16th Sunday after Pentecost

God: “Do as I am, not as they say”

     Last night, I encountered a person who used Hitler as an example of someone they could not forgive. Look, I completely understand the symbolic nature of the statement, but Hitler has not done anything personally to them (as far as I know). The person was simply trying to help me understand that forgiveness and mercy have limits, and Hitler embodied the limit for them. On reflection, however, it seems that forgiveness is denied rarely because of some abstract sense of limit, but rather is denied out of a profound sense of being personally wronged. The "wrong" done God./father of the sons in today's parable from Matthew, was personal because of the disobedience--one rather insidious and the other overt---damaged a personal relationship, not simply defied a category of acceptable behavior.   

    The context for Jesus' teaching in Matthew: Jesus has just finished his Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem, and is making a point to let everyone know the religious leaders will enter heaven after tax collectors and prostitutes. Not a great way to start off Passover in Jerusalem, but this was personal.

     As the passage from Ezekiel suggests, today is all about what the Greeks refer to as metanoia, which is literally a “change of mind”, but also implies a complete “change of heart”,  a change which finds its fulfillment in action. Today’s parable is all about our actions lining up with our words.

     The hero of our parable refused the wish of his father to work in the vineyard at first, but changed his mind and began work. The other sons put up no resistance, but did not go work in the vineyard; they served only with their lips. Our hero’s virtue was his change of heart and his follow-through of working in the vineyard. This is the son that did the will of the father.

      There is another level important for us in today’s parable. The un-favored son did comply externally while inwardly they betrayed their word; the lone dissenting son’s actions were always transparent, always honest so that when his metanoia occurred, the virtue did not lie solely in words but found fulfillment in his actions. His actions were the transparent manifestation of his heart.

     Our obedience to God must come from a change in heart, not simply a change in mind that gives lip service to obedience. God’s mercy is always most profound for those whose hearts have been changed, not simply a change in “words”. All of salvation history reveals God’s actions, not simply God’s words. God’s Word, Jesus, was God’s action. The epitome of God's love is a person, not a text, or a system of laws or creeds. While doctrine, stories, history and other texts are part of our heritage and integral to our faith, we must remember all things are subordinated to the person of Christ.

     Our lives, then, are the testimony of our faith, not how well we can quote Scripture and point an accusing finger of disapproval at our neighbor. We confront sin with compassion and mercy, the way God has confronted our sin. God’s mercy confounds us because His forgiveness is personal; His love is everlasting.

15th Sunday after Pentecost

A Fair Wage: The End of the Line

What is fair?  Recall the words of Isaiah from the first reading: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” Is God really that inscrutable? Some would use this as an excuse to simply abandon all reason, which usually means embracing whimsy and self-interest. Considering the passage in the context of Isaiah 55, however, we can see that the prophet is suggesting it is God’s great mercy that is inscrutable; for indeed, it is God’s mercy that touches humanity, not God’s wrath, in the person of Jesus.

     Jesus, in today’s gospel, is addressing his disciples on the heels of Peter’s declaration, “Look we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” Like so many of Peter’s declarations, we might cringe, but we can easily see ourselves in such questioning. Peter’s question brings us an important issue for those who “have left everything”. Clearly, Peter regards the disciples as being the leaders of the Kingdom, most deserving of salvation; however, Jesus’ parable, when applied to that attitude clearly seems to indicate a position at the end of the line (“…the last will be first, and the first shall be last”). The ordering of first and last in the sentence, placing last first, suggests a reordering of Peter’s sense of entitlement. “Scramble for the back of the line” seems to be Jesus’ advice to the disciples, but the ambition to be last so that one may be first seems to bring us back to the same problem: “I am entitled to compensation”. We can hear Peter’s petulance at the end of the line: “Okay, now I’m at the end, let me be first!”

