The Quality of Mercy-All Saints Day

 

Again, we find ourselves reflecting on what it means to be human as we observe the tri-partite fall celebration of All Hallows Eve, All Saints or All Hallows Day, and All Souls Day. Sometimes known as the Days of the Dead. We mock death, honor death, reflect on the lives of those who have led the way before us, and ponder our own mortality as we watch autumn leaves fall and scatter on the ground, blown by the wind, dissolve back into the earth from where they came.

 

Jesus sits down to speak on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. In the crowd, of course, are his disciples – followers – that group of folks, men and women, who go where he goes, see what he does and try to pattern their lives likewise. There are farmers, merchants and fishermen from throughout the northern region of Israel who were struggling to keep their enterprises above water as they were heavily taxed for transporting their goods to market, and had to pay additional tribute taxes to Caesar as well as tithes to support the Temple in Jerusalem. The presence of armed Roman garrisons and tax collectors weighed heavily on their hearts. Often in debt, they would lose the family farm, family vineyard, family boats and business – all of which would be usurped by those they called the Oiko-Despots, rich mega-absentee landlords, resulting in thousands of people who the Oiko-Despot saw as expendables, slave laborers, homeless.

 

All these folks are sitting the hillside looking, listening to hear some glimmer of hope from this Jesus they have heard about who has been giving away free healthcare, meals, and companionship to any and all who come his way. We only have three loaves of bread and thousands of hungry people? Give it all away he would say to his disciples. Across the lake were the hot-springs where folks like the Oiko-Despots from all over the ancient world would come too pay large sums of money to be healed, and here this young man is giving it all away.

 

Eventually, they follow him all the way to Jerusalem, that city on a hill which was the religious, political and economic center of Israel. For weeks now we have heard of various religious, political and economic leaders testing Jesus, trying to ask trick questions, trying to somehow discredit him publicly in front of his followers. While all along dusty trek from Galilee to Jerusalem could be seen Roman crosses with fellow countrymen and women nailed to them as reminders of what your fate would be if you crossed the Empire, if you dared to challenge the rule of Caesar and those collaborating with the cult of the Emperor. The crowd on the hillside were familiar with all of that, and listen to Jesus for a word, a phrase that could sustain them in the midst of all that felt oppressive, unfair and frightening.

 

Instead of talking about what to do, Jesus speaks to us of how to Be – these are Be-Attitudes - Attitudes of Being. He calls us to be peacemakers, pure of heart, meek and humble, hungry for righteousness and justice, to acknowledge our sadness and the poverty of our spirit. Yet, at the very center of these Attitudes of Being stands what Kurt Vonnegut once described in a Palm Sunday sermon as the “one good idea we have been given so far”: to be merciful – merciful toward others as we are merciful toward ourselves. It is this attitude of mercy that lies at his reminder: to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. To live our lives out of such Attitudes of Being, says Jesus, is a Blessing and the essence of what it means to be human.

 

Jesus knows that until one loves oneself it is nearly impossible to love others. And I suspect we can all agree, to love oneself takes a heaping measure of mercy. It is easy to be hard on one’s self. It takes awareness and attentiveness to cut our selves some slack and be merciful to one’s self. What Jesus says is to become peacemakers, to be meek and humble, to thirst for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, to recognize that the true poverty of our spirit all begins with mercy, with being merciful – full of mercy for oneself and others. Perhaps being merciful says it all. We are, after all, made in the image of the God whose property is always to have mercy.

 

We do well to remember these Attitudes of Being on All Saints Day and the utter centrality of mercy at the heart of what it means to be human. We have great lists of those who in the history of Christianity have been remembered as Saints – those who by their lives exemplified a quality of mercy in the spirit of Jesus, the Christ. Hugh Bishop of Lincoln who died 16 November 1200 is one we remember for his generosity, his dedication to educating those under his care, and for protecting the Jews in his diocese, quelling the anti-Semitic violence that broke out during the reign of Richard I.

