in our lives what can only be called hate. This still goes on, God knows.

Parents are often accused of hypocrisy by their children. Children can see very clearly the distance between a parent’s words and actions. And parents have a natural tendency, I think, to have their words reach for ideals that their behavior doesn’t quite attain. We want our children to be better than we were, so we give great advice and make great rules, based on our long, hard experience... but too often we didn’t or don’t take our own advice or keep our own rules.

Leaders are prone to the charge of hypocrisy in the same way. They take on the burden of setting an example, of maintaining social standards, of preaching and teaching what is best. But that also means that when they inevitably fall short it is more visible and obvious.

There is this sense in which hypocrisy is a product of our trying to be better, trying to do better, holding ourselves to a higher standard, and striving to improve our life. We all fall short of our own ideals, I think. This is especially true for the kinds of ideals we hear about in church. Aren’t we all hypocrites then?

II.

I am acutely conscious of what a hypocrite I am. I don’t want to be. But I am very conscious of the yawning gap between my preaching — which has lately been an exposition of Jesus’ words and actions — and my behavior. I am not nearly as in tune in my own life with Jesus’ blessings as I would like to be. Am I poor in spirit? Am I pure in heart? Am I merciful, gentle, mournful, and a peacemaker? Do I hunger and thirst mainly for righteousness? Am I persecuted? Hardly.

I give myself a generous C+ on these scales. And, as I have said before, I know very well that I break all ten commandments on most days before breakfast, at least in spirit. This is because of the various evil systems in which my lifestyle involves me without my even thinking about it. Was the cotton in my bedsheets once picked by slave children in Uzbekistan? Was the wood that my bedroom floor is made of once standing in the Brazilian rainforest? The electricity powering my clock, the natural gas burning in my furnace, the paint on my walls, the fruit and grain in my breakfast... was it all produced, manufactured, distributed, and sold in a way that demonstrated equity, justice, fairness, and peace? Of course not. It came to me by the blood, tears, and sweat of poor people and workers all over the world; and in the process made many other people, who didn’t do any of the work, very wealthy.

Maybe I hold myself to a nearly impossible standard. But I think that Jesus wants us to know how we are connected to each other and to the Earth. He would want us to be conscious of how the quality of these connections matter. All the decisions we make, even just breathing, we are expressing our commitment to either God or to Caesar, either to the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Empire of those who dominate this world.

In this sense we are indeed all hypocrites, and the more clearly we hear and proclaim the call of Jesus to live according to the values of God’s Kingdom, the more aware of our own hypocrisy we become. The deeper we scratch the surface of our own lives, the more horrified we must be at the suffering of those who bring us our necessities and conveniences.

But what Jesus talks about here is more than hypocrisy. He is looking at the scribes and Pharisees, and he sees not just their hypocrisy, but their attitude towards their hypocrisy. And he sees the attitude — and the nasty, self-righteous, smug, judgmental practices — that their hypocrisy leads to in their relationships with others.

Realizing the yawning gap between our words and our actions ought to make us more humble... but in the religious authorities of Jesus’ day, it didn’t. They appear not to have been conscious of any such gap. Indeed, to even suggest such a thing to them was tantamount to treason and criminality. They felt, like every establishment, that the stability of whole society depended on them being legitimately in power. The very survival of the nation was based on their being in charge. To undermine their authority was to undermine the integrity of society itself. Such is the view in every generation of the 1% (or fewer) who control things.

III.

Realizing our own hypocrisy, facing it, admitting it, confessing it... this is sort of the first step. Hypocrisy is really a kind of blindness. Once we begin to see it in ourselves, once we begin to ask the question about the gap between our words and our actions, then we have begun to turn away from it.

Hypocrisy is most lethal when it is accompanied by self- exaltation. It begins to lose its power over us when we are moved to sorrow, remorse, and humility. So Jesus concludes his talk with his famous aphorism: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

It is the lack of humility and absence of responsibility exhibited by the religious establishment that Jesus is most upset about. Can a humble person “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others”? Will a humble person be “unwilling to lift a finger to move them”? Would humble people “do all their deeds to be seen by others”? Would they “love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have people call them rabbi”?

What about folks who give themselves multi-million dollar bonuses as a reward for wrecking the whole economy? What about those who justify having others bail them out by saying they deserve it? What if the same people are strict about imposing financial austerity on others, even foreclosing on people’s homes?

No. A humble person is deeply aware of the gap between Jesus’ blessings and one’s own behavior. That awareness is what makes one humble in the first place. When Jesus says “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” I wonder if he means more than grieving for someone who has died, or something lost. I wonder if he also means a kind of grieving for one’s own sins, one’s own shortcomings, one’s own failures, one’s own participation in evil systems. That’s supposed to be why monks and nuns wear black, you know. It’s an expression of mourning for their sins.

As in 12-step groups, the first step in healing is realizing you have a problem. Our problem is the distance between God’s Word and our actions. You cannot go through the 12-steps without a rather comprehensive humility, they tell me. And that kind of humility is essential for the Christian life.

So Jesus says his disciples should not hold themselves up over each other. “You are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth,” Jesus says, “for you have one Father — the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.”

None of us is Lord or Master. None of us is better or closer to God. Some of us may have special training and we all have particular callings, but there is not supposed to be a hierarchy, a pecking order, among Jesus disciples. There are no superiors and subordinates, in his family. Elsewhere, Jesus points out that in God’s Kingdom there are brothers and sisters, mothers and children, but no fathers. We have only one Father or Lord, and that is God. And there are no mediators between God and humanity except him, the one Mediator, Jesus. And we all relate to him.

“The greatest among you will be your servant,” says Jesus.

IV.

Think of the saints of the church, those in history who followed Jesus well. Some of those figures were more powerful in the world than others. And certainly we do not lift them up as in any way mediators between us and God. We don’t pray to them or consider them our teachers in any but the most derivative and secondary ways. They are exactly like us, in every way. They are us, in a sense.

And something I think they all have in common is a humility and a deep, personal awareness of their own failings and shortcomings. They were not superior, or self-righteous. They did not claim elevated status. They did not think of themselves as saints, in any special way.