      What we need to do is abandon our “line mentality”. The Kingdom isn’t about where we are, it’s about who is there with us. Like the master of the vineyard in today’s parable, God does not regard time as an indication of virtue. In eternity, time is meaningless. Like the refrain from Amazing Grace “"When we've been here ten thousand years/Bright shining as the sun./We've no less days to sing God's praise/Than when we've first begun." Our reward for our relationship with God is the relationship itself, not an enhanced environment.

      There is the story of the man recently arrived in heaven being disappointed at the plain furnishings and amazed to see the utter joy on the faces of the people who are enjoying themselves in blissful communion. He approaches one of these folks as asks them if this is heaven. “Yes, it is!” the man replies. “How can this be heaven; it is so plain and unattractive?” “Oh, that,” the man replies. “Heaven isn’t out there”, gesturing at his surroundings, “heaven is in here” gesturing to his heart. Our reward of faith isn’t something we get, it is someone we become: the image of the One who made us.

Hell for those expecting more.

Triumph of the Cross

Way of Resurrection 

     Today’s celebration has resonances with Good Friday in that the Cross, with Jesus upon it, is at the center. As Paul points out in scripture, the crucified Christ is a scandal to non-believers. Why would it be a “scandal”? Why would they care?

     They care because, if true, it has rather uncomfortable implications. If it is true that Jesus was God’s presence on earth as human, then God’s own creation crucified its creator! What’s more, God allowed that to happen. Christ is the Cross. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of God, and we are called to follow him to the cross. But the story, as we well know, is not complete.

     We follow Christ to the cross so we can follow Christ through the cross to the resurrection. So, the cross is not the goal of the Christian life, but resurrection; however, to be resurrected, one must first be crucified. Saint Paul suggests that “...if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his “(Rom.6:5).

     Specifically, St. Paul preaches that we need to crucify our “old self” with Christ. In other words, we must seek the death of the false self, the self that rejects the Good News of Christ. Paul’s poetic language can be a bit difficult to navigate, but in essence, it is part of Paul’s notion of the “new man", the person who is reborn in Christ by “crucifying” the old one.

     Few, if any of us, will be called to be physically tortured and to die for the Gospel, but we know of Christians for whom daily this is a reality in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Most likely, ours will be the daily sacrifice of our selfishness and self-centeredness in favor of a life of grace, of living for others the way Christ lived for the world. That God’s grace triumphs over sin and death is the Triumph of the Cross.

 

 

    

12th Sunday after Pentecost

The words of passion from Jeremiah in his love affair with God remind me of the “burning” of Pablo Neruda’s poem “Ode to a Naked Beauty”: “As if you were on fire from within./The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”  Jeremiah’s complaint is that loving God puts him at odds with the world, and causes him to suffer; he is not a willing sufferer, but he has been seduced by God. The usual translation is “duped”, but a mystical tradition within the Church that renders patah as “seduced”, and I think it is appropriate especially for this passage.  Jeremiah’s love for God is all-encompassing. He is in love with a being, caught up in a passion that will not be denied.  Indeed, these lines could have been taken from the lover’s complaint of a Shakespearean sonnet.

“I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure.”

            This intensity finds its resonance in today’s gospel reading from Matthew where God’s love for humanity is likewise intense and “foolish” in the person of Jesus, who realizes that he will soon suffer and die because of this passionate love for humanity.  That is why he sharply rebukes Peter, whom he had praised just moments before, and suggests that seeking to avoid the suffering is an inclination from Satan. Clearly, Peter loves Jesus and wants Jesus to avoid suffering and death. Peter wants the triumphant king, not the suffering servant; but, clearly, Jesus is the Suffering Servant, and many who followed him equated him with Jeremiah for whom the Suffering Servant was likely penned (some thought Jesus as the resurrected Jeremiah).