 

There are others we know, like Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr, and those we have never heard of, with names like Fabian, Wulfstan, and Phillips Brooks, who by the way wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem.

 

Then there is Laurence, Deacon of Rome who was tortured and executed by the Empire 10 August 258. As Deacon, Laurence had access to the funds of the church to care for the poor, the hungry, the sick, the blind and the homeless of Rome. Swept up in the persecution of Christians by the Emperor Valarian, Laurence was ordered by a magistrate to turn over the treasures of the Church. Laurence went about the city and gathered all those for whom he had cared for with the mercy and love of Christ and presented them to the magistrate. “What is this?” roared the magistrate at the sight of such a crowd of indigent street people. “Behold in these poor persons,” replied Laurence, “the treasures which I promised to show you; to which I will add pearls and precious stones, those widows and consecrated virgins, which are the Church's crown!" For this Laurence, this living icon of God’s mercy, was tortured and killed.

 

On All Saints Day we recall these qualities of meekness, peacemaking, hunger and thirst for justice, and mercy which are at the heart of the lives of All The Saints the Church remembers today. Among the widest known words of Jesus’s teaching are these Beatitudes. All who embody these Attitudes of Being are Blessed and live lives of Blessing others. This is the heart of what it means to be merciful, to be human. Mercy is an outward expression of our Christian Hope that the falseness of this world is ultimately bounded by a greater Truth. We have these weeks leading up to Advent to reflect on how the lives of the Saints, the lives of our ancestors, and Jesus’s teaching on mercy can become the outward expression of all that we say and do with the residue of our lives. 

All Saints Day calls us to open our hearts and let the quality of mercy enter into the very fiber of our Being. Mercy is the essence of Christ and Being Blessed. Now, as Phillips Brooks wrote it is time to let Jesus into our soul:

 

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv'n!

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heav'n.

No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in. Amen.

It Is Tragic, Really

 

It is tragic, really. “…nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.” When people stop talking to one another it never ends well. In this next little episode in Matthew 22:34-46, a lawyer, which really means a Pharisee who is a scholar of the Biblical texts of Israel, is sent out to try to trick him one more time by asking, “Which of the 613 commandments is great?” The trick is no matter what Jesus chooses, the retort could be, “But what about…?”  

 

But Jesus is a shrewdie, and instead quotes an already well-known summary of the law derived from the prayer to be said three times daily in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might,” and Levitcus 19:18, “…you shall love your neighbor as your self.” Then he asks them a trick question about David and the Messiah, his adversaries give up, walk away, and never ask him another question. Which is tragic. Truly sad.

 

For the essence, the very core, of what it means to be human as the Bible tells it begins with obedience – obedience grounded in listening. “Hear, O Y’israel!” What we hear is that the desire of YHWH is for radical neighborliness. This desire is not just for Israel, but it is a demand of every human person so as to sustain a viable human community. Human obedience means to care for the community, to practice hospitality, to engage in responsible stewardship, and concrete acts of faithfulness: to share your bread with the hungry; to bring the widow, the orphan, the resident alien, the homeless poor into your home; to cover the naked. All of which necessitates listening to hear what those in need really need lest we just give them what we think they need. Meanwhile, we tend to prattle, dissemble and debate whether this is the work of the private sector, or if this ought to be a matter of social policy. Tragically, we don’t listen, we don’t hear them or one another, and we stop talking to one another. We dare not ask any more questions of this radical itinerant Jew who wants us to take God and others – all others, even strangers – seriously. Who wants us to not only love our neighbors but also love our enemies as well. We have more important things to attend to, say the Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests: rituals, sacrifices, studying texts, issuing judgments.

 

All the while, the unsolicited testimony of the Bible makes no distinction between private and public responsibility. The Bible insists that governments and social institutions of all kinds are both expected to be vehicles for the kind of obedience that takes God at his word. We are to find ways to provide food, shelter and security for all who live among us, including strangers. Especially strangers, something we have been pondering all week at our Noonday Prayers. 

