Cue Santana!

 Cue Santana

Ezekiel is a priest and a prophet in Jerusalem.  The Lord God of the Exodus and Wilderness Campaign issues a decree: quit blaming the current bad circumstances on your parents or anyone else but yourself. “It is only the person that sins that will die.” Turn around and walk in my way again. Oh, you think my way is too hard! Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair? Each of you need to change your evil ways. Tell my people, Ezekiel, and let them know there is good news: there is still time to turn back and change.  

 

Six Hundred Years later, Jesus enters Jerusalem with a demonstration that mocks Royal entrances! He proceeds to the Temple and begins to overturn the tables in the market place and currency exchange in the outer precincts. The chief priests are angry. Then as a demonstration of what should really be going on there, he cures the blind and the lame who are flocking to him, and crying out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” This elicits anger from the chief priests. And then he withers a fig tree because… it does not have fruit. Causing the disciples to ask, “Wow! How did you do that?” Aw shucks, he replies, with a little prayer and faith you could tell mountains to be lifted up and thrown into the sea! It’s crazy time in the midst of the annual Passover festival! All this recalls that Ezekiel did crazy stuff too – like eating a scroll!

 

All of this explains why the chief priests and elders ask him, “By what authority are you doing these things?” A reasonable question. Which implies there are different kinds of authorities: such as God, Satan and Jesus himself. Jesus is a shrewdie and does not take the bait, and instead asks them a question: Answer this and I’ll tell you. Does the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin? They’re in a corner and realize there is no good answer: if they say from humans, the people will be angry, and if they say from heaven they know Jesus will ask them why they did not believe John. Not believe in him, but believe John when he says it is time to repent and change your evil ways, each of you, individually – the message Zeke was to announce, also in Jerusalem, yea those many years ago. No answer from you, says Jesus, no answer from me! But I will tell you story.

 

A father has two sons. He asks one to go work in the vineyard, and the son says, “I will not.” But then he does go out to the vineyard. He goes to the other son who says he will go, but he does not. Which one does the will of the father? This is a layup. It could not be easier. Of course, it is the first. Then Jesus says, “Right, and I’ll tell you something else: tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God before you! John came to show you the way but you did not believe him. They did! And even after you saw all those people down by the River Jordan turn back to God’s Way, you did not change your evil ways. Snap! Cue Santana!

 

What’s the take-away for us today? In the midst of lots of crazy stuff going on, social chaos, an ongoing pandemic, a yearning to return to business as usual, back to normal, our texts appear to scream, “Forget about it!” The point being, things need to change. We need to change. John told people to bear fruit worthy of repentance. No fruit on your tree. Zap! No tree. The good news is that there is time to change. Time to repent. Time to turn things around. Time to bear fruit. Time to be agents of change. All things will turn out all right in the end. Things don’t look so good right now? Good news! Then it’s not the end! All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well. You can be agents of change. You can be agents of healing. You can move mountains! You really really can. There is still time. Amen. It is so. It is truth.

Who Are We Anyway?

Who Are We Anyway?

We need to read the story of Jonah more often. He’s an angry young prophet. Angry because he was successful. Odd.  He reminds me of another angry young man, Ambrose Bierce, who like Jonah got angrier as he grew older! Ambrose was a writer whose anger and cynicism drove his every word. He compiled a Devil’s Dictionary which offered definitions like this: “Mammon, n. The God of the world’s leading religion.” [The Devil’s Dictionary, Peter Pauper Press, 1958, p38] That would be the underlying problem in the parable Jesus offers in Matthew 20:1-16. Again, he, or Matthew, it doesn’t matter which, tricks the reader into thinking this is about the kingdom of God’s reign, when in the end it appears to be an invitation to compare and contrast what is real in the here and now with what could be if we were to take God and Jesus at all seriously.

 

A long-standing interpretation of this story suggests that the land owner is meant to be God who treats everyone the same (not necessarily fairly!), and the workers who grumble about their wages are made to look like ungrateful brutes. Again, looking into the deeper meaning of the story ought to convince us that the “landowner” of the story is not Godlike in the least, and the workers, surprise-surprise, are getting screwed, and worse still, being shamed and blamed publicly for their predicament.

