What If Proper 23A

 

Matthew 22:1-14

This week's Sermon That Works by The Very Rev. Thelma M. (“Nikki”) Mathis does a terrific job making sense of an otherwise difficult parable.

What If?

It’s possible that the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” referred to at the end of this parable is being performed by anybody who has to preach on this Gospel passage this morning. The kingdom of heaven is like … a king with anger issues, a vicious aristocracy, and a guest with poor taste in clothing who gets thrown into everlasting torment? How is this good news?

 

Where’s the Jesus who says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28)? The one who gave us the Beatitudes; the one who heals all the sick; the one who says, “Let the children come to me” (Matthew 19:14)?

 

Believe it or not, this is the same Jesus who is speaking to us this morning, but this time, the verbal form he’s using can be trickier to understand. Unlike a wise proverb or a beautiful promise, parables are stories that are meant to be weird. They are undomesticated by design. They have no clear answers tied up in a bow. Instead, they have outrageous characters doing ridiculous things, all for the purpose of expanding our holy imaginations.

 

And yes, of course, we first use intellect, study, and analysis to understand the foundational context of the parables—that of the original culture and language—and all the implications thereof. But then, springing from that foundation, parables invite us to feast on “what if?” And in that “what if,” we can explore new ways of living and loving outside the stifling, normative box created by our own cultural assumptions, conventions, and any self-righteous sense of moral certainty. Author and New Testament theologian Amy-Jill Levine, in her book, Short Stories by Jesus, offers this key to our exploration of multi-faceted truth in parables:

 

Like a poem (another simile), a parable will evoke numerous interpretations; it is our job to sort through them. When we seek universal morals from a genre that is designed to surprise, challenge, shake up, or indict and look for a single meaning in a form that opens to multiple interpretations, we are necessarily limiting the parables and, so, ourselves.

 

We might be better off thinking less about what they “mean” and more about what they can “do”: remind, provoke, refine, confront, disturb.

 

And disturb is exactly what this parable does. Here we find a dismissive and murderous aristocracy that kills royal servants for the crime of inviting them to a dinner. Here’s a king who has apparently never heard of de-escalation, so he destroys a city. Here’s a royal social order so rigid that commoners are coerced to come and party while unburied corpses—and what little possessions they may have had—are still burning in the city’s rubble. And we can’t forget the guy without a tux who gets tortured for all eternity. Not to mention all the elegant foods prepared for the gourmet feast—the fatted calf and slaughtered oxen waiting to be consumed like some time-sensitive parmesan and truffle double-baked soufflé—across the time it took for a monarch to assemble troops and commit war crimes against his own people!

 

Why would Jesus offer any part of this absurd nightmare as an example of the kingdom of heaven?

 

Let’s start at the foundation.

 

The foundation for this parable derives, at least in part, from an argument unfolding after the time when Jesus lived and taught. At the time when Matthew’s Gospel was being written, there was an intramural cultural and theological argument between two sides of the Jewish community: about whether Jewish Christians or Jewish non-Christians were the ones truly following God.

 

By having the parable’s king destroy the city of those who “would not come” to the wedding banquet he had prepared, Matthew is weighing in on the debate. The destroyed city in the parable recalls the Roman decimation of the city of Jerusalem—and the absolute razing and defiling of temple—in 70 ad. The application seems to be that, in the destruction of Jerusalem, God’s judgement has been enacted on the Jewish religious leaders who rejected Jesus. The parable could be Matthew’s way of arguing that Jewish believers in Jesus are the ones truly faithful to God.

 

Now this historical context doesn’t necessarily mean that we should read this parable as a wholesale allegory, but that’s most often how this parable is explained in pulpits, Sunday School, and Bible studies. And unfortunately, from that interpretation, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to many false and anti-Semitic notions: about how Christians and Jews fit into the unfolding of God’s plan of salvation.

 

What if, for us here and now, Jesus is also doing a new thing? The great thing—the good news—about Christ’s invitation to the “What if?” of parables is that—once we honor the foundation—we’re set free to listen to whatever else the Holy Spirit has to say. Is this parable about existence of judgment? The fact of Jesus’s rejection? The inclusion of others who are often rejected, now being fed and honored at God’s table?

 

What if this parable is a mirror held up for us to see our sometimes-distorted notions of God and God’s kingdom—or shall we say God’s “commonwealth”? (Remember: parables invite us to think about God in fresh and vivid terms, asking, “What if…?”)  What if God operates outside of our notions of power and control, of scarcity and fear? What if God rejects being depicted as angry or power hungry, rejects being used as an excuse for the crusades or the slave trade or the Doctrine of Discovery? What if Jesus isn’t the bridegroom as depicted in this story—a royal so inconsequential to the lives of his subjects (and to our daily lives now), that he’s ornamental rather than functional? What if Jesus isn’t a prince so negligible that we can offer worship on Sunday and then uphold empire on Monday?

 

If this parable can function as a mirror, the reflections we see in it are not for the purpose of beating up on the church, using shame as a punishment for judgment. What if judgment isn’t exclusively about punishment, but about clear sight and honest repentance, leading to love and liberation?