 

YHWH calls us to remember: you were once strangers in Egypt and I took care of you because I love you. No other reason. Love is rescue and hospitality and caring for the whole community. It is through such care for the stranger that God calls us to a life we cannot predict, writes Sister Joan Chittister. “It is the stranger who disarms all our preconceptions about life and penetrates all our stereotypes about the world…It is the stranger who tests all our good intentions…We must speak good about everyone we do not know and yet do know to be just as full of God as we are, if not more so.” [Illuminated Life, Sr Joan Chittister, OSB, p129-130] We walk away from such obedience at our own peril. To cease asking questions, to stop talking to one another and the stranger and the enemy is not to be human in any sense that the Bible understands who we are created to be.

 

This is what Paul is saying to the church in Thessaloniki. We don’t come to you for flattery, or greed, or impure motives, but with the Love Christ speaks of, and not only speaks of but lives out in every he says and does. No matter what people are saying about us, “… we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” [1 Thessalonians 2: 5-8]

 

I have lived with this passage from seminary to this day. When asked to “describe your ministry in 140 or fewer characters,” I simply wrote, “I endeavor to live as it we read in 1 Thessalonians 2: 5-8.” It was my attempt to encourage Bible Study among those considering my resume. I don’t always succeed living this out, but every day I reflect on those words of Paul and the words we have today from Jesus and remind myself: We Can Always Begin Again. We cannot afford to walk away from one another. We cannot afford to stop asking one another questions. For it is when we do that that things turn tragic. One day the Pharisees and Sadducees and others are talking to Jesus. Then they walk away and stop talking to him. The next thing we know, he is hanging from a Roman cross. Fortunately for us, and for the world, that is not the end of the story. It need not be tragic. Amen. It is so. It is truth.

 

 

Who Is In Charge Here?

 

Who Is In Charge Here?

The question this week really is, who is in charge here? Paul’s letter to the church in Thessaloniki is believed to be the first of his letters that have survived to be included in the Christian Bible. This makes it the earliest example of Christian writing about Jesus and the emerging community of his followers.

Evidently, they have written to Paul with several questions: believers who have become idlers, non-productive members of the community just waiting for Jesus to return; some have returned to worshipping idols; a concern that some have died before Jesus’s return in the end of days and what will happen to them when he does. There also seems to have been some who question Paul’s authority, which was not unusual as there were other competing evangelists of all kinds traveling around all claiming to be in charge. Even as early as the year 50ce the diversity of the emerging Christian community was profound and confusing.

Before addressing the issues, Paul butters them up as he compliments them for their “work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ,” which contradicts the existing problem that some have stopped working at all! [1 Thessalonians 1: 1-10] Note his emphasis on “work” and “labor.” Paul knows what we all know: Faith and Love and sustaining Hope does not come easy. Ongoing hard work is an important component of the life of Faith grounded in Love for others – all others. Not to mention work of all kinds: cleaning house, washing dishes, etc. As we have learned this week in our Daily Noonday Prayer, “Work does not distract us from God. It brings the reign of God closer than it was before we came [into God’s world]. Work doesn’t take us away from God. It continues the work of God through us…I must work as if the preservation of the world depends on what I am doing in this small, otherwise insignificant space I call my life.” [Illuminated Life, Sr Joan Chittester, OSB, p 125]

 Paul knows there is no time for idlers on the harvest plain, and no time for worshipping idols either. These days idols tend not to be made of wood and stone overlaid with silver and gold, but are distractions of all kinds like money, greed, envy, consumerism, hatred of those not like ourselves, inflexible ideologies, and even our obsessions with religion and politics can become idolatrous!

