Sunday, September 25, 2011

Sunday September 25

nb: with a big shout-out to Kevin over at The Word Proclaimed. I use a story he tells as a example today. I remembered hearing the original sermon when he preached it. If you want to learn from a master, go check him out.

So, over the past year or so, you’ve probably gotten used to me asking the question during my messages each Sunday – what do you think about the gospel lesson that is read?

And today, Jesus asks the same question of the educated Pharisees – what do you think? They’ve been pestering him with questions, trying to trick or trap him into committing blasphemy by equating himself with God, or saying that he’s the messiah – really, they’ll take anything as an admission of guilt. The thing is, they know the right answers to their questions.

One of the problems of the Pharisees is that they took God’s truth and boiled it down to a series of legalistic requirements. Have a religious question? They have an answer to it. Have a question that stretches the boundaries of what they know is their good doctrine? Not happening. The problem isn’t their doctrine, they believe – in that case, the problem is asking a question that doesn’t fit the answers they have.

They want to know by what authority Jesus does the things he does. His way of interacting – or acting – with God is foreign to their way of thinking. So they want to trap him outright in an admission that he is wrong.

So Jesus asks them a question designed to make them think – did John’s baptism come from heaven, or was it of human origin? We’re given a glimpse into their thought process – if we say, ‘from heaven,’ he’ll say, then why don’t you believe him; but if we say ‘of human origin,’ this crowd will tear us apart because they believed he was a prophet”.

So, they’re pretty shrewd thinkers. Politically astute, we might say. But they’re unwilling to open their thinking to something that might change their minds about what they believe. But Jesus comes to shake their nicely laid-out faith to its foundations.

I’ve said before that faith isn’t about getting the right answers, but about learning good questions. Jesus is a master question-asker, and his questions stretch the simple answers that the Pharisees and the crowd have come to believe.

In the end, the crowd turns on him, enraged that his questions expose their faith for what it is – hollow dogma, memorized and regulated. It’s a faith that brings great comfort, and self-satisfaction in no small measure, but it can also leave people feeling empty.

And the empty tomb raises still more questions.

A friend of mine tells a story about his time as a pastor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The week after the US invaded Iraq, a local TV station sent a reporter to his church, looking for a faith-related sound bite for the six o’clock news. My friends’ church had been holding weekly prayer services in the weeks leading up to the war and some reporters had already done pieces on the church.

But this time was different. The reporter who came was known for his confrontational interview style. And as my friend tells the story, it was clear he had an axe to grind.

As my friend tells it, the reporter

“knew that I and most of the congregation were opposed to the war and he tried to get me to say on camera that any Christian who supported the war was going to hell. Saying that high profile Christians were destined for damnation would have sounded great on TV.

I tried to convince him that reconciliation was at the heart of the Christian faith and that was one of the reasons why I opposed the invasion of Iraq. He kept needling me, pushing me, asking leading questions. Frustrated, he turned the question around on me and snapped,

“Where then, is this ‘reconciling God,’ when children are being maimed, lives destroyed, innocent people killed, all in the name of so-called freedom?”

I fumbled around for words, very aware that any bonehead comment I’d make would be broadcast across the country.

The only response I could think of was, “God is present when people suffer unjustly. When a child is maimed, God is maimed; when innocent people die, God shares their death.”

As my friend admitted, he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his answer. And from the disappointed look on the reporter’s face, neither was he. While my friend had offered as thought-out a response as he could in a short period of time, a quick, hard-and-fast condemnation would have made a much better soundbite.

Usually, we only think as much as is needed to form an opinion about something – and then we stop. As with the Pharisees, though, Jesus challenges us on that. So he goes on to tell the story of two brothers.

A fathers asks his two sons to go to work. The first son says ‘no,’ but then goes to the fields. The second son said, “sure I will!” and then didn’t go. Which one did the will of his father?

Now, before you give the short answer, think a little about it. You have two children: you ask them both to do something. One says ‘no’ outright; the other says ‘absolutely!’. You don’t stick around to see the results. Who is doing your will?

What we think about something influences what we do – regardless of what we say. The first son answered honestly when his father asked him to go and work in the vineyard: he didn’t want to. But he changed his thinking and went to work that day. The second son answered dishonestly – he told his father, “yes, I’ll do it!” but then didn’t. His actions showed what he was thinking all along.

Where does our thinking lead us as Christians? Does it stop at the altar: “I’m righteous, so I’m good. I don’t have to change anything, because I’m better than other people”? Or does it extend out into the good Lord’s vineyard – “all right, I have this tremendous gift of salvation from Jesus. What do I do with it now – how do I live in ways that show other people that they can have the same gift?”