These were servants of God and people. They did their best to live according to God’s law and Jesus’ blessings. They were anything but perfect. Each had their particular failings. But they give us hope for that very reason. For what God did with these folks, God can also do with us.

But it’s going to take humility, and confession, and remorse, and commitment to change and find new ways of living together, according to Jesus’ commandments. It will take finding out whom we have hurt, and making amends. It will take gathering in peace, forgiveness, non-violence, and love. And it will mean standing as an inconvenient and puzzling witness, both to the prevailing injustices of our world, and most importantly to the possibility of God’s new order for life.

+++++++

Belonging, Then Believing.

2011-10-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

The standard pattern of church membership has been that we expect people to believe before we accept them as belonging. We see this in the usual way Presbyterian churches receive members. Part of the process of becoming a member is making a reaffirmation of faith. We assume that the active members of a church are all people who have made this statement of what they believe. We are a gathering of people who believe in Jesus.

I wonder if this whole way of behaving isn’t wrong, or at least very unhelpful. Isn’t it kind of like expecting someone to know calculus before they take a calculus class? Or to play the trumpet, or speak Italian, or knit a sweater, before being allowed to participate in the group where those skills are learned?

Isn’t it rather presumptuous of us to somehow expect people to be Christians before we welcome them into the church? Isn’t the gathered community a place where we learn together how to follow Jesus? Is there anyone in our church (or any church) who is willing to say they have it all together and don’t have anything left to learn about this? Doesn’t requiring that people already believe/trust in Jesus before we will deign to make them a member exclude people from membership who may be on the way to becoming disciples?

I am coming more and more to the view that people need to belong first. We need to welcome and embrace people into our fellowship whether they are “Christians” right now or not. The church that allows itself to become a closed club of people who already believe is not going to grow very easily. First of all because even the people who have come to believe are not completed and finished as Christians. Secondly, a lot of people have learned that they have to say they believe in order to be included… but really don’t trust in Jesus just yet. Thirdly, often it is the ones who have the most trouble believing who end up with the stronger faith when they do develop a relationship with Jesus.

When Jesus calls his disciples, he does not have them make complete statements of faith in him. Peter does not make his confession of who Jesus is until deep into his relationship as a disciple. Thomas doesn’t make the kind of confession we require of new members until after Jesus’ resurrection! Jesus does not require anyone of his disciples or wider entourage to sign on to specific beliefs about him. Indeed, he welcomes sinners of all kinds, and people will all kinds of diseases, without regard for what they do or don’t believe. It is their relationship with Jesus, and the community gathered around him, that brings people to faith in him.

Neither did Jesus bother with keeping detailed membership rolls, or deciding who was or wasn’t welcome at his Table. Everybody was welcome: Pharisees, Roman soldiers, women, lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes, working people, children, and so on. He knew that faith in him was not based on what their opinion was about him, but on what kind of relationship he had with them.

Church, in other words, is not just for Christians. I hope no one avoids gathering for worship with us because they “don’t believe all that stuff.” I’ve got news: some of us who do gather also have serious questions about “all that stuff.” And some of us who do accept it, do so in very different ways.

The church is not a gathering of people who already believe. It is a gathering of people who are open to a relationship with Jesus, through his followers. In our life together, we are developing this relationship with Jesus and his followers, and anyone interested enough in hearing what Jesus is about to get themselves to a church on Sunday morning. The people of the world are not divided into believers and non-believers. Rather, there are people who are in different places in their relationship with him. And those who say they “believe” are not necessarily “ahead” of those who are able to give the most orthodox opinions. I have known atheists who were better followers of Jesus than some Christians.

My point is that the church needs to be a place where people feel welcome and know they belong. Then we can show each other the love of Jesus, and grow in it together. We can build each other up, learn forgiveness, practice encouragement, pray with and heal each other. After all, every week we’ve been singing, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” We don’t sing that they will know we are Christians by the correctness of our theological opinions.

The “they” in the song are the people we meet in the world. Our little fellowship must be so welcoming, and our love for each other, and for the world, so apparent, that “they” will want to be a part of it. We have to be a part of that love first, before we can talk intelligibly about it. We have to be doing it before we can say we believe it.

Love Is Everything.

2011-10-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

Matthew 22.34-46.

Occasionally in this business I encounter people who rationalize their lack of involvement in the church by saying things like, “Since God is everywhere I believe I can worship God on the golf course on Sunday morning as well as I can in church.” There are many other ways this sentiment gets expressed. Often it is an excuse for skipping church: “God wants me to spend more time with my family,” “I am worshiping God when I read the newspaper,” “God is glorified when I sleep late after a hard week at work,” “I worship by watching a preacher on TV while I’m making pancakes.” That sort of thing.

At that level it is relatively harmless. But by this reasoning any human activity becomes worship simply because we say so. And that can become a huge problem, and often has.

A couple of centuries ago, some Americans actually claimed they were glorifying God by owning slaves. Others have claimed they were expressing their obedience to Christ by dropping high explosives on people from 30,000 feet in the air. Many Germans during the Second World War thought killing Jews was a way to glorify God. Some are very overt in their belief that making money glorifies God. I have heard it said that exploiting natural resources — from meat, fish, and fur to water, wood, coal, and oil — actually glorifies God.

Thus, while the commandment calls upon us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, our interpretation and behavior drains those words of all meaning. We have turned this commandment on its head so that anything we want to do is by definition an expression of our love for God simply because we want to do it.

So, to prevent this kind of abuse, Jesus, like many other wise rabbis of the time, appends a second great commandment to the first. He says we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. Thus it is impossible for us to say we love God while expressing hatred, violence, exclusion, or anything else that would be offensive to us, against other people. Our love for God must be made real, can only be made real, in terms of our love for others.

Of course, we have found many ways to get around this as well. We justify and rationalize our violence towards our neighbor by saying it is really a form of tough love. Thus we may say, when we inflict suffering and injustice on people, that we are assisting them in developing their own self-discipline, or that we are helping them see the error of their ways, or that we are aiding them in cultivating their own entrepreneurial spirit, or that what we do to them will aid them in character-building.

The real meaning of what is going on here has nothing to do with love for God. In fact, God is out of the picture entirely. All we have are our own desires, needs, fears, hopes, and dreams. These have become our god. The bottom line of this reasoning is that “God wants me to be happy, so whatever I do to make myself happy right now must make God happy too.” In other words, if we think like this I wonder if any God larger than our own ego exists for us at all.