            Of course, Peter was perhaps the most passionate of all the disciples---in word and action. Personally, I think Jesus realized that what is essential for the continuation of the mission was passion, not administrative acumen (though we need not find them as opposing qualities). Peter’s passion needed to be directed away from his fanatical devotion to Jesus, and towards God’s mission of embracing humanity. Our purest expression of love for God is our love for whom God has created.  Jesus makes falling in love with God less of a mystical affair, and one of flesh and blood reality. Jesus’ Great Commission (John 15:12) isn’t about loving God directly, it's about loving one’s neighbor. It is in loving one’s neighbor, then, that the love of God becomes flesh and blood. Like God, our love will be often rejected, and we will indeed pay a high price for having been “seduced” to love the God we can see in each other, because our love of Christ compels us beyond the love of family, of nation, of tribe, and seeks the love of God in all, not just among the "lovable".

11th Sunday after Pentecost

Who do you say that I am?

The story in Isaiah this morning about Shebna being denounced by Isaiah is classic. Shebna, a royal steward of the palace, is being rebuked because he has taken upon himself honors associated with the king (viz. having a tomb built in the place reserved for the Davidic kings). Shebna was the one who controlled access to the king, hence the phrase “when he opens, no one shall shut; when he shuts, no one shall open”(Is.22:23). This is juxtaposed in today’s readings with Jesus’ declaration to Peter, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Mt.16:20). It’s all about the power to grant access, and Peter has been rewarded with this power through his confessional statement to Jesus’ question of identity, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt.16:17).  For Roman Catholics, the whole “key” issue is understood as referring to the office of St. Peter; he was the first leader of the church, and the primacy of this office has been handed down to present day. As a rather rough generalization, The Orthodox (and Old Catholics) have a more collegial view, with the “keys” power being distributed evenly among the episcopacy, while the Protestant view generally asserts that the entire body of the faithful has been given the “keys”. 

It is easy to get wrapped up in the discussion as to whom the power of access has been granted to “loose and bind”, and forget Jesus’ original question: “Who do you say that I am?” Perhaps the link between the Old Testament and the gospel has more to do with simply a study of ecclesiastical pedigree. Perhaps it also has something to do with the cautionary tale of Shebna, who abrogated the power of the king for himself, to allow the power of the office to go to his head, and as a result lost the office altogether. 

Positions of power within the church today, as in all positions of authority, can become extensions of personal egos. The larger the institution becomes, and the more the power of that institution becomes concentrated in the hands of the few, the legacy becomes not “good news” but an obsession with control. The church, divinely instituted is, alas, administered by humans, and humans have a lousy track record with unchecked control. Such abuse of authority in the Roman Catholic Church is an easy target, but the problem of control extends well beyond the borders of the Roman Catholic Church. What is clear is that Jesus’ question can get buried too easily in the “court intrigue” and political power-plays in any church. 

           While the institutional church is for Jesus, its members must be from Jesus. It is not enough to proclaim ideological affiliation, we must animate our ideology with a living relationship with God through Christ. While the Creed may guide us, it is our responsibility finally to access the deeper reality opened to us by the church. The institutional church, as an institution, will never be “good news”, but only the members of the body working across denominational lines, responding to Jesus’ call to confess him through their lives as The Christ, the Son of the Living God.

10th Sunday after Pentecost

Jesus’ action with the Canaanite woman in Matthew’s gospel is troubling for us who experience the universalism of the Church, and the belief that salvation has been offered by God to the entire world. However, the church of Matthew’s gospel were Jews, and the Canaanites were well outside God’s covenant to the Jewish people, and it seems Jesus sided with the popular understanding of such a separation. Although this story is also present in the Gospel of Mark, the change in Matthew to a Canaanite from a Syro-Phoenician woman speaks of Matthew’s desire to emphasize how much outside God’s covenant she was. Add to this Jesus’ words of rebuke and the stage is set rhetorically for what comes next.