The problem with fundamentalism of any persuasion is that it proclaims thinking to be the enemy – fundamentalism accepts no truth other than a narrowly defined legalism. On the opposite end of the spectrum there are people who label themselves as “free thinkers”, who reject religion outright usually in favour of something of their own devising.

What both groups have in common is that they’re the people who urge you to ‘have an open mind’ when confronted with some of their ideas.

But they don’t really want you to have an open mind – they want you to have an empty one - that they can fill with their own ideas.

So God doesn’t call us to give lip service to a prayer and then go home Sunday afternoon to our comfortable chair. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

So we strive to do the work of God who is with us – sharing the message of the gift of the kingdom of God, showing the world how we live – not as people who are burdened and defined by dogma or doctrine, but as a living, thinking people serving a living, thinking God. The doctrine that we learn in Sunday school, confirmation, and through preaching isn’t intended to be the stuff you have faith in; its purpose is to help you define what you believe, and help you to find clearer ways to live out your faith.

And why is it so important that God calls us to be ‘thinking’ people?

Look around you. It’s a nice contrast to the rest of the world.

Let the people of God say amen.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

September 18

nb: with a shoutout to David Lose, and an apology to Daniel Erlander for appropriating the idea of God's "manna way."

Think about this question for a bit: the parable of the workers in the vineyard is about ____________________?

There’s lots of good things we can say about it: it’s about love, about God’s fairness, God’s mercy. There are probably as many different interpretations as there are people here today. here are a couple of things that it’s not about: the parable is not about being just, or fair, or working hard for a living and reaping the rewards of a good life.

Some deeply cynical part of me points out that this parable is also about the workers who are in the vineyard. If the kingdom of heaven is like the landowner, then the landowner has to continually deal with people who are a bunch of whiners. So, in another way, the parable of the workers in the vineyard is a story about how we usually feel that we could do a better (or at least more fair) job of running the universe than God can.

On some level that’s true, isn’t it? It was true for the Israelites: they are brought out of slavery – and bear in mind that slavery for the Israelites was something they’d chosen to avoid a famine; it was only after a Pharoah arose who didn’t know Joseph that it became a burden to them. They’d seen the parting of the sea, the great pillar of fire that led them by night, and the cloud by day. They were familiar; intimately familiar with the works of God.

Out in the wilderness, though, it was something else entirely. Out of the familiar confines of Egypt, there arose some problems with management: “you have brought us into this wilderness to kill us with hunger!” What is Moses doing, what is God doing that they are now in the wilderness, with little food?

We know how God provides for the Israelites: he sends quails at night and bread in the morning. This bread, called manna, covers the ground and the Israelites are to take what they need for the day, and nothing more – except on the sixth day, when they are told to gather enough to last them for the Sabbath.

There’s another interesting human factor to the story, as well: it’s what the Israelites call the stuff on the ground: manna. The word manna means…well, it means what they say, the same thing that your children, and mine, say when confronted with the intolerable reality of a Brussels sprout for the first time: “What is this?”

“What is this that you’re trying to feed us?”

“What is this that God is doing?”

“What is this stuff that we’re given?”

What is this? is our reaction to God’s grace in our lives. It doesn’t look like we think it should. It certainly isn’t fair – partly because our gratitude to God’s presence in our lives is always tainted with self-interest: what do we get from God in exchange for being ‘good’ people? But what God gives, thought unexpected, is good, and it is gift, all the same.

The secret of manna is that God gives out what everybody needs – and only what we need. You can’t ‘store up’ God’s grace; you can share it with others, but not store it up. That’s God’s manna way – that grace is more than just a simple prayer before a meal.

We can live out a manna way of our own – because when we know that grace isn’t just a simple prayer; it becomes a way to live.

Yet that way is kind of hard. The manna way doesn’t make sense in our lives – I’ve worked as a manager, and I know that many of you own your own businesses and farms. Look at the parable of the owner of the vineyard: does that make sense?

In a word, no. It makes us ask, what is this? All over again.

But as I often ask you: who are you in this parable? Are you the landowner? (if you think you are, you may have delusions of grandeur).

Are you among the first hired? Or the middle, or the last? Do we really have a ‘heirarchy’ of believers in the faith? I sometimes think we do – certainly, there seems a certain amount of respect accorded to people who have lived in the faith for longer.

Let me share with you something that all those workers have in common, though. Why are they in the marketplace at all? They are there because they are the dregs of their society. They are the people who do not have regular work, do not have a business of their own or a fishing boat, or a plot of land to farm. They are the desperate, the destitute, and maybe even the damned.

And the landowner goes out looking for them. Four times during the day, the landowner goes out seeking them. He doesn’t ask for applications, doesn’t check references, doesn’t interview and then do callbacks. He’s looking for labourers for his vineyard, and not just anyone will do – he needs everyone.