II.

To counteract even this rationalization, Jesus goes further by reminding the Pharisees that the Messiah is not dependent on David or any other human lord. Rather all human lords and purposes are dependent on the Messiah. Even the great King David is not superior to the Messiah. This means that we do not get to decide how to love God or how to love our neighbor. It is not up to our ingenious reasoning. What we think doesn’t matter. Loving God and loving our neighbor are not morally relative things that we get to define according to our present needs and desires.

No. The criterion is not us but the Messiah, Jesus Christ. He gets to decide and inform us about what is real love for God and what is real love for others. The Messiah is our Lord; he is the One who defines what these things mean for us. He shows us what real love is.

And once we consider the example of the Messiah we realize that all rationalizations and convenient explanations are empty and false. For the example of the Messiah is of one who emptied himself for us even to the point of giving up his own life, even to the point of dying humiliated and cursed on a cross. That example, and not our self-serving, self-indulgent sentimentality, is what love really means. The Messiah, Jesus, defines love for us. We do not get to decide this for ourselves.

God does give us the world... but not to do with it as we see fit. God does give us each other in relationship... but not to exploit, abuse, manipulate, and control. Rather, we are to do with the world and with others only what God wills, and only what brings glory to God, and only what expresses love for God as we see this love revealed in Jesus Christ.

That is to say, we are to express our love for God in our love for others by following the example of Jesus. Only by living according to what he says in the Beatitudes, to which we have repeatedly returned, can we truly say we are living in his love. Only by purity of heart and poverty of spirit, only by righteousness and mercy and gentleness, only by peacemaking and even suffering persecution, can we truthfully say we love God and our neighbors.

Jesus shows us that love is a sacrificial, self-emptying movement in which we die to our own selves, our own agendas, our own desires, our own need to control and possess. And in so dying we find ourselves reborn to eternal life, a life of profound abundance, a life of connection and unity with all things and with God.

III.

This kind of love is impossible for us. On our own, we should not even attempt it. Even the example and explicit teachings of Jesus are subject to misinterpretation. More horrible atrocities have been committed in Jesus’ Name than I care to think about. Following Jesus is impossible for us. It is not something we can decide to do on our own.

But God can do this. And we can do it when we are united in purpose and spirit with God in Jesus Christ. In him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, because we are one in him and with him, it is now possible for us to follow God, and even more. The only way to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, the only way to love our neighbors as ourselves, the only way to love with the love God gives us in Christ is to become one with Christ.

This why God gives us the church, the communion of believers, the gathering of those who place their trust in Jesus Christ, to function as Christ’s on-going Earthly Body in the power of the Holy Spirit. The church is here so that we may support each other in the work of discipleship. For the calling we have, to love God and to love our neighbor, is something that requires mutual listening and encouragement, criticism and prayer. We become one with Jesus Christ when we enter into true communion with others and gather together in his Name, to hear his Word, to do his will, and to celebrate his Sacraments.

This is why God gives to us the Sacrament of Baptism, so we may symbolically, spiritually share in Christ’s death and experience rebirth in him. He shows us what love is in coming into mortal existence to dwell among us. In this he shows his love for the whole creation by becoming one of us, even to the point of death. Therefore, it is when we express the same kind of love, a love that empties ourselves of our own prejudices and biases, that we share in Jesus’ love.

This is why God gives us the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, so that we may actually participate in Christ’s own Body and Blood, remembering his sacrifice and anticipating his return. He loved God fully and completely and in so doing showed his love for us.

Everything we do in the church serves to remind us of the basic purpose for which we are placed here on the Earth, which is summed up in those two commandments: love God with all our being, and your neighbor as yourself. Christ gives us this ability. It is something we do in him, and together with each other.

IV.

Every so often, God sends a tsunami of change into the world and into the church. The point is to blow away our complacency and our self-satisfied attitudes, and return the people to what the prophets call the love they had at first. Periodically we are called back to our original calling to love God and our neighbors. These are times of reformation and renewal in the church.

I think we are in one of those seminal periods now, when God is thrusting aside the old order and something emerges that really expresses in our own time this eternal good news. It is a time when we are being brought back to face very basic questions, and to remake very basic affirmations. Like loving God with all our being. Like loving our neighbors as ourselves.

But in the church, the essence of reform has always been a return to basic and essential truths, practices, beliefs, and spiritual experience. They may explode into each generation in new ways, but the basic core is always to tap into the original energy, the original spirit, the original message of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ.

I would like to be a part of that.

+++++++

Belonging to the Emperor.

2011-10-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

Matthew 22.15-22

Jesus is still in the Temple during the final week of his mortal life. The religious and political authorities seek to trap him. They want to arrest him. They want him to say something that will get him into political trouble with either the Romans or the people. So they ask him this famous question about taxes. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” If he says it is not lawful, he has the Romans on his case for undermining their authority. If he says it is lawful he risks alienating the people. They think they have him between a rock and a hard place, in a no-win situation, a position from which he will be forced to alienate somebody.

They ask the question, then I imagine the whole place going silent, waiting for his answer to this thorny question. It seems like there’s no way out. It seems like he has to say yes or no. It seems like this is it, they finally have him where they want him.

But Jesus just shakes his head and asks to see a coin. You’ll notice that he isn’t carrying any coins himself. This is not just because Jesus is famously poor, owning almost nothing, as far as we know. And it’s not because he didn’t carry any cash on him, but relied upon Judas to manage the cash-box.

It is for a deeper theological reason. A coin was technically, and literally, a “graven image.” The Jewish Law specifically prohibits touching, having, or making any such thing, let alone worshiping it. For a strictly religious Jew, it would have been considered idolatry even to use graven images such as coins. But they had to use them out of economic necessity.

Those who are testing him don’t appear to have had many scruples about coins. He asks for a coin and someone produces one immediately. They, who were supposed to be so strict and rigorous about the Law, had no compunction about coins. They probably saw coins in much the same way we do: as neutral economic tools. Coins in those days had value because of their metallic content; they also had abstract and symbolic meaning because they made wealth more portable and standardized than real estate or livestock.