 

Which is that they are poor. Poorer than the peasant class in ancient Israel who usually had a little land and a family. If these day-laborers have to rely the daily wage of a denarius, they were known to the Urban Elites, who owned most of the land, as “expendables.” The daily wage of a denarius could feed one person for two- or three-days max. These workers could not sustain themselves let alone a family. They are desperate.

 

Whereas our “landowner” is a Despot – the Greek word in the text calls him an Oikodespotase, literally “master of the household.” Oiko means “household,” but despotase is the root for Despot which even then meant an absolute and arbitrary ruler/owner, from whom there can be No Appeal. Oikodespotase was also the title slaves were required to use to address their masters – or, Oiko-Despot. The expendables hanging out in the local 7-11 parking lot looking for a day-job would not like or trust our Oiko-Despot, but had no choice but to work for him. Planting season and harvest time were the only two times of the year our Oiko-Despot would need their help. The rest of the year they usually had to beg, or form bands of bandits and rove the land robbing people. Which, by the way, was the end of the angry Ambrose Bierce who went off to Mexico to ride with Pancho Villa and was either murdered or executed as a result.

 

Our caste of expendables, one notes, have no leverage with which to negotiate a better or longer deal. It was unusual for our Oiko-Despot to hire them himself, since we learn he had a manager, a steward, who would usually do that for him. Yet, he seems to take a perverse delight in returning to hire more and more expendables all day long, only sending in the steward at the end of the day to do the dirty work of paying them, beginning with paying the last, those who worked the least amount of time, first. That’s when the perverse nature of the Oiko-Despot reveals itself. For when one of the expendables who had worked all day complained that they deserve more for working longer, our local Urban Elite Absentee Land-owner finally says, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go… Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

 

Even the peasant farmers, fishermen and expendables listening to Jesus, and on the edges of the crowd some Scribes and Pharisees, keepers of the interpretation of the values of God’s Torah, would know that the answer to that last question is absolutely, unequivocally, “No.” Embedded in Torah is something called the Debt Code based on the understanding that the Earth is the Lord’s and everything therein (Psalm 24). And that YHWH is the true Lord of the Vineyard whose prerogative is to distribute the land as YHWH sees fit! The land is given as a blessing to extend abundance for everyone: the more one gets, says Torah, the more one is obligated to give as God has given! This principal of giving is meant to prevent covetousness and acquisition and greed and envy, all of which tend to engender covetousness and the desire for more which eventually leads to violence and becomes a curse. The plan as outlined in scripture is to prevent there ever being a class of “expendables” in the first place. Besides, the word our Oiko-Despot uses translated as “friend” when talking to the grumbler is really a condescending term, not the word used for true friends. He is only feigning courtesy. It’s a put down. He’s got his harvest in and can dispose of his rented expendables. Get out of here, I don’t need you anymore. Then he adds insult to shame and blame, “Or, are you covetous because I am generous?” Our Oiko-Despot is the absolute reigning king of Covetousness, having snatched up all their land when debt threw them into foreclosure. Wow. Talk about chutzpah! Those listening would know this.

 

The problem facing Jesus: those who claimed to be the guardians of kingdom values had become the perpetrators of an ongoing system of oppression. Perhaps that was the problem in Nineveh as well. We are not told. We do know that Jonah does not want to go to a large gentile city, tries to run the opposite way, ends up in a big fish that “spews” him back on dry land with fresh orders from God to warn the Ninevites, sits and waits for God to incinerate them when lo and behold, they actually listen and repent of the evil they had done – so God spares them! Because that’s what God does. Jonah knows this but prefers to be angry that God would save foreigners.

 

Perhaps Jesus is inspired to do the same for Israel. Here’s a story of business as usual. He seems to be saying, we can maintain this systemic bad treatment of the poor and blame them for their problems, and risk a calamity. Or, we can repent like the people of Nineveh and start over caring for one another in all the ways that Torah instructs us to do.

 

Perhaps we can think of situations in our own time and place similar to the exploitation and hubris represented by the Oiko-Despot in Jesus’s story, the expert at taking advantage of the poor and then shaming them publicly, blaming them for their expendable plight.