 

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said it best: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

 

What if the ridiculous cruelty of this parable is meant to remind us of the simple fact that God is love, and we are beloved? Jesuit priest and author Gregory Boyle addresses this beautifully in his book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion:

 

God, I guess, is more expansive than every image we think rhymes with God … The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold, the one who can’t take his eyes off of you. Marinate in the vastness of that.

 

Following love’s logic to its conclusion, let us look again at the parable’s mirror.

 

Perhaps Jesus isn’t king or son, but a conscientious objector to empire. Jesus is the one who won’t go along with status-quo maintenance and the terror that comes with abuse of power.

 

Lutheran pastor and author Nadia Bolz Weber describes Jesus in the parable like this: “At Calvary he (is cast out into) the outer darkness of empire, the outer darkness of our self-obsessions, the outer darkness of our secret addictions, the outer darkness of our sins and sorrows, the outer darkness of our human competition extravaganza. He goes to Calvary, rather than play along.”

 

What if we, like Jesus, refuse to “play along” with empire, and with our projections on and emulation of God as tyrant?

 

What if—among the many who are invited—the few chosen are the ones who choose to follow Divine Love incarnate, so that we can all—every human being everywhere—may be called “beloved,” God’s children with whom God is well pleased?

 

What if, because of what was done by Jesus in the outer darkness of Calvary, we really do get to, as Father Boyle says, “marinate in the vastness of a God who can’t take their eyes off of you, and who endlessly drops rose petals on our heads”?

 

Amen.

 

The Very Rev. Thelma M. (“Nikki”) Mathis is the Rector of St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church in Athens, GA, Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. She is also Dean of the Oconee Convocation in this diocese. For more than a decade, she has served on the faculty for the Episcopal Preaching Foundation and is currently faculty for the Learning to Lead program in her diocese. She is a contributor to Forward Day by Day, The Sewanee Theological Review, Graymoor, and the Episcopal Preaching Foundation publications Kerygma and Preaching the Beatitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

The Futility of Violence Proper 22 A

 

The Futility of Violence

It’s not a parable about wicked tenants. It’s about the futility of violence. How one approaches a parable like the one in Matthew 21:33-46, beginning on giving it a title, is problematic. A title which the parable, when told, it never had. Neither Matthew nor Jesus says, “This one is called: The Parable of the Wicked Tenants.” The title labels the tenant farmers as wicked for being unhappy about their situation. Most, if not all of them, have had their family ancestral farmland foreclosed due to debt and gobbled up by an absentee landlord. They are frustrated, not wicked. The lands the tenant farmers had lost was inherited land. It had been in the family for centuries. At the time of Jesus, and even more profoundly at the time Matthew’s gospel appears, farms and vineyards were often foreclosed and now owned by city-elites of the Roman Empire.

 

Another problem is a history of the church reading these stories as allegories – each character in the story, we say, is code for someone else. Looking at the allegory in Isaiah 5:1-7 some six centuries before Christ, one might have a legitimate point of making the owner of the vineyard God; the tenant farmers to be the kings and leaders of Israel, some of whom were notoriously corrupt; and the vineyard itself is Israel. Oh yes, and for centuries in Church preaching it has been assumed that the new “people who produce the fruits of the kingdom” was in fact the Church itself. To interpret the parable in this way, and cast Israel, or “the Jews,” as “wicked tenants,” means the Church established the very roots of anti-Semitism and Christians as “God’s new people.” Such interpretations persisted through The Holocaust, and today feed the increase of attacks on Jewish people and synagogues here in the U.S, and throughout the world.

 

As already noted, at the time of Jesus, and four decades later when Matthew’s gospel appeared, an unjust system of wealthy city elites who lent money to struggling family farms foreclosed them. The tenants needed to borrow money because of taxes to the Temple, toll-booth taxes, or tariffs, to move their goods to market, and further tribute taxes, or protection money, to be paid to the Roman Empire. Further, the Empire now “owned” the entirety of Judea, Galilee, and most of the surrounding territories. Any notion that “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything therein” had been usurped by the Empire and its need for more and more resources to sustain its power. God was no longer viewed as “the owner” of the vineyard. And the kind of violence one hears about in the parable is aimed more and more against the Empire, not God, eventually resulting in a sort of peasant revolt beginning in the year 66 CE, and crushed by Rome in the year 70, with Jerusalem and The Temple burned to the ground. Thus, the nearly 4,000 years of Yahwism and Abrahamic religion came to a halt – for there was now nowhere to make the appointed sacrifices.