But coins also meant something else. Using them indicated your participation in the emperor’s economic, political, and social system. Jesus’ question when he is shown a coin is, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” The coin, of course, had an engraving of the emperor’s profile and his name.

The coin clearly belongs to the emperor. It is embossed with a picture of his head. It is made of his copper, from his copper mine, mined and minted by his slaves. He says how much it is worth. And he decides how many of these coins you have to pay him in order to have the privilege of using any of his coins at all. To use such a thing would seem to indicate some level of loyalty to the emperor.

So, simply having one of these coins could be construed as an act of blasphemy against God’s Law, and it is an act of loyalty to Caesar and all he stands for. Just using these coins is nothing less than a participation in their own oppression.

II.

Jesus’ famous answer takes them all off guard, not because it is so ambiguous, but because it is far more radical than anything they were hoping he would say to get himself in trouble. He says, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

From Psalm 24 we learn what are “the things that belong to God.” “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.” I say it nearly every week leading up to the offering. The point of Psalm 24 is that the whole Earth, all creation, everything that exists belongs to God. Everything that exists is to be used and managed only according to God’s Law and will. Everything we have we hold in trust for God, we are only like tenants and managers of the Earth, as in Jesus’ recent parables. We are only stewards of this property for the owner who has left it with us. Our job begins and ends with doing what God wants with these resources. Period.

And what God wants is spelled out clearly and in great detail in Scripture. We may summarize this desire as justice and kindness, humility and love, sharing and equality.

The question remains, however, concerning what belongs to the emperor. Jesus implies that something belongs to him. He seems to say clearly that at the very least the coin he is shown belongs to the one whose image and name is stamped all over it.

I think Jesus would deny that even the coin really belonged to Caesar, the emperor. After all what is a coin? It is metal. Metal comes from the Earth, and the Earth belongs to... God. The people who mined and minted it also belong to God. The knowledge of metallurgy and engraving also comes from God.

What does not belong to God or come from God is this economic and political system of which Caesar sits at the head, which is based on violence, exploitation, oppression, fear, greed, inequality, bigotry, and war. This system creates vast inequalities of wealth between rich and poor. This system is contrary to God’s will. It is a product and expression of human sinfulness.

Remember that the whole religion of Israel is based on a single event: the liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt. In that event, God took the people out of a system in which they were exploited, oppressed, imprisoned, and forced to work to enrich someone else. God took them out of a system in which Pharaoh and his friends owned everything and gained the benefit of all wealth, labor, and resources.

God delivered them to the Promised Land, and on the way God gave them the Law, the whole point of which was to prevent and obstruct and reject the development of a system like that of Pharaoh. Instead of Pharaoh, instead of Caesar, God’s people were to be governed by God through God’s Law. God’s Law applied to everybody, even the most powerful. Even Pharaoh and Caesar.

And God’s Law has to do with the creation of a holy people whose economy would be based on sharing in the fullness and generosity of God.

III.

When someone presented the coin for Jesus to look at, he might as well have said, “If you use the emperor’s coins you are expressing your loyalty, allegiance, obeisance, and subjection to the emperor and his system of greed, inequality, and violence. Good luck with that.”

If people participate in the emperor’s system, with all its “benefits” and conveniences, all its opportunity for enrichment and growth (albeit to a very few), then they need to pay for it in the emperor’s coin. This tax is only the cost of doing business in the emperor’s regime. If you don’t want to pay it then you can’t play; that is, you can’t participate in the system.

And let us not fool ourselves by rationalizing, “Well, that was then, and this is now. He’s not talking about us! We don’t live under any emperor, we live in a democracy! We live in a free market system! Rich people don’t get rich by violence or empty speculation today, they get rich by working hard, making good investments, and producing good things for people! If anything Jesus is criticizing taxes! Yeah, that’s it: Jesus hates taxes!”

Well: This self-serving mythology tends to pervade the minds of many, especially those comfortably situated at the top of the system. The ruling class of every generation has always found some way to avoid or exempt themselves from Jesus’ teaching.

But this approach is always belied by the facts on the ground. Our system today is different from that of Jesus’ time only by degree and complexity. The same basic principles that motivated Pharaoh and Caesar continue in effect today, and they achieve basically the same results, only now it is global. Granted, it never would have occurred to people in Jesus’ day to invent the “credit default swap.” But that’s not exactly to our credit.

God’s commandments are about spreading the wealth of God’s creation, distributing it in such a way that the poor are lifted up and no one was allowed to become too wealthy. God’s commandments are designed to prevent the rise of a privileged class, and to prevent the descent of any of the people into poverty and servitude. God’s commandments lift up the poor and even resident aliens. Jesus practices the restoration of outcasts, the empowerment of the powerless, and the healing and inclusion of those suffering from diseases.

The system of Pharaoh and Caesar does just the opposite. It causes a tiny percentage of the population to control nearly all the wealth. Which is where we are today, globally. A small percentage of the population of the planet controls and consumes the lion’s share of the resources.

IV.

So. What are we supposed to do? What does Jesus require of us? That we not use money? That we not participate in the dominant economic system? Is that even possible in a world of economic globalization? Are we supposed to go live with the Amish? Live by bartering and exchange? How am I supposed to pay my car insurance? What about my medical expenses? I can’t expect to go to the doctor and pay for a blood test with a basket of tomatoes I grew in my garden, can I?

I think we need to be honest: on the one hand, Jesus is saying just that. And some of us are called to take him literally and live in self-sufficient communities, off the grid, in absolute sharing. The early church certainly understood Jesus this way, as we see in the book of Acts. The community of disciples in Jerusalem expected people to sell their possessions, give the proceeds to the leaders of the church, who would distribute it as any had need.

On the other hand, that practice did not hold for everyone for very long. We don’t see this as a permanent requirement later in the New Testament. Not all of us are necessarily called to that high a level of discipline.

But this does not let us off the hook. It does not mean we get to ignore Jesus’ teachings and do as we please. For it remains the case that all of us are called to live in a way that shows that we know that everything really belongs to God. All of us are called to separate ourselves from the corrupt and deadly values that characterize the emperor’s economy. In our hearts and minds, and especially in our practice, in our daily lives, we need to have God’s economic values rule for us.