 

Perhaps we are meant to imagine, that instead of thinking whatever we have is ours to do with as we please like the Oiko-Despot does, and sustain systems of economic oppression, rather we are meant to be gracious, merciful, abounding with steadfast love for others, all others, loving our neighbors as ourselves, relenting from any behavior that shames and blames those in need, but rather cares for them as one would care for a sister or brother. Oh yes, and also many animals! We are to care for all the creatures on this Earth – the Earth which the Psalmist sings is the Lord’s, and everything therein. After all, Jonah was correct in his description of the God in whose image we are made. 

Or, are we? That other angry young man, Ambrose Bierce describes us like this: “Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.” [Ibid p39]  Amen. It is so. It is truth. 

There Is No Comparison!

 

There Is No Comparison!

The evangelist Matthew, in chapter 18:23-35, suggests there is something in this odd story that “may be compared” to the kingdom of heaven. First, Peter wants to quantify forgiveness. Next, a gentile king calls one of his top-level bureaucrats to settle accounts. The king reverses his decision to sell the man, his wife, his family and possessions to recoup some of his losses. Instead, he forgives the debt. The account manager, however, seizes a lower functionary in the kingdom’s economic resource accumulation apparatus who owes a paltry sum and puts him in the slammer. The rest of the bureaucracy complains, so the king reverts to form and withdraws the magnanimous forgiveness and sends the bureaucrat off to be tortured to the end of time. Ending with the ominous, “This could happen to you if you fail to forgive from the heart!” Just how does all this compare to the vision of God’s justice and peace, God’s Shalom, for all people that Jesus proclaims and lives?

First, a look at the numbers. When Peter tries to limit forgiveness to that mystical Biblical number seven, Jesus responds with the already absurd seventy-seven times. But in the Greek it can be interpreted as seven times seventy! That is 490 times! Which is Jesus’s way of saying, “You cannot quantify forgiveness any more than you can quantify the love of God I’ve been enacting wherever we go, Peter!”

Then there is the account manager’s debt: 10,00 Talents. A Talent was worth fifteen years of a laborer’s wage. So, we are looking at 150,000 years labor to work it off. There have been only 2,000 years since this story was told, so it’s two down, 148,000 to go! Considering Homo Sapiens has been around as a species approximately 195,000 years, the account manager would have had to start working it off near the very beginning of our time on Earth. And it turns out 10,000 was the largest number anyone could imagine back then, just as a Talent was the largest denomination of value anyone could imagine. It’s a big enormous debt! We might ask, however, what’s with this gentile king allowing one of his top-level producers get into such debt in the first place? Since this is money this gentile king depends upon to secure his power over the kingdom. I say gentile because in Israel one cannot sell a man’s wife and children.

Suggesting this king in the story cannot be God in allegory. His actions, his apparatus for collecting tribute and tax monies to maintain his power, is all typical of the time, and throughout all time really. We’re not told why he forgave such a ridiculous amount of debt. Perhaps it was a kind of public relations move to pacify the vast majority of the people of his kingdom who labor forever in debt to satisfy the needs of the kingdom. Perhaps the account manager was to model this forgiveness as well to make it look good. But so quickly do we all revert to type, to the ways that have been ingrained in us through years of being part of the apparatus; part of the system. How easy it is for the reader or listener to be lulled into the evil afoot, not necessarily intentional evil, but the systemic evil of how such economic oppression serves the interests of the ruling class – in this case the Herodian empire, the Temple hierarchy and aristocracy, all clients of the Empire of Caesar – and not the people of the land.

Surely when we compare this story to any idea or imagining we have of the kingdom of God’s justice and love for all people, we would not like it to play out like this: at best being eternally in debt to the apparatus of the ruling class, or at worst, tortured for eternity to satisfy the needs for those ruling the kingdom to maintain their power over all. The king and kingdom of this story cannot in any way, shape or form compare to the kingdom of God Jesus embodies. Jesus tells this story as an example of the way things are, not at all how it is meant to be in the kingdom of his Father. It is to be a contrast, not an example. There is no comparison – none at all.