 

This means that after the year 70 CE what we know as Rabbinic Judaism became normative. It had its origins in the years of captivity in Babylon and rabbis led the study of biblical texts while developing several different groups of texts to interpret what the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob willed for creation and the people appointed to care for creation and one another. And although there were home communities of people who followed Jesus as a movement within this new form of Judaism, it would be sometime in the late 1^st century or early 2^nd century that anything like “the church” as an organized entity appeared. That is, the parable is not about Christians and Jews as we think and know of them. It’s not about God. It is about the Empire, or the State’s, oppression of the people of the land – peasant tenant farmers – through systems of property foreclosures, taxes, tolls, tariffs, and an armed military enforcing it all. The church’s collective misreading of this parable has not only caused the sustained existence of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, but also blinded much of the church from recognizing the signs of what in the 20th century became the origins of authoritative, corporate fascism in Italy and Germany. Only a handful of Protestant Confessing Churches resisted the fascist oppression.

 

Standing among the ashes of Jerusalem, however, there are still deeper lessons to ponder. The futility of armed rebellion and violence was revealed. By the year 70 CE, some four decades after Jesus, the peasant revolts had failed spectacularly. This appears to have resulted in a never-ending spiral of violence up to the present day. In one corner, we hear Vladimir Putin just this week threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons against Ukraine and countries of the NATO alliance, calling into question just what constitutes a sovereign nation-state. In the other corner, is the president of the United States threatening to “annihilate” Iran and its entire civilization – one of the oldest civilizations on the face of the Earth – while also threatening to make all countries in north and south America client states. This also calls into question what constitutes a sovereign nation-state.

 

The parable also explores the themes of inheritance and who are rightful heirs of the land, and frankly, calls into question the very credibility if ancestral lands. At the micro level this means homes and farms, but at the macro level it means Empires absorbing more and more countries and territories. Willliam Herzog III, in his book, Parables as Subversive Speech, suggests the parable raises these still relevant questions: How can people and even sovereign nation states reclaim their honorable status as heirs, or as sovereign nations, if violent revolts always end in futility? Are there other ways to reassert their claims? [page 113]

 

The oldest strands of the four gospels are the Holy Week narratives in which Jesus eschews armed revolt, and instead, in proclamations like the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, and other teachings, does exemplifies another Way – the way of non-violent resistance. It is how the early church operated until in the fourth century the Emperor Constantine elevated the church to Empire status. Others like Ghandhi and Martin Luther King Jr achieved at least temporary success through non-violent resistance. But even those gains are currently in danger of being reversed as the violence of empires appears to escalate.

 

Jesus asks us to pray for bread that is given daily. To pray for our debts to be forgiven as we forgive the debts of others. To hallow God’s name. For God’s will to direct all that we do and all that we say.

Blessed are those who know their need for theirs is the grace of heaven.

Blessed are those who weep, for their tears will be wiped away.

Blessed are the humble for they are close to the sacred earth.

Blessed are those who hunger for earth’s oneness for they will be satisfied.

Blessed are the forgiving for they are free.

Blessed are the clear in heart for they see the Living Presence.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they are born of God.

[The Casa del Sol Blessings of Jesus based on Matthew 5: 3-9, by John Philip Newell]

 

May our prayers be for the peoples and nations of the world to find a Way beyond the futility of violence so that all persons may live in peace and security.

Amen.  

Where Is Your Mind Proper 21A

Where Is Your Mind?

“Close your eyes. Take a few, deep, cleansing breaths…. Where is your mind?” At the end of each class, this is what my first official Yoga instructor, Sallie Rich, would ask us. “Where is your mind?” Are we thinking ahead to the next item on our to-do list? Are we thinking about a return to a past which, because so much has changed, is literally impossible to resurrect? Where is your mind? And, perhaps as importantly, where is our mind?

 

Paul, writing to the Church in Philippi, urges us to, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” The “you” in the text of his letter, is plural. As Christians, we are those people who belong to one another in Christ Jesus. Paul urges us to work out our salvation together as a community of Christ. Following Christ is not primarily about being an individual in Christ. Rather, through baptism we are made the Body of Christ in this age, in this world, and it is God who will make us who we are to become in the age to come. [Philippians 2:1-13]

 

So it is that Paul urges us, together as the community of Christ, to: “be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. Where is your mind? Where is our mind?

 

To illustrate this, Paul offers one of the most ancient and beautiful hymns of the Church: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus:

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be grasped,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a servant,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death--

even death on a cross.

 

Paul appeals to unity within the community. That unity cannot be achieved or maintained if individuals think only of their own interests or care only for their own pride. Unity requires

that all share a concern for the common good. Where is your mind?

 

Jesus is asked by some chief priests and elder where his authority comes from. Like every good rabbi, he asks them a question in return about John the Baptizer. [Matthew 21:23-32] “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” The chief priests and elders immediately identify the question as a trick. And they are correct. “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So, they say, “We don’t know.” “Then neither will I tell you by what authority I do the things I do.” It’s as if he knows that they are incapable of experiencing the mind and will of God, which is the mind of Christ.

 

Then he tells a story about a father and two sons. The father asks his first son to come work in the vineyard with him, but the son says no. But later, he goes out to work with his father. He asks his second son to come work with him, and the boy say “Sure thing!” but does not go out to help. “Which one,” asks Jesus, “does the will of the father?” This one is a gimme. “The first,” they say! “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. 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.” Sometimes it is utterly surprising when we discover who really gets it, and who does not. Where is your mind? Where is our mind?”