But at the end of the day, he calls those hired last – those who had given up all hope of hire, but who remained because they had literally no where else to go – and gives them the usual daily wage. And those hired first see it, and begin to do some mental arithmetic. This could be the greatest payday they’ve ever seen.

And they receive the exact same pay. One day’s wage. Not a weeks; nor a months; nor a lifetimes; but one day’s wage. And they take it, not as grace, but as insult. Instead of rejoicing at the poor who were helped on that day, they assigned a worth to each group, and they were at the top of the heap.

And as preacher David Lose points out,

Jesus tells [this parable] to illustrate the hardness of heart with which those who deemed themselves righteous considered those who by almost any standards were not, begrudging them the grace and mercy of God and the attention of God's Son. But there's also an existential dimension that speaks as truly to our own day, time, and lives as it ever did to Jesus' original audience. Because this parable lays before each and all of us a choice as clear as can be. When we look at our lives, do we count our blessings or our misfortunes? Do we pay attention to the areas of plenty in our lives or what we perceive we lack? Do we live by gratitude or envy? Do we look to others in solidarity and compassion or see them only as competition? The killer thing about this choice is that it really is a choice as unavoidable as it is simple -- you just can't be grateful and envious at the same time. So which is it going to be?

Jesus is eventually killed precisely because he offers this choice. That is, Jesus is crucified not just because he proclaimed that the grace, and mercy of God was available to all, even to those deemed so incredibly unworthy, but also because his declaration revealed the hardness of heart, the stone-cold entrenchment of spirit, that is part and parcel of the human condition. His boundary-breaking generosity revealed the envy and competitiveness of those in power. His vision of another way of being in the world -- he called it the kingdom of God -- betrayed the lie told by the protectors of the status quo that theirs was the only way. Shamed by such a vision, and unable to embrace it, they put the visionary to death.

Yet God’s manna way continued, as the darkness of death faded to reveal a new bread from heaven broken for all people; fruit of the vine that brings to all people new and everlasting life.

Today is our stewardship Sunday – and maybe I think we need to rename it. In fact, I’m going to suggest it right now: instead of calling this stewardship Sunday, let’s call it ‘celebration Sunday’. Let’s call it “grace Sunday;” let’s call it “manna Sunday.” This is a day when we celebrate that we, who are hired last, who journey through the wilderness, we who are not worthy of the smallest tidbit of the grace of God, are given ALL.

This day is not a day when I’m going to flog you to open your wallets and “give”. This is not a day when we’re going to put a chart and graph, and say “this is where we need to be.” This is not the day when I raise up the ministries of the congregation and ask you to staff them.

I’m not going to do that because I already see your hearts open, and giving. I’m not going to do that because I know that when I tell you at the end of the service to “go in peace and serve the Lord” that you DO that; that you go out into the vineyard and work from sunup to dusk.

I want you to know that this is the morning we wake up and find God’s grace scattered on the ground so that we can live. I want you to celebrate God’s faithfulness and gifts to this community – and I ask you to celebrate the future we share together, because of that faithfulness and gift.

Today we will talk about a new initiative for our congregation’s future; we’ll talk about our hopes and dreams and visions. Most of all, today I want you to talk about you; we have shared in our labours together, and now we rejoice at the end of the day.

And for anyone who doubts that the Church lives like this parable of the workers in the vineyard, that the Church models the landowner who welcomes every labourer and gives to them freely, remember this: even if this is your first day in our home – or even if this is your fifty thousandth – you are welcome to join our celebration.

God has sought you out; you have been brought home. Join us, celebrate with us the great miracle of God’s manna way: that grace isn’t just a simple prayer before meal; that it isn’t a philosophical condition; that it isn’t a theological concept –

Brothers and sisters, grace is a way to live. Be at peace, for you serve the Lord and your reward is certain. Go out and find those who are desperately seeking; look for those who have given up hope. Bring them into the Lord’s vineyard and know that they, too, will receive all that they hope for – and just what they need.

Let the people of God say amen.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

September 4 - Pentecost 12A

Did you know that, here in the church, we practice ‘tough love?’ It’s true! Of course, tough love looks different from different perspectives.

I have a friend who left a church that practiced ‘tough love’ – if you did something that the pastor and church leadership thought was wrong, you got a visit from them. At that visit, you were told that you had to repent, but that you were going to be shunned from the community for at least some suitable amount of time before you could come back to church some Sunday and in front of the entire congregation confess the sin that had been pointed out to you and symbolically ask the forgiveness of Jesus. The pastor and elders of the church would confer, and after some uncomfortable silence would usually let you back in, noting at the same time that they were being lenient – lenient -- out of Christian love.