 As to the question of forgiveness, Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” Implied in his absurd answer to Peter’s question is another question: how would you like your forgiveness? It is not the quantity of forgiveness that matters, Peter, it is the quality of forgiveness that matters – one time from the heart will do. Such forgiveness cannot be withdrawn as it is in this story. It is forever. Once and for all. Amen. It is so. It is truth.

 

A Blessing (For This Labor Day)

 

A Blessing

May the light of your soul guide you.

May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret

  love and warmth of your heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light and renewal

   to those who work with you and to those who see and receive

   your work.

May your work never weary you.

May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration,

   and excitement.

May you be present in what you do.

May you never become lost in the bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day

    with dreams, possibilities, and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected.

May your soul calm, console and renew you.

 

     -John O’Donohue

 

Reading these words by the Irish former priest and poet John O’Donohue woke me up! That’s really what this Labor Day holiday ought to be about. Not the sales. Not the “end of summer.” Not simply a day off, or the reminder that another school year is upon us. It is about soul work. May the Light of your soul guide you! May you be present in what you do.

 

The poetry in the Wisdom of Ben Sirach sings of the value of work with our hands. Without such gifts and skills, says the poet, “no city can be in habited.”[ Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 38:27-32] While Jesus says the work we do is not to be for wealth, but to serve God and God’s will.[ Matthew 6:19-24]

 

What is work? The other day my Bishop, Eugene Taylor Sutton, reminded us that the Rule of St. Benedict says work is the friend of the soul itself - a means by which we love and serve God. God who is present within us and beyond us. God who is Love. As O’Donohue urges us, to be present in what we do, we must first be present to the presence within us and beyond us. Elsewhere O’Donohue reminds us that the body is the visible shoreline of the invisible world of the soul. And that the soul does not reside in the body, but rather the body is to be found in the soul. It is this soul in which we live and move and have our being that is to guide the work that we do.

 

In our catechism there is a phrase I return to over and over again. It is in the description of the ministry we all share: “… and according to the gifts given to us, we are to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.”[BCP 855] Or, Sister Joan Chittister writes in her book, The Illuminated Life, “We must restore the human community. We must grow in concert with the God who is within. We must be healers in a harsh society…We must begin to do life, to be with people, to accept circumstances, to bring good to evil in ways that speak of the presence of God in every moment.”[pp 81-82] And it is St. Paul who reminds us that we all have different gifts. The gifts you have are meant for me. The gifts I have are meant for you. It is only in the giving and sharing of our gifts that God’s work is done. And this means we are not all meant to be about this work of reconciliation in the world in the same ways, doing the same things. All of our gifts, all together, are necessary to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.

 

All work is soul work. Our bodies act it out, but it is the soul, the residence of the body, that accepts the gifts God has given each of us to do the work of what Jesus may have known as tikkun olam – repair of the world. The repair of a broken world, a harsh society in need of healing and reconciliation.

 

This Labor Day, we think of all the essential workers who have been working day and night, working longer and extra shifts, while others of us have been able to quarantine at home, work from home, and stay out of the public sphere. Not only doctors, nurses, first responders and public safety officers, but the people who clean and maintain hospitals and precinct houses; those who continue to haul our trash away; those workers who are in our Supermarkets and Grocery stores long hours every day exposed to hundreds of people a day who may or may not take best practices seriously. Think of the teachers and students and custodians in states and districts who are required to be in classrooms, mechanics who repair cars, plumbing, electrical issues. Think of the 22 million who have filed for Unemployment since March. This may be the most unusual Labor Day since its founding in 1882.

 

Then think of what is needed in respect to healing a broken and harsh world; think of how we might reconcile seemingly unreconcilable differences. How might we make a difference? How can we be present in what we say and do? How can we allow the light of the soul to guide us? The truth of the matter is that the world needs you. The Church needs you. Jesus needs you. The great Creator God needs you and your gifts for this work of healing and reconciliation. They all need your Love and the Light of your soul. Let Jesus live in you. Go forward with him! May Christ be present in you. May the Light of your soul guide you. May you be present in what you do. Work is the friend of the soul itself - a means by which we love and serve God. This is the Labor Day we need this year. And every year. Amen. So be it. It is truth.