 

The Greek of the second son’s reply, “I go, sir,” is really, “I go, kyrie,” or, “I go, Lord.” Which no doubt recalls a saying of Jesus earlier in Matthew, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord [kyrie, kyrie],’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” This second son is to remind us of those who profess loyalty to Christ Jesus, but whose lives, whose actions, do not exhibit the kind of love, humility, selflessness, and concern for the needs of others more than for oneself that Paul lists as what it means to have “the mind of Christ;” we are to look not to our own interests, but to the interests and needs of others, so as to be of “one mind – the mind of Christ.” Where is your mind?

 

It would help us to read aloud each morning and evening these words of Psalm 25:1-8:

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you;

let me not be humiliated, nor let my enemies triumph over me.

Let none who look to you be put to shame; let the treacherous be disappointed

in their schemes.

Show me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths.

Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation;

in you have I trusted all the day long. Remember, O Lord, your compassion and love,

for they are from everlasting.

Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions; remember me according to your love and for the sake of your goodness, O Lord.

Gracious and upright is the Lord; therefore, he teaches sinners in his way.

He guides the humble in doing right and teaches his way to the lowly.

 

This is the mind of Christ. This is the reversal to which John calls us all. This is the repentance to which Jesus calls us every day. To turn back to the ways and the paths of God: the ways of compassion, humility, love, selflessness, to look out for the needs and interests of others, not our own – not to consider being made in the image of God as something to be grasped and exploited, but to empty ourselves; to take the form of a servant in Christ; to give selflessly, and to be of one mind; to be committed to the common good: to have the mind of Christ.

 

Close your eyes. Take a few, deep, cleansing breaths. Where is your mind?

The Urban Elites vs The Expendables Proper 20 A

 

The Urban Elite vs The Expendables

“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”  [Matthew 20:1-16] Thus says “a landowner   ‘ to some grumbling day laborers. We want to believe this is reasonable. We want to think this landowner is generous. We want to think that this is how God might treat us – all as equals. That is, we want the landowner in the parable to be God. Yet, all the facts of the situation Jesus describes does not represent the kind of God Jonah describes: “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 3:10 – 4:11]

 

The facts of the story. The characters are a landowner, some unemployed day laborers, and a manager who works for the landowner. And, oh yes, the newly translated “daily wage.” The text, and previous translations, is more specific: it was a denarius. And of course, there is the audience to whom Jesus addresses this so-called parable.

 

In the previous chapter we are told there are large crowds following him wherever he goes. During which time some Pharisees ask him about divorce; the disciples try to fend off people bringing children to him to be blessed; Jesus rebukes the disciples, blesses the children and says, famously, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”; a rich young man who wants to know what he has to do to reap eternal life, to which Jesus replies “Get rid of everything and follow me”; the disciples, led by Peter, complain that this is too hardrd, and Jesus replies, “It will be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter the kingdom of God;” and finally he reminds them, “But many that are first will be last, and the last first.” It is then that Matthew has him tell this story. Presumably to clarify what he has just been talking about. And remember, there were no chapters or verses in the text, so this is a continuation of the story about the children and the rich young man and access to the kingdom of God and “eternal life.”

 

Under the Herodian kingship of Israel as a client state of the Roman Empire, cities ascended as economic centers, putting new pressures on the agrarian economy. As those who farmed and fished were beset with more taxes and tributes, that is protection money, the wealthier mercantile class in the cities bought up tracts of bankrupt farmland, reducing the farmers to tenant farmers or slaves. Many of whom were unemployed altogether. Our “landowner” would be recognized by the great crowds following Jesus as one of the Urban Elites who were now absentee landlords who would need extra laborers during planting and harvest seasons. Thus, employing these day-laborers for only one day at a time. They were considered Expendable. We can be sure many of them are listening to Jesus when he says, “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”

 

Despite having a property manager, our landowner personally goes out to hire some day laborers who are in the marketplace hoping to be hired and to earn enough to purchase a loaf of bread on way home. This is where the denarius comes in. Our Urban Elite offers a denarius to the first laborers he hires. It is impossible to reconstruct what a denarius was worth, but it is unlikely to be generous as the Urban Elites were known to depress wages, knowing they could hire an Expendable for as little a wage as possible. As he sees the need for more workers, he returns to the market place to hire more and more Expendables throughout the day, saying he will pay them “what is right.” The crowd is likely thinking, “Even a denarius is not ‘right,’ but we have to accept whatever it is these Urban Elites offer.” There is no negotiation. Take it or leave it.