Giving “to God the things that are God’s” means that everything we do and have needs to be dedicated to the One “from whom all blessings flow.” We live in the world, interacting with people and other forms of life, managing and using objects, allocating and developing resources, only according to the will of the Creator. This will is revealed in the Scriptures, which point to Jesus Christ. He is our standard. His life of justice, healing, truth-telling, simplicity, humility, joy, peace, and sacrifice, needs to be reflected in our life, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

We have to live in this world; but we must not be of it. We must not let it define us. And we are to bring the values of God’s Kingdom into our lives; first in the church, and also in the larger society.

This will be difficult and costly. It could make us annoying, eccentric, and unpopular. It will likely cause us to be less successful by the world’s standards. But it is to be in harmony with the God who created the whole universe, and it is to place yourself within that destiny. It is to begin to reflect in our world the life of love, the life of the Creator, the life of eternity.

+++++++

Transformation Invitation.

2011-10-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

Matthew 22.1-14.

Jesus is teaching in the Temple during the last few days of his earthly life, and his parables are getting more and more severe. He is apparently deliberately inciting the anger of the religious and political authorities. And his critique will get even more pointed and explicit in the coming couple of chapters.

This parable is about a king who gives a wedding banquet for his son. Those who were originally invited refuse to attend. The king sends out his slaves to personally invite them a second time, this time providing details of the spectacular menu for the banquet. But the original invitees are too busy. Some of them even abuse and kill the messengers!

What is going on here? The king is God, and his son is Jesus. But who are the originally invited? Why do they not want to come to a great banquet? Why would they be so annoyed at the king that they go so far as to commit murder?

The subtext of what Jesus is saying has to do with the leaders of his own people. These are the folks who knew themselves to be the chosen people. If God was ever going to have a banquet, they knew that they would top the guest list.

In our context, who is most likely to assume they are God’s closest friends? Who proclaims most loudly that they are the tightest with God and that they will be translated directly into heaven when the “rapture” comes? Who seem to automatically believe that in any coming heavenly banquet with God’s Son, they will be the first invited? Well, I’m afraid it is usually different kinds of Christians who make these assumptions today... even some Presbyterians!

And there is some justification for this assumption. Like the Jewish authorities of Jesus’ day, many Christians pride themselves on being good people. They go to church regularly and frequently, supporting it with their time, talents, and money. They lead the respectable, upright, exemplary lives. They are the acknowledged leaders of the community. They are successful at work and at home, with stable, beautiful, decent families. They have investment portfolios, they own their own homes, they have life insurance, and they can afford the occasional vacation. They don’t make political trouble, usually supporting the ruling parties. And they are often very patriotic, even to the point of equating their religion and their nation.

Why then, when the invitation finally comes to the event for which they have been waiting all their lives, do they refuse it? Why do they not flock in pride and gratitude to the king’s palace? Why do they not drop everything and do whatever they can to get to the king’s banquet? Why are they apparently so angry with the king and the king’s son, that they do not show up at the banquet?

II.

We don’t know. Jesus doesn’t say in the parable why the invited folks don’t want to attend. Maybe they were upset with the person who is not mentioned in the parable at all, which is the bride. Maybe they did not like the woman the prince had chosen to marry. Maybe he had chosen someone not like them, but someone of a lower class, someone they considered a sinner, someone not up to their standards. Maybe this choice, or something else, revealed the king to be different from what they wanted and expected. We don’t know.

But we do know that this is one of the main things people complained about with Jesus. He was hanging around with the wrong people. He was associating with sinners. He was forgiving them. He was not exhibiting a loyalty to the establishment, their State, their economy, their morality, their values, or their preferred status. Maybe they felt that since the king and his son had shown such disloyalty to them, they could reciprocate with their own show of disloyalty.

But we do know the excuse they gave: work. They have farms and businesses to attend to. They have more important things to do than attend this banquet. They do not have the time for a king who doesn’t support them and their view of things. The king had become less and less of a priority. It gets so that anything takes precedence over the king. I can’t come to the banquet because my kid has soccer practice, or I don’t want to miss House on TV, or I have to wash my hair....

And they also express their disgust and disappointment with the king by abusing and even killing his slaves who have been sent to invite them to the feast.

These slaves, of course, represent the prophets whom God sent to call the people back to God and to God’s Law; and who were often rejected by the leaders of the people.

Neither do we have much regard for the prophets sent to us. We’ve seen a few killed, like Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others. But mainly we marginalize and trivialize them. At most we will honor them and their memories... while carefully avoiding putting into practice anything they talked about.

The king’s response to this rejection is rather violent. Jesus says that “The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.” Clearly this looks ahead to the destruction of Jerusalem, about 40 years after Jesus speaks those words.

But this shows us a side of God that we would usually prefer to leave out of our New Testament. In Jesus Christ we know that our God is not a God of death and punishment and destruction.... But... let us never forget that it remains possible to reject God and to cut ourselves off from God and thereby to draw down upon ourselves definite consequences. God does not suspend the laws of nature — including the laws of political and economic nature — to suit us. God is love. But to separate yourself from that love is to attract back from the world what you send into the world. If you do acts of idolatry and injustice, violence and exploitation, destruction and murder, then that is what you will receive. If you live by the sword, Jesus says elsewhere, you will die by the sword.

III.

When it is rejected, God’s love can turn into an annihilating wrath that consumes everything before it. This is what happens to the people in the parable who refused to celebrate the wedding with the king, who were too busy, who abused and killed the king’s servants.

It happened literally 40 years later. And it happens over and over again in history as generation after generation reject the commandments of the God of love, and choose to live instead in hate, fear, anger, violence, injustice, and corruption. Empire after empire, regime after regime, system after system, kingdoms and republics, dictatorships and democracies... they all fall, they all collapse. They all flourish briefly, sucking whatever energy they can out of people and the earth, and then crumble into dust and fire. And if Jerusalem, God’s holy city, was not exempt from this fate, having been leveled not once but twice, how much more will every other earthly system or order be liable to destruction? If Israel was not exempt, no one is exempt.

In the parable, the king then invites the second-string people to the banquet. The king says, “‘Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.”