 Religion and politics are both highlighted in our ongoing narrative of Jesus on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and his ongoing confrontations with various authorities – this time the Pharisees, concerned with keeping Torah faith in the midst of the Roman occupation, and some Herodians, those who support the Ruling Family of Palestine, and therefore support the Roman Empire since no one could rule without such allegiance. Odd that they would be joining forces, but we know politics and religion both often make for strange “bedfellows!”  [Matthew 22: 15-22,]

 They set about to test Jesus in public as yet another attempt to discredit him. The issue is both religious and political: paying the tribute tax to Caesar. If he says Jews ought not pay the tax most people would agree with his sticking to Torah ideals, but not his sense of what is practical to survive in the Empire. But were he to say yes, the practical answer will cost him politically and religiously and possibly lose the support of his followers. What could go wrong?

Plenty as it turns out. After listening to them butter him up like Paul does in Thessaloniki, all Jesus has to say is, “Show me the coin used for the tax.” Gleefully, they produce a denarius – which shows an image of the Emperor on one side, and an inscription on the reverse to the effect, “Caesar is God.” Such coins were not permitted for offerings at the Temple, thus the money-changers or currency exchange in the Temple court yards. The coin itself is a forbidden idol. That the Pharisees could produce such a coin on the Temple Mount exposes them as hypocrites, from the Greek word for “actor.” Jesus exposes them as religious role players or posers! Jesus could stop there, but no. Once getting them to say whose image is on the coin he replies, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

 Try to imagine a long pause after the first half of the epigram - let it linger before driving home the indisputable second clause, which although is a parallel construction, does not suggest the realms of Caesar and God are of equal significance. The realm of Caesar is vastly inferior to the significance of God’s realm. Jesus does not suggest there is a religious realm and a political realm that deserve equal respect. The second clause all but nullifies the first! Since the earliest days of the church interpreters have surmised that Jesus is saying, “We are God’s coins. We bear God’s image. Women and men are created in the image of God. We belong to God as surely as your coin belongs to Caesar. Have you already forgotten what I said in my sermon on the mount at the beginning of all of this: You cannot serve God and mammon! You cannot serve God and money! [Matthew 6:24] So, go ahead and toss Caesar a few denarii, but remember life does not consist in wealth and possessions and power, but rather in living according to the will of God – working on faith, laboring in love and sustaining the virtue of hope in a world that often provides little evidence that such hope is justified. There’s work to be done. No time for this idle chat.”

 Snap! “When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.” I guess so!

 Jesus, and Paul after him, have one point and one point only: The answer to the question, “Who’s in charge here?” is, YHWH, the Lord God of the Exodus, the God of the Wilderness, the God of Return from Exile, and soon to be the God of the Resurrection and New Life! Not Caesar. Not Herod. Not idols. Not idlers. Not posers and schemers. Only The God who commands,

Come, labor on!

Who dares stand idle, on the harvest plain

While all around him waves the golden grain?

And to each servant does the Master say,

“Go work today.”   [Jane L. Borthwick, 1859, 1863]

 We must work as if the preservation of the world depends on what we are all doing in this small, otherwise insignificant space we call our life. For our life is God’s life. God’s life is ours.

Amen. It is so. It is truth.

Come and Join The Party Every Day!

 

Come and Join The Party Every Day!

The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger,

and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.  Exodus 34:6

 

For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger,

and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. Jonah 4:2

 

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  Psalm 103:8

 

But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy. BCP 337

 

I begin with these to remind us that the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer echo a formulaic description of the God of the Bible that runs from Exodus all the way to the end. It may not sound like it, but the same God who in Isaiah 25 is threatening to destroy the vineyard, Israel, which he has planted and tended is the same God who also “relents from punishing,” as Jonah found out when the Ninevites repented and were spared. This upset Jonah who seems to have been looking forward to the spectacle of disaster visited upon Nineveh. We have to admit, we sometimes find ourselves wishing for the similar destruction of others from time to time. Not very “made in the image of God” of us, is it?