 

At the end of the day, the landowner, who hired the Expendables at a pittance now asks his property manager to pay the day-laborers beginning with those hired last. He knows how those who worked all day are going to react when those hired last also get the denarius the early-birds were promised. The early-birds do complain. We have been in the hot sun all day long so we deserve more. Just the reaction our perverse Urban Elite landowner expected. It’s as if he was just waiting for the opportunity to let the grumblers have it. In fact, he intentionally has the last workers paid first so as to shame the ones who worked the longest! Just as the translation of denarius as “daily wage” fails us in understanding this story, so does the first word out of his mouth: “Friend.” The Greek here is not a friendly term. It intentionally calls attention to the difference in social status. At best it is something like, “Hey, buddy, what’s your complaint? We had an agreement to a denarius and that’s what you will get.” Adding, dismissively, “Take it and go. Get out of here!” Which to the crowd sounds like, “And don’t let me see you coming around here ever again.” They’ve all heard it before.

 

And many of them, and us, likely agree with the grumblers. We often like to think we deserve more – especially if we have worked harder and longer than others. I learned quickly in seminary when I once complained, like the grumblers, that I deserved a better grade on a paper because I had worked so hard, I was reminded by my professor that it did not matter how hard I had worked if I had not adequately answered the questions posed for the paper.

 

The Urban Elite takes it one step further when he proclaims, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” I believe this is called adding insult to injury. The firm belief of everyone back then, declared at the outset of Psalm 24, is that, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.” Those who ‘dwell therein’ are created in the image of God. Jesus came, in part, to remind us what God’s image is, and how our behavior ought to reflect that image in how we treat one another. The Bible is full of examples of how dangerous it is to say “I can do whatever I want with whatever I have.” There’s David, who has Bathsheba’s husband killed in battle so he can take her for himself. There’s Herod, king of the Jews, who is worried about the succession of his kingship has all the toddlers in and around Bethlehem killed to try to rid the world of Jesus. Or, the king in Matthew 22, who when invited guests say that they cannot come has their city burned to the ground. These examples suggest that “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me,” is wrong on both counts: It all belongs to the Lord, and we are to use it as the Lord desires, not to satisfy our selfish desires. God created no Expendables. They were the creation of the Urban Elite’s systems of economic exploitation and oppression.

 

The landowner does not represent God. Suggesting that Matthew’s opening, “The kingdom of heaven is like this…” is likely ironic or even sarcastic. “So, this is the kingdom of heaven with more of the same oppression and exploitation that we already experience today!” The story is meant to demonstrate the incongruity of the incoming reign of God with earthly systems of oppression that stake their claims of legitimacy on stories like this while pretending to be guardians of the values of this age. The truth is that not everyone ought to be treated the same. We all have different gifts and talents. And to buy us all as cheaply as possible cannot please God. The story means to reiterate: The first will be last, and the last will be first. That God is gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love. When will we be more like God? Amen.

To Heal Divisions: Forgive Proper 19A

 

To Heal Divisions: Forgive

Chapter 18 in Matthew addresses our tendency to be a divided people. Whether it is a divided society, or a divided church. The antidote appears to be forgiveness. Mutual forgiveness. Which Jesus highlights when teaching us how to pray which in Matthew 6:9-15 goes like this: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors…For if you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive others their offenses, neither will your Father forgive your offenses.”

 

It is in this context that Peter wants to know how often one must forgive another. Which, let’s be honest, is the kind of question that really means “how little forgiveness, or, how few times, can I get away with forgiving someone?” The Greek of Jesus’s answer is ambiguous as it can mean seventy-seven times, or, seven times seventy times. Which is to say, there is no limit. We are to just keep on trying and trying to forgive one another until it works. Until we truly behave as if we really mean to live are in the presence of God, God’s reign, God’s kingdom.

 

Matthew then has Jesus tell a story, which as it turns out seems simple, but in the end leaves it up to us to decide. A king decides to settle accounts with his doulos, translated “slaves.” Given the amount of debt owed by our particular doulos in Matthew 18:21-35, ten thousand talents, it seems he is among the highest level of the retainer class who provided bureaucratic services for the elites. Like the king who has succeeded the power struggles among equally ambitious elites so and is now “king.” He has won the most lucrative prize of all, control of the state or political apparatus. To maintain this power and protect himself from those who would usurp his power would require immense resources in the way of taxes, tribute payments (what in Chicago we would call “protection money”), and confiscating landholdings. Once one achieves kingship, the resources of the state were his to plunder for his gain. These agrarian kings stood at the apex of an authoritarian system, and believed themselves to be above the law, and beyond restraints.”

 

The retainer class like our doulos would head-up agencies, especially collection agencies, as operatives of the royal court. Below them were scribes, lawyers, and accountants who kept records of the king’s acquisitions and debts owed to him. At the lowest level were porters, jailers, and those who would run the most mundane errands of kingdom. All three levels owed their loyalty and existence to the king, and those in the top rung also shared in some of the wealth.