If the original guest list doesn’t show up, then the king invites everyone, “good and bad,” interestingly enough. It is now a radically open invitation. It is not reserved just for the chosen, just for the believers, just for the good people. Now the banquet is open to everybody. The king rejects his original friends, who had rejected him. Now he is willing to accept anyone as friend. Everyone is invited to the banquet.

But this blanket invitation does not mean that standards are thrown out the window. It does not mean that this broadly inclusive gathering, hauled in like fish in a net, gets to set its own agenda. For it is still the king, and it is still the king’s banquet for his son’s wedding. Being invited to this banquet is a big deal. It is a humbling experience to be responded to with deep thanksgiving. It is a tremendous act of grace and inclusion, where people who were nobodies have been made into somebodies through no act or merit of their own. People who were once lost are now found.

One does not come to this banquet unless it is in profound awareness of the honor involved. You need to come clothed in your loyalty to the king, and endued with the virtues the king requires, and dressed in the garb of a new, transformed, forgiven, redeemed life. You do not come still wallowing in your profiteering, your exploitation of others, your use of threats and violence to get your way. You do not come in arrogance and superiority. For to do so would be another way of rejecting the invitation and dissing the king. The response to the king’s invitation, whether you are on the original guest list or the revised guest list, is transformation. This invitation makes you a new person. That’s why the establishment rejected it, and why the outcasts accept it. To come to this banquet is to be made new. Redeemed. Changed.

IV.

That is always what the banquet, the Kingdom of God, is about. It is about bringing people from one way of life, characterized by greed, violence, fear, anger, selfishness, and narrow-mindedness, to a way of life that reveals love and forgiveness, peace and joy, goodness and humility. This new way of life exhibits the virtues that Jesus lifted up in the beatitudes and that God outlines in the Ten Commandments.

This Kingdom of God was not meant to be something we only inhabit at the end of time or when we die. God clearly intends it to be reflected, anticipated, and instituted here and now, in the living relationships of contemporary people. Perhaps we do not experience the total fullness of this banquet until the end, but we do begin to know it and celebrate it in this life.

I think the church, the gathered community of believers, is meant to be the place where the Kingdom of God begins to break in and spread among us. When Jesus is talking about those who work or refuse to work in the vineyard or who attend or refuse to appropriately attend the wedding feast, I think he is talking about the church, in some form.

When we celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we announce it as “the joyful feast of the people of God.” It is a small token or anticipation of the Kingdom of God, which Jesus often represents as a banquet. In a sense the sacrament defines us, and the values of Jesus Christ, expressed and remembered and embraced in the sacrament need to become the values embodies in the church. His life — his love and healing and humility and peace — needs to inform and shape all we do together in the church.

That’s what it means to show up at the feast wearing your wedding garments. It means to come together at the Lord’s command and to say with our voices and with our actions: “We are yours!”

+++++++

Earth/Vineyard.

2011-10-03T10:23:00.001-07:00

Matthew 21.33-46

This is the third vineyard parable Jesus tells during his last week, as he is teaching in the Temple. It involves a landowner who established, planted, and cares for a very productive vineyard. Jesus makes the point of telling us that he “put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower,” meaning that he has invested in the vineyard, provided for its protection and its continued prosperity. The owner has done everything necessary to make the vineyard fruitful and profitable. It is a self-sufficient, balanced system, designed to produce good grapes and fine wine.

Here, the vineyard reminds me of the Earth itself. The beautiful garden, the perfect environment for life, the only place we know of in the whole universe where life exists, a living, balanced, changing, growing system, designed for beauty, joy, delight, and fulfillment.

Then the owner goes away on a long trip and leases the vineyard to tenants. All the tenants have to do is keep the vineyard going and it will serve them, and the owner, very well.

Our time on the Earth is like this. God often seems absent. At least God’s presence is not obvious and visible to everyone.

The vineyard has been left in the care of some tenants. That is, the community — whether it be Israel as God’s people or even the planet itself — has been left in the care of human beings. All we see is the beautiful vineyard and its amazing productivity. We don’t see the owner.

Seasons pass and harvest time comes. The owner sends slaves back to the vineyard to collect the produce. It was only being managed by these tenants on the owners’ behalf. The produce of the vineyard belongs to the owner.

These slaves of the owner represent the prophets who came and called the people back to peace, righteousness, and justice, which are supposed to be the fruits of the vineyard.

But the tenants don’t want to hear about what the owner wants. They are doing very well living off the produce of the vineyard themselves and they see no reason to send a portion back to the owner. So they abuse these slaves. They even kill them, and send the others away empty-handed.

The owner then has an idea. He will send his own son, the heir, whom he thinks, for some reason, that the tenants will surely respect. The owner is apparently very naive, patient, forgiving, and trusting. What is he thinking?!

But, somehow, the tenants think that if they kill the son they will somehow come into possession of the vineyard themselves, possession being, as they say, “nine-tenths-of-the-law.” So that’s what they do. They kill the owner’s son.

Jesus then stops the parable and asks his hearers, which include priests and elders in the Temple, what they think they owner will do to those tenants. “They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’”

II.

Indeed. Jesus has these religious authorities basically condemn themselves. Because in the parable, they are the wicked tenants who take over the vineyard, refusing to give the owner his due, abusing and killing the owner’s representatives, who are the prophets. And it is they who will shortly kill the owner’s son, who is Jesus himself.

What is the produce of the vineyard? That is, what does God want from us and from the creation? What does God expect to receive? What is God looking for in us? What are the desired fruits of the vineyard, that is, of the creation over which we have dominion?

Obviously, an actual vineyard is supposed to produce grapes, from which people make wine. The creation is designed by God to produce what? Well, the scriptures include many lists of the good things God wants from us. There is Micah’s famous summary about doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with our God. And there are others.

One of the most important of these is the set of commandments we read earlier. The Ten Commandments are God’s rule for living on the Earth in peace, justice, equity, and righteousness. They are designed to separate God’s people from the corrupt and exploitative values and practices of Pharaoh. God is saying, “If you live like this, if you keep these commandments, if you live together in justice and peace, you will be making a community, a neighborhood, that produces what I want from my creation. If you live in loyalty to me, without idolatry, honoring my name, keeping my sabbaths, honoring your parents, not killing, not stealing, not committing adultery, not lying, and not desiring the things your neighbor has, you will find contentment and prosperity, and you will be giving me what I want out of creation.