 

Given the Bible’s view of God, it strikes me that Matthew’s presentation of “the banquet” (Matthew 22:1-14) is quite odd. I mean what kind of king, or God, first destroys a city and all its people for not coming to his party, and then sees someone amongst those he ordered to be brought in off the street to the banquet, and then has the poor soul bound hand and foot and tossed into the “outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” simply for not having the proper garment on? Certainly not someone whose property is “always to have mercy!” We even heard Kahlil Gibran the other day at Noonday Prayer saying that anyone who considers themselves “good” does not ask even the naked, “Where is your garment?” For it is, after all, Matthew’s Jesus who says, “I am the naked; I am the stranger; I am hungry, I am the prisoner…” I am persuaded that Matthew repurposes the parable to address trouble within the early church rather than as a description of the “heavenly banquet” of God’s Reign, calling those of us who claim Christ as Lord to look deep within ourselves and how we treat one another.

 

So, instead of allegorizing Matthew, I offer a more believable vision of the banquet as my long-time mentor, pastor, preacher and friend, the late N. Gordon Cosby of the Church of the Saviour, Washington, DC, once described it:

We’re Invited to A Grace Party! When we hear the invitation to claim our membership in God’s family, it’s like we’ve stumbled onto a Grace Party. We can hardly believe our good fortune. The sights and sounds of it are pure delight. Abundance characterizes the whole shindig. The most delectable manna is falling everywhere, and wine overflows as though from an Artesian well. Everyone is eating and drinking endlessly, yet not being harmed because this food and wine are not of the world but of New Life.

 

And get this: Everyone’s invited! That’s the really good news. No one has to crash this party, there’s no limit to how many of my friends I can bring along with me. Or, my enemies for that matter. It’s such a blast that I want everyone to come – those with wealth or not a penny to their name, those who are down and out or who thought they had some power. I do notice, though, that the so-called nobodies seem to be having the most fun. It takes others awhile to lay down everything they brought with them and start to play.

 

What are people doing at this party? That’s the funny thing – We’re not ‘doing’ much at all. We’re just being. We’re being our real selves, relaxed and eager to help out with whatever the host asks of us. Love is flowing all over the place. Whatever you need, we’re ready:

 

Do you want someone to listen? We’ll hear whatever you need to say.

Are you bleeding from wounds of the past? We’ll soothe and bandage your wounds.

Do you need to be held for a while, just being quiet in a safe place? Not a problem. We have all the time in the world.

Looking for respect, even reverence? You’ll get such a dose of it you’ll wonder if you can take it all in.

 

In fact, there’s so much peace and joy at this party that it can be hard to absorb. Some of us just aren’t able to let in this much unimpeded Love and Goodness. That’s right. The host isn’t pushy. We can come and go as many times as we need to until we can handle this much joy.

 

This is simply the nature of a Grace Party. None of us is here because we deserve to be. We haven’t earned any of it. And although some of us might keep turning down the invitation, the host will never stop inviting. And neither will we who have decided to stay. We’ll be spreading the news of this unbelievable Feast everywhere we go. Come to the party! It won’t be the same if you’re not there.

 

Hey, come right away! Come and join the Party Every Day! 

Amen. It is truth. It is so!                                                                          

 

Filled With Love

 My Heart Is Filled With Love

Isaiah 5 begins: Let me sing for my beloved, my love-song concerning his vineyard. Israel is the vineyard and the beloved. In review: YHWH rescued a disparate group of slaves out of Egypt; shaped them in the wilderness into a covenant people to create a community of justice and dignity for all people, especially the most vulnerable: widows, orphans and resident aliens, those without resources; provided them a land in which to live and prosper according to the covenant agreements; provided leaders in times of crisis. As to the land, each tribe, each clan and down to each family had specific regions and land holdings under their stewardship and care. Yet, injustice, idolatry, the few elites drinking and eating and seizing family landholdings to expand their own power and status, are among the injustices detailed in verses 8 and following. The land is the Lord’s, and everything therein (Ps24) – but we, his people, are exploiting it for our own selfish desires as if it is ours. The song considers this sin – which we have missed the mark, and abandoned our stewardship of the land and the people we are charged to care for.