 

Our doulos-retainer is brought to the king. He owed the unimaginable amount of ten thousand talents and could not pay. No one could, really. The king ordered that the he, his wife and family, and all their possessions be sold to pay off the debt. The doulos-retainer falls to his knees and begs saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’  Despite the impossibility of raising such an enormous sum, the king has mercy on him, forgives the debt, and sets him free. He could be grateful, but instead the doulos-retainer runs across a man who owes him 100 denarii, an infinitesimally smaller amount than the ten thousand talents. He demands to be repaid. The man falls to his knees and begs, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ He appears to have no appreciation for the king’s mercy and he orders the man to be jailed until the debt is paid. Some of the king’s other retainers were alarmed and told the king what had happened. Furious and in a rage, the king says, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. Referring back to the teaching on prayer, Matthew has Jesus pronounce, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

 

Everything in the parable is beyond measure and beyond limit! Lots of hyperbole! There was no torture allowed in ancient Israel, other than not being forgiven by God. The doulos-retainer would simply have been demoted to the lowest level slave in the king’s apparatus. And even the lowest of those in the king’s bureaucracy had more power and status than those outside of it: peasants, artisans, tenant farmers, women and children. His offense threatened to disrupt the king’s entire bureaucratic system. But as it turns out, the king himself resorts back to type when the doulos-retainer makes just one misstep in failing to forgive his debtor. The king does not forgive him seventy-seven times. Not even two times. Together with his final pronouncement about torture, makes this a truly strange story.

 

By inviting people to a kingdom of God life, Jesus proclaimed a total reset to the status quo, and spent most of his time with those outside the bureaucratic system of people like our king; those who were victims of a brutal system that sought to consolidate all resources and wealth among the elite. Which is why the world awaited a messianic figure like Jesus to inaugurate a new age of forgiveness and love for all; especially the forgiveness of debt, which in Torah had been specified to occur every seven years. It seems, however, that the bureaucracy had internalized the system to such a degree that they, including the king, were irreducibly creatures of it. Retaliation and revenge remained the only behavior the elites could imagine to maintain their power. The dynamics of the system alone would force the cancellation of forgiveness of debts and any other policy that threatened the existence of the bureaucracy itself. Everyone, including us, the readers, are then ensnared in the experience of a kind of evil; not necessarily intentional evil, but the implicit, unanticipated ‘systemic evil’ of policies that ensured deep divisions within society.

 

The people with whom Jesus spends most of his time both hated and feared the retainers as the visible figures who carried out the policies of the elite, while they also prayed for someone or something that might force or inspire the elite to change their policies. The character of the kingdom Jesus announces is one of mutual forgiveness. This is the behavior required by the indwelling presence of God’s kingdom, and the presence God’s Son. The story seems to say that to receive forgiveness both enables and obligates one to offer forgiveness to others, not as an occasional exception to the rule but as a habit of life, and not without an awareness of the forgiveness one has received, but as a response to it. “For if you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you.”

 

The surprising answer to Peter’s question, the parable seems to say, is that the Christ the Messiah has come, but so far nothing has changed. And that it is up to people like us, as disciples of God’s Son to adopt a behavior of the forgiveness and love we have received from Christ; to respond with more forgiveness of others than we can possibly imagine. For it will take ten talents worth of forgiveness to begin to heal the divisions that plague society; for the entire system to change from one of retribution and revenge to forgiveness and love – love of neighbors and love of enemies. The parable seems to ask: How might we embrace love and forgiveness not as an occasional exception to the rule, but as a habit of life that can make the presence of God and God’s kingdom of mercy real for all of us?  For everyone? For ever and ever? Amen.

Who Are the Prophets? Proper 18A

 Who Are the Prophets?

I find myself reeling between grief and thanksgiving, as one after another men and women I and many have relied upon for so many years have moved on to their final resting place after lifetimes of inspiring the rest of us to be the best version of ourselves we can possibly be. In the span of a few days, Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, Cassandra Wilson, and Gloria Steinem have departed this mortal coil. A country singer, a writer, a pioneering jazz vocalist, and a leader of what has come to be called Second Stream Feminism. All of whom cared deeply about the community of humankind and our responsibilities to love and support one another. All of whom could be said to have fulfilled the prayer for this Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost: they all in their own ways resisted pride in themselves, and never forsook their own particular place among those who rely on the Lord’s mercy and a concern for what we used to call “the common good.” How lucky we have all been to have had these four prophets among us for so long.

 

One does not take calling them prophets lightly. As we read in Ezekiel 33:7-11, a prophet’s role is to sound the alarm, to call out truth to power, to warn the general populace that we are on a wrong path – paths not congruent with the Lord’s way, the Lord’s dream of “a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky” as that Twentieth Century prophet and mystic, Howard Thurman once described God’s creation. Wendell Berry, principally a farmer, and a writer of novels and poems, was one of the earliest in our time to declare the damage we have done to God’s “friendly world and sky” with the poison of fossil fuels damaging the very air we breathe, and warming the planet to dangerous temperatures causing more and more violent weather, all while pouring more fossil fuel poisons into the very ground that produces the food we eat in so-called “modern industrial farms.”