For it turns out that all God wants out of creation is our happiness. God wants us to live together in peace and justice. God wants us not to fall into the destructive corruption of Pharaoh, where a few people had all the power and wealth, and everyone else had to scramble to get by.

That is the fruit, the produce, the result, the profit that God wants from the Earth. That is the whole point of the vineyard in the first place.

Our primary example is Jesus, who keeps God’s commandments perfectly. His life demonstrates conclusively what God wants from creation. He shows us what the fruits of creation are supposed to be. He reveals the desired produce and profit from creation that God is looking for from us. And in him we see, as he identifies in places like his blessings at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, the kind of life God wants.

III.

Instead, the tenants, that is, the people who were originally given the vineyard to manage, but who, over time, let it go to their heads, did not produce those fruits. Instead of justice, they allowed inequity and exploitation to fester. Instead of peace, they supported oppression and violence, propping up the rule of the Romans and making deals with kings like Herod. Instead of forgiveness, they piled more rules on people, inciting guilt and shame, and making it so no one could ever measure up. The tenants came to think that the vineyard, the whole creation, was there for their benefit. They could do with the produce what they pleased. It was for their own consumption and distribution.

This view remains prominent today. Many believe that the Earth exists for us to exploit and waste, to use and exhaust. It is God’s gift to us and we may do with it what we wish.

It is amazing to me that these same people are the ones who feel, and loudly proclaim, that they are the most tight with God. They have the most confidence that God is going to save them first. It is as if when Jesus asks his question at the end of the parable, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” many folks today apparently think that the owner will reward them with heavenly glory!

For make no mistake, God will not look kindly upon those who took the produce of the vineyard for themselves. For they did not produce and return to the owner what the owner desired. They did not do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. They did not keep the Commandments, but found ways to justify their own very profitable breaking of them. They did not lift up and cherish the values of Jesus’ blessings by living in gentleness, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, peacemaking, mourning, and desiring righteousness.

Instead, they created and rationalized a system with which Pharaoh or Caesar would be far more comfortable. Instead of justice, we have vast inequalities in wealth between the few rich and the multitudes of the poor. Instead of peace we have violence lifted up as the way to solve problems. Instead of humility we have a system based on pride and status. Instead of caring for the Earth as the theater of God’s glory, we have gutted it for its resources, polluted air, land, and water, and kicked the climate out of balance.

In Revelation 11:18 we find that when the owner, that is, God, returns, one of the early items on the agenda is “to destroy those who destroy the Earth” (REB). So the complacent, wealthy, and powerful, eagerly awaiting their reward, receive instead a miserable death, a booting out of the vineyard, to watch the vineyard turned over to others who will produce the fruits desired by the owner.

IV.

We are the tenants. We are the ones into whose care this glorious planet has been given. We are the ones who are called to exercise stewardship and responsibility over this tremendous and spectacular gift. The owner, the Creator — God — intends that this be a place of joy and peace, equality and love, goodness and truth, righteousness and justice. The owner has given us meticulous guidance and specific rules concerning how to live here in peace and justice with each other. The owner has even sent numerous blessed souls to remind us of this sacred calling, culminating with his only Son, Jesus Christ, from whom we learn conclusively how to live.

Will the owner return to discover that we have enriched ourselves and allowed our neighbors to suffer in poverty? Will the owner return to find that the vineyard has been exhausted, polluted, wasted, and corrupted? Will the owner return to see a world out of balance, where a privileged few own everything? Where people chose to follow Pharaoh and Caesar, rather than the Creator?

Or will he find us joyfully living in communities of peace and justice, maintaining and cultivating the vineyard, in harmony with creation and each other, following Jesus’ commandments, living in humility and gentleness? Will he find a vineyard where the poor are lifted up, and sick healed, and the outcast included? Where violence is renounced? Where economic inequalities are balanced?

I hope we are found doing God’s will with the resources that have been entrusted to us, returning them to God in the same spirit of generosity, peace, justice, forgiveness and love, with which they were given.

+++++++

Talk Is Cheap.

2011-09-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Matthew 21:23-32

I.
The day after Jesus causes a riot in the Temple, he goes back. And as soon as he gets there he is accosted by some chief priests and elders of the people. They demand to know by what authority he does such things. Who said you could do this? Who said you could drive the merchants and money-changers out of the Temple. Who said you could disrupt the system like this?
Jesus does not answer the question. Instead he says he will answer them if they will answer first a question from him. And he asks them about John the Baptizer. “Did the baptism of John come from heaven or was it of human origin?” In other words, was John sent by God, or was he just some lunatic? Was he an authentic prophet, or did he just make some stuff up out of his imagination?
His interlocutors have to think about this. And they can’t answer honestly, as we will see. So they have to think about which will be the most politically acceptable answer.
If they say that John’s baptism was from God, then they will have to answer for why they did not support him. Why did they not follow him? Why did they discourage people from going out to him? Why did they send delegations out to question his authority and criticize his practices?
And if they say that John’s baptism was bogus, false, and heretical, something he made up himself and not from God, they know that they will have to answer to the people. The people felt that John was a God-inspired prophet. If these officials were to blaspheme his memory they could be looking at another riot.
[It reminds me of what Ronald Reagan said when he was asked what he felt about Martin Luther King. It was around the time that King’s birthday became a national holiday. Now, Reagan certainly couldn’t pretend to admire someone whom he worked and spoke against his whole life, whose beliefs and principles — nonviolence, social justice, peace — he spent his whole career rejecting and denigrating. But neither could he criticize him, as by this time practically the whole country had accepted King as a hero. So he basically refused to answer.]
So these chief priests and elders also refuse to answer Jesus. But we know what their answer is... and so do the people. We know this because it has already been demonstrated by their actions. When John was active in his ministry these people were his opponents. They did not support him or follow his message. When they had the chance they did not go out and join John.
But they can’t say that out loud, even though everyone knows it. It would enrage the people, and apparently they still need some measure of tolerance from the people for their own legitimacy.
Since they do not answer, neither does Jesus choose to answer their question.