The woman’s response to Jesus’ rebuke of “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs” with “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps
that fall from the table of their masters” is a coup of a well-tempered response that upends Jesus’ harshness; it is a moral drama being played out in front of a crowd who sides with Jesus. So what does Jesus do? He proclaims her daughter is healed because of her great faith to see beyond what the crowd saw: an insurmountable barrier to God’s grace. This event is on the heels of Jesus proclaiming in front of the Pharisees and scribes “…it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles” The Canaanite woman is yet another instance of Jesus proclaiming God’s reign isn’t localized, or dependent upon the traditions of “the elders”, but upon compassion and justice, making a strong connection with the first reading from Third Isaiah, which asserts that God’s justice and mercy is also a function of allowing “foreigners” to serve at the Temple if they agree to keep the Sabbath and the Law of the Covenant. To do so would be a great act of faith not only for the foreigners but also for the Jewish people.

Contempt for “the foreigner” is a cultural characteristic, it seems, for many. Most recently, children and young adults seeking refuge in this country have had to endure not only exile from their home and families, but also the contempt born of fear from many in our country, and some in our church. Jesus’ morality drama played out to staunch the flow of animosity for the Canaanite who represented the consummate foreigner. Jesus’ clear message to the crowd: faith trumps creed because faith is the foundation of creed, not the other way around.

We worship a living God, not a living document. Too often text takes the place of a living faith. Where the community’s faith is strong, the “traditions of the elders” is always held accountable by living faith. When creed runs contrary to the living faith, it is discarded or altered to reflect the current reality. Ours is a living relationship with God, not a relationship with a text; that is simply another more insidious form of idolatry. Our true worship is as old as Isaiah in establishing justice and righteousness and calling brother all who nurture faith in a living God.

9th Sunday after Pentecost

I'm in way over my head!  Where is God in all of this?

Imagine, if you will, that you have been sent by God to your people to demonstrate God’s power over and against 450 false prophets before the kingdom.  In a mighty display of God’s power, you call down fire from heaven completely obliterating the false prophets.  There is a giant pause as this object lesson settles in. People are amazed; they are frightened and break out into astonished applause. Then the crowd turns and walks away as you begin your well-rehearsed speech about being the true prophet of God. Then, the queen of the kingdom, out of fear, turns against you and forces you to flee to a cave in humiliated retreat. What went wrong?  Where is God in all of this?  Such is the situation Elijah finds himself in in today’s Old Testament reading from Kings.

After the great spectacle of God’s almighty power, the demise of the prophets of Ba’al, God appears now to Elijah, not in a way he appeared to Moses: wind, earthquake, and fire; God was not in the great wind, not in a mighty earthquake, and not again in fire, but only in a “tiny whispering sound”. Elijah hears the sound, but if Israel won’t pay attention to fire raining down from heaven, what will a whisper do? God tells Elijah that he is to go and anoint another leader and that a remnant of Israel will be faithful. So, the whisper leads to a renewal of a remnant of Israel (7,000) who reestablish God’s covenant with the faithful, the faithful who found God in a whisper.

With such great and grand injustices in the world, who doesn’t long for God as spectacle? Fireballs raining down on false prophets (or at least on ISIS!). Fireballs against our enemies, bread for the hungry, hope for the poor. What we get is a whisper that lies below the din of talk shows, political speeches, and mob violence; the whisper speaking to all who listen, who quietly and with great faith assert God’s presence in the whisper of individual acts of love well below the radar of social media.

Jesus, responding to the fear of his disciples in a boat on rough waters, accepts Peter’s rather glib challenge, and calls him from the boat. Peter’s salvation comes not by being successful at walking on water but succeeds in having his faith deepened in Christ’s saving him from his own fears and doubts. In this case, again, God was not in the storm, not in the spectacle of turmoil, but in quieting the storm and allaying fears. “Lord if it is really you, command me to come to you on the water” was Peter’s rather dim-witted proof of trust (If it wasn’t Jesus, but perhaps Satan, why not fool Peter?). Somehow, deep in Peter’s consciousness, he knew Jesus—present or absent-- would protect him, and he stepped out of the boat.

Faith didn’t save Peter, but Christ’s unconditional love; you don’t need to have great faith to be saved by Christ, but you’ve got to step out of the boat. You’ve got to be willing to fail at walking on water, at having your spectacular plans fail so that you can fall into the arms of the living God whose call is a whisper no one seems to hear.