 

As the Lord instructs Ezekiel, if you do not warn the people, the impending disaster is on you. If you do warn the people, and they ignore your warnings, the impending disaster is on them. You must call them to turn away from their evil and destructive ways and return to the natural Wheel of Life: everything living is born, has a life, dies, decays, and is reborn from the natural elements of its decaying matter. This responsibility to warn the people and speak truth to the powers that capitalize on damaging the friendly earth and skies is the fundamental message in the 176 verses of Psalm 119, a psalm that finds 176 ways of urging us to return to the natural created order of things – a caution that progress does not always eventuate in good for the friendly earth, the friendly people, nor the friendly sky.

 

So it is that one finds Wendell Berry addressing the Garden Club of America, apologizing: “But I must add I am sorry for getting here / By sustained explosion through the air / Burning the world in fact to rise much higher / Than we should go.” He writes that “Burning the world to live in it is wrong /As wrong as to make war to get along / to falsify the land / By sciences of greed, or by demand / For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify / The body’s health and pleasure…” Berry goes on to urge us to “play it cool”: “Why not survive / By nature’s laws that still keep us alive? …By going back to school, this time in gardens / That burn no hotter than the summer day…Life of our life, the garden lives and sings. / The Wheel of Life, … work, sweat, and hunger / Bring food to the table, food to the cellar shelves. / A creature of the surface, like ourselves, / The garden lives by the immortal Wheel / That turns in place, year after year, to heal / It whole.” (Leavings, Poems, p.22)

 

Saint Paul, in the thirteenth chapter of his majestic Letter to the Church in Rome poses the pivotal question in all eras: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.” No matter how many prophets the Lord sends to us, however, we resist waking up to the fundamental challenges that face us – challenges of our own creation, whether we choose to admit it or not. It took a young woman, a journalist, to recognize the ongoing fate of women both at home and in the workplace, to eventually create a journal for women called Ms. At the time, many people did not know how to even pronounce that title for a woman of whom you are not sure is married or not. It speaks of a kind of new independence in a time when women could not have their own credit cards, and only 15 women served our country in Congress. Today, thanks very much for the vision of Gloria Steinem and others on the staff of that magazine, 150 women serve in the U.S. Congress today – against a rising tide of so-called Christian Nationalism that wishes to send them home to their respective kitchens and deprive them of the vote altogether. Dolly Parton, along with Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda picked up the vision Steinem put forth, and used a comedic movie to call attention to the plight of working women everywhere. And Cassandra Wilson, amidst her vast and eclectic repertoire, featured songs that also called for a new day for women, for outsiders of all kinds, and for us all.

 

All the while, Parton, Berry, Steinem and Wilson persistently called us to restore a kind of community that seeks to serve the Common Good, looking out for the most vulnerable people throughout the land. Which is really the focus of this week’s gospel. What might appear as a kind of “manual of church discipline and conflict resolution,” [Matthew 18:15-20] a look at its place in all of chapter 18 of Matthew’s Story of Jesus suggests a larger and broader concern. The chapter begins with Jesus raising up children as the ideal model of a follower of his call to live according to God’s statutes. One can easily believe that Jesus was deeply familiar with the psalms, and Psalm 119 in particular. He goes on, in his parable of a lost sheep, to remind his would-be followers that it is of utmost importance to go forth and find, what he calls in chapter 25, “the least of these, my sisters and brothers” – outcasts of all kinds including the hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned, and immigrants and strangers of all kinds. Even to the point of leaving 99 others to find and serve every last one!

 

Against this background, verses 15-20 really seem to say something like, “There is much more important things for us to be doing than petty arguments over who sits where, is the bread and wine real flesh and blood or symbolic, and when is it appropriate to cross oneself during the Holy Eucharist? Settle it all, and get back to the work of the kingdom – which is a prophetic announcement if there ever was one.

 

I vividly recall sitting in a once abandoned house on an old logging road in Maine, where my musical companions and I would often spend a night or two while on the road. There was no electricity, no running water, no telephone. Nights were dark and quiet. What better place to pick up a little book titled, A Continuous Harmony, in which I discovered the vision Wendell Berry has for us all, and for God’s green earth. That was over fifty years ago, and I have never turned back from consulting Berry’s wisdom regularly. The other night I picked up an early book of his poetry, The Wheel, and on page 2, in the second portion of a Requiem Poem dedicated to his deceased friend, Owen Flood, I found words that might now best characterize Wendell Berry himself, and all the other prophets who scream out loud throughout the centuries trying to turn the rest of us back in the right direction; God’s direction; Christ’s direction:

In the day of his work

when the grace of the world

was upon him, he made his way,

not turning back or looking aside,

light in his stride.

 

Now may the grace of death

be upon him, his spirit blessed

In deep song of the world

and the stars turning, the seasons

returning, and long rest.

Amen.

Peter & Dolly Proper 17A

 

Peter & Dolly

Last week, Peter was the star pupil in the disciple’s class. When asked by Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?” he replied, “You are the christos, the anointed, the messiah, the Son of the living God.” Right. Now do me a favor. Do not tell anyone. And that’s where we left it.