II.
But then he does respond by telling a short parable, which is one of my favorites. There is the father who had two sons. He asks each of them in turn to go work in his vineyard. One says he will go, but doesn’t. The other at first refuses to go, but then changes his mind and actually goes out to work in the vineyard. The question Jesus asks is: Which son did the will of the father? The one who went or the one who just talked about going? I think Jesus is using this parable to answer the question about authority.
The first son is like the tax-collectors and prostitutes, these being two classes of people Jesus is infamous for hanging around with. Jesus attracted sinners, people who were outcast and rejected by the establishment religion of his day. He was known for bringing these people to changed lives, where they renounce their sin and live in forgiveness and blessing.
These are the ones who, when the father approaches them, refuse to go to work in the vineyard. Why? Maybe they feel unworthy. Maybe because if they work in the vineyard they might have to interact with their pompous and self-righteous older siblings. Maybe they feel guilty, excluded, out-of-place, and harassed in that vineyard.
We might know what this is like. It has been said that the worst thing about Christianity is... the Christians! We have a reputation for being judgmental, cruel, exclusionary, demanding, bigoted, and hypocritical. Who wants to work in the vineyard if people like that are going to be there? Especially if you’re not a member of the upright, church-going, law-abiding, privileged class.
So when the father asks them to go work in the vineyard, they say, “Dad, stop bugging me about the stupid vineyard. I had enough of that vineyard when I was a kid. Let my big brother, Mr. Perfect, work there, but I’m done with that place. So stop asking.”
But this brother finally changes his mind and repents. He goes to work in the vineyard. Maybe he just loves the father and feels bad about saying no to him. Maybe he has a change of heart and realizes how important it would be to the father. Maybe, like the lost son in another parable, he comes to himself and realizes his true identity is to do the father’s will.
The second son is like the priests and elders. They know what to tell the father to get him off their case. “Yeah, sure, Dad, I’ll go work in the vineyard... (as soon as I have time).” They know the right words. But they don’t want to have to do any actual work, at least not the work the father wants them to do. So they hang around the Temple, wasting time. They look like they’re doing the father’s will. They talk like they love and obey the father. But they don’t actually go to the vineyard. Maybe they have convinced themselves that doing busy-work in the Temple is “working in the vineyard,” so to speak.

III.
How does Jesus’ parable answer the question put to him about authority? The one who is our authority is the one we listen to and actually obey. We demonstrate who our authority is by our obedience. If I do something on my own authority, that means I claim the moral and legal weight or license to do it. If I do something on someone else’s authority, that means I am undertaking to carry out the will of this other power. It means I have their weight behind me, backing me up.
John’s baptism was from God not because he talked about God but because through this ritual he brought people to repentance and closer to God. He liberated people from their destructive and violent lives. People experienced change and transformation because of their encounter with him. This change, from a bad, sinful, unjust, and degraded life to a life of justice and peace, is what God does in the world. John’s authority was from God because he did the things God does. He was able to act in the name of God. On his own authority he had no such power; he was just a crazy guy in the desert. But because he was following God’s will he was able to do what he said.
The people recognize that authority and follow John. The people also recognize the authority of Jesus and follow him.
My point is that merely talking about something gives you no authority at all. Who has more authority, the musicologist, or the musician? The sportswriter or the athlete? The correspondent or the soldier? The theology professor or the pastor? The one who observes and talks about something, or the one who actually does something?
Earlier in this chapter, when Jesus cleanses the Temple, he does not do it on his own authority as a human being. You’ll notice if you read that section that immediately after the incident Jesus heals some blind and lame people in the Temple. These were all things that the Messiah was supposed to do. In these actions he reveals that his authority comes from God.
The priests and the elders do not accomplish these things. They maintain an institution. They write and expound on the rules that actually increase people’s guilt and powerlessness. They make people figuratively lame by preventing them from walking in a closer relationship with God. They make people blind by obstructing their vision of the true God of love we know in scripture. And they prop up and benefit from this bureaucratic institution — the Temple — which was now perverted into a tool of the economy, a tourist trap, a revenue and profit generator. They rule by violence and fear, and they maintain the status quo. This reveals that their true authority is their own power, their own wealth, their own standing in society.
Thus, like the second brother, they talk, but they don’t go and work. And the ones who get into the Kingdom of Heaven ahead of them, according to Jesus, are the sinners who repent, the tax-collectors and prostitutes whose lives are transformed by Jesus’ ministry.
Jesus concludes: “For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax-collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.”

IV.
So where does real authority come from? Does it come even from the Bible, which the priests and elders knew inside and out, and which the tax-collectors and prostitutes probably knew not at all? Does it come, as Mao Zedong said, out of the barrel of a gun; that is, is authority based on raw force and coercion? Is it based on personal charisma, the ability to gain a following? Is it based on your standing in an institution or hierarchy? Does it come from your pedigree, your family status, name, and genealogy?
No. Real authority comes from the “author” of all things, God. And we demonstrate that authority when we have the effect in the world that God wills God’s people to have. When we “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God”, to quote the prophet Micah, then we are acting on God’s authority. When we heal the lame and give sight to the blind... that is, when we empower powerless people and when we reveal to them the truth so they can move and see with integrity, then we are acting on God’s authority. When we are able to get the market out of our heads and purify our souls as true temples of God’s Spirit, then we are acting on God’s authority. When the blessings of Jesus’ sermon — poverty of spirit, purity of heart, gentleness, peacemaking, grieving, and desiring righteousness — when these characteristics pervade and permeate our actions, then we are acting on God’s authority.
In other words, authority is shown in the quality of our lives, our transformed, changed, renewed, liberated and liberating, lives. It is shown in our ministry and our mission in Jesus’ name.
Let’s remember that. Our authority — all authority — comes from God. And it is granted to us when we are in tune with God’s will, which is always to save, heal, deliver, redeem, and love. There is no true authority for any other action. And our words only matter when they are backed up by real actions, actually changed lives — our own or others’. We have authority… to live as Jesus Christ lived; we are called to this kind of life. He gives us the power to do it, which is the Holy Spirit.
He calls each one of us into the vineyard, which is the way Jesus sometimes talks about the mission of his disciples. Hearing that call, may we drop everything and go into service in his name, bringing to all people the good news of God’s love, revealed in Jesus.
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