 

Six hundred years later, not only have things not changed, but in addition to the seizing of family land holdings by Urban Elites, Caesar’s Rome has occupied the land, and has siphoned off more and more of the resources meant to sustain the neediest people to feed its own Imperial greed, lust, gluttony and pride – and those who resist feel the wrath of the Empire. Five of the seven deadly sins are evident throughout the land of YHWH’s Vineyard.

 

Admittedly, Storyteller Matthew presents this as a kind of intramural dispute between Jesus and the chief priests and elders by grouping it with the question of authority and parable of the two sons. But the core parable itself is a description, or codification, of what has been going wrong for centuries. Both Isaiah and Jesus address the core issue of the unfair consolidation of farms by Urban Elites who in turn create literal vineyards and orchards to export wine and oil to the Empire, thus depriving the peasant class of their means of family support, turning them into tenant farmers at best, and more often simply servant slaves.

 

There was known to be resistance on the part of the displaced peasants, and even revolts. In certain circumstances, if the tenant farmers could resist giving crops and tributes to the new owners of their land for three years, they could get the family farm returned. There were organized revolts against the unjust usurpers of the land, and against the Roman occupation, just as the people in Isaiah’s time resisted their capture and deportation to Babylon. And it is key to understand that by the time Matthew re-presents this parable of the vineyard, the first revolt against Rome has failed, and Jerusalem and its temple, the cultic center of all Israelite worship, lies in still smoldering ruins. The Vineyard has been trampled, devoured and laid waste.

 

We are mistaken to spend our energy trying to allegorize the parable assigning parts to God, Jesus, the prophets and others, rather than to look at the end of the story in the context of Jesus’s own life and actions. One might reasonably conclude that the story’s conclusion says that armed revolt against the Usurpers of the Land and against Rome is futile! Together they will crush you along with the grapes and olives! Remember, it is Holy Week. Jesus is in Jerusalem about to enter into his showdown with Pilate and the Roman legions who have coopted the Urban Elites and the chief priests and elders to maintain order, especially during the High Holy Days of Passover in Jerusalem.

 

Jesus has made himself known by his disturbance of the Temple marketplace, and the withering of a fig tree. He is perceived as a danger. Yet, the nature of the danger he represents is misunderstood. He is not there to lead a revolt – he is a messenger of God’s Love – he literally is the “my Beloved” in the song of Isaiah! Jesus’s ethic of Love, as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr would call it during the Civil Rights movement, is the alternative to meeting the violence of the Land Usurpers and the Empire with violence, and rather to seek and serve all persons with the Love of Christ, striving for justice and peace for all people – not some people, not a lot of people, but all people – and respecting the dignity of every human being. Pilate cannot grasp this at all. What is truth, he asks. The chief priests and elders cannot grasp this. By what authority do you do these things, they ask.

 

But many people did understand, and followed him. And although it took several hundred years, the Emperor and the Empire itself was changed – not without its own difficulties – but the Love of Christ became the coin of the Realm, and remains to this day a force for hope and for good.

 

The parable ought not be called the parable of the “wicked tenants,” but of the dishonest and unjust usurpers of the land, just as Isaiah had called out this injustice some six hundred years earlier. One need only ask family farmers throughout this great land of ours who are losing their farms to agribusiness whether or not this parable still has relevance in the world of today.

 

Violence, says Jesus, will never triumph over violence. Only a heart filled with love, with the love of God’s Beloved Son, can make a difference. Make the difference. When we each let our hearts be filled with love, a change will come as it did in the year 313 CE under the Emperor Constantine. The Song of the Vineyard is a song that calls each heart to be filled with love to transform an unjust society from being one of violence to becoming a society of peace, of God’s shalom, of justice and peace for all people that respects the dignity of every human being, sharing the resources of the land with all people. Amen. It is so. It is truth.

Joyce Andersen My Heart Is Filled With Love