 

And now, the rest of the story. Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

 

Poor Peter. It’s been a rough week. First, the failure at walking on water, and now this. He gets the right answer, and is the only one to state who Jesus is. Suddenly, he is “Satan.” We need to remember, when all this was written down, Satan was understood as an employee of the God of Israel. To be “Satan” is to be a tester or an inspector – someone who checks you out to see if you are still on God’s program. And to “get behind” Jesus is simply another way of saying, “Follow me,” which of course is how this adventure began back when Peter was a fisherman.

 

Where Peter went wrong in Part II of the incident at Caesarea Philippi is that he could not accept Jesus as christos could possibly face mortal danger in Jerusalem. The christos, the anointed one, the messiah Peter and others expected would be a fierce warrior king like David, or an almighty judge, who would drive the Romans, the current Goliath, out of Israel once and for all. You’ve got his all wrong, he seems to be saying. Those things cannot happen to you. Set aside that it appears he missed the part about being raised on the third day altogether, Peter says in effect, No, you cannot be that person you are describing.

 

It is safe to say, Jesus knows who he is, and knows exactly what he will face once inside the walls of the City of Shalom, Jerusalem. This is where I suggest Dolly Rebecca Parton comes in. She had tons of talent as a song writer, singer, and entertainer. She was a smart and even shrewd businesswoman. She could do concerts, movies, stage, and television. But her most important quality of all was her intention to accept everyone for who they are. In interview after interview, she would say something like, “We are here to love one another, not judge one another. Judging others is God’s business, not ours. And sure enough, I am not at all equipped to do God’s business. But I can love my neighbor – all neighbors. As far as I am concerned, if you are straight, you are straight. If you are gay you are gay. If you are trans, you are trans. And I accept that, and let’s all get together and make the world a better place for all God’s people.”

 

And it turns out, she not only talked the talk, she walked the walk. She knew what it was like to grow up in a remote town in Appalachia, and saw just how illiteracy could hold people back, like her own father, who could neither read or write. Rather than make money writing a book about the challenges of growing up in Appalachia, she created a nation-wide and world-wide program to send age-appropriate books to children every month from birth to age five so that when they went to school they were prepared to learn. When fellow entertainers and the U.S. government stayed away from the HIV-AIDs epidemic, Dolly was one of the first to step forward and support the LGBT community and raise money to help find medical interventions for them. She stood up for marriage equality; for better working conditions for women at work; took the royalties from one of her first songs made a world-wide hit by Whitney Houston, I Will Always Love You, and invested the millions of dollars in the African-American community in Nashville as a memorial to Whitney Houston’s name. And most famously, when she got wind that drag-queens were holding contests to see who could most look and act like Dolly Parton, rather than try to put a stop to it, she anonymously entered one such contest. And lost! She found it hilarious that there were contestants who somehow looked and acted more like her than she did herself! And when COVID-19 struck, she contributed one million dollars to the development and trials of the Moderna vaccine which went on to save millions of lives. I submit, this is what it means to carry her cross and follow Jesus.

 

All because she would wake up early every morning, and the first thing she would do is ask God, “Lord, what do you want me to do today?” Over and over again, it turned out that God wanted her to help people to be who God made them to be. Because long before her first appearance at the Grand Old Opry at age 13, where she got three standing ovations, she grew up singing in church, and she, unlike Peter, knew exactly who Jesus was and what it means to follow him.

 

Jesus was all about accepting people for who they are and what they are. Jesus was all about inclusion, including everybody no matter what. Dolly would tell others, all others: There’s never been a better you, and there will never be another person just like you. And you’re the only one who is capable no matter where you’re from of becoming whatever version of yourself you want to be. And you don’t need to be ashamed of it, even if others make fun of you, it does not have to be embarrassing if you don’t let it be. That part’s up to you. It takes a lot of bravery to totally be who you want to be to the world.

 

Which is exactly what Peter gets wrong. Jesus knows who he is and what he has to do. And he knows there will be opposition from all fronts in Jerusalem. It took a lot of bravery to walk from Galilee to Jerusalem, meeting opposition all along the way. Peter could not accept that, but it turns out Jesus knew what it meant to be God’s anointed, God’s Son, God’s beloved. And in her own way, so did Dolly Rebecca Parton.

 

Is it a coincidence that Dolly died just as we are given this confrontation between Peter and Jesus at Caesarea Philippi? We will never know for sure. Is it a coincidence that our opening prayer asks God: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; the very week that we learn the degree to which Dolly Rebecca Parton was doing all of that without telling anyone but the people she was helping day in and day out? We will never know. What we do know that is that she loved God’s name, had a deep understanding of true religion, and that her Jesus brought forth in her good works. So many that we may never know the full reach of her care for all sorts and conditions of humankind. She knew what it meant to pick up her cross and follow Jesus.

 

Scripture tells us that Peter continued to struggle with what it means to accept and include others – all others, no exceptions. This episode at Caesarea Philippi, and the events of the past week, suggest that when it comes to honoring the invitation to follow Jesus, it is better to be a Dolly than a Peter. And that in doing so, life becomes much more meaningful, and as Dolly showed us year after year, a whole lot more fun! Amen.