That was their tough love. But is that really the love that Paul talks about? Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” As Paul writes – and he echoes the words of Jesus and other, even more well-respected Jewish rabbis – that the commandments are summed up in the words “love your neighbour as yourself.”

And that seems really, really, easy. In fact, some aspect of that is usually cited by people who describe themselves as ‘I’m-not-religious-I’m-spiritual’. If we’re not religious, but we’re spiritual, we can tell ourselves that ‘I love my neighbour as myself, so I must be good, then.” And honestly, that seems a lot easier of a way to live. It’s easier simply because then I can choose who my neighbour is.

But the difference between being spiritual and being religious is that when your are religious, you don’t get to pick and chose things based on how uncomfortable they make you.

You may find your neighbour in the homeless woman who sits outside of Safeway and asks for change,

You may find your neighbour in the person of little education but strong opinion who comes to talk with you because you’re “good church-going folk.”

You may find your neighbour in the young unmarried couple next door when they come over to ask if they can borrow some milk. They need to borrow the milk because he got laid off because of a DUI (which was SO not his fault), and they can’t get to the store to buy food for their kids. They become your neighbour when you load them down with food from your pantry, and grit your teeth instead of pointing out the huge party they had last week.

When you’re Christian, your neighbours choose you. And then you find what ‘tough love’ is really about.

It’s about loving when you really don’t want to. And finding that love and forgiveness are really, really, hard pills to swallow.

Today Jesus talks about what to do when your brother or sister ‘sins’ against you. It’s interesting that Jesus uses that word; in Greek, the word means “to miss the mark.” So, when someone else ‘misses the mark’ with you, Jesus provides a means of recourse. At first reading, it seems to be the kind of ‘tough love’ that we understand.

But think very carefully about what Jesus is actually saying in this text when he says’ “let such a one be to you as a tax collector and a Gentile”.

In classes at Seminary, I was always up for a good argument – I mean, class discussion. If a professor wanted someone to throw something out for the class to chew on, I was often the first to open my mouth.

One day, we were talking about this text, and how we are provided with this model in Matthew 18. I tossed out the example of the church that my friend attended, and then said that, apparently, it was after all ‘biblically sound.”

And my professor looked at me and said, “really? That’s biblically sound? Then answer me this: who wrote this gospel?”

And I said, “Matthew.”

And she said back to me, “and what did he do?”

I said: “he was a disciple.” “And what was his profession?” “He was…a tax collector.”

And she reminded me of the gospel story of a few weeks ago, of the woman who came to beg Jesus that her daughter would be healed. “Where was she from?” my teacher asked. And the light slowly dawned as I said, “she was a gentile.”

That was the beginning of my realization that ‘bible study’ meant more than just memorizing dogmatic answers to tradition texts. ‘Bible study’ means letting the text speak to its own understanding, not the meaning we want.

Jesus says, ‘and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Bring them into your community and love them. Bind them to the love of God in Christ, and they will be bound in heaven. Loose them, and you will lose them.

Now that’s ‘tough love’.

I’ve said before that I think there was unity in the church for maybe fifteen minutes at the foot of the cross. Conflict is natural in any situation where culture, values, and mixed experiences are present, and Jesus knew that. There are a couple of stories in the gospels that begin “now the disciples argued among themselves…”

If you live by the law, your entire life will be lost, because the Law is hungry: it’s easy, really easy, to point out the flaws and sins of everyone around you. You can, in fact, make a church around that kind of idea. But Paul reminds us to live by love: love that poured out for us in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Being Christian means acknowledging that Christ died for your sins: but honestly being Lutheran means admitting you drove the nails in, while at the same time Christ says to you: Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.

Tough love is not destroying someone utterly so that we can feel righteous in ourselves.

Tough love means loving the unlovable – and maybe even admitting that that includes ourselves. Paul reminds us, “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers,” possibly because when we come to understand and know the love that Christ has for us we can come to understand a bit better what it means to both be saved from and saved for.

Saved from death, and sin.

Freed for love, for community – because Jesus never, ever, uses an example of just one person. Where two or three are gathered, there will always be conflict. Yet it’s funny that it’s in this place that Jesus also promises us, “I am with you.”

Maybe that’s because Jesus knows that we will always sin – we will always ‘miss the mark’. We will always fall short as a community because, well, we’re not Jesus – but we bear his name to the world, despite our failing, despite our sins. And then, together, we move forward as a community of two, or three, or thirty, or three hundred, knowing that as we are gathered in the name of Jesus Christ here is here among us, that we owe each other nothing, other than to love one another, as Christ first loved us.

And there is nothing that can ever separate us from that love.

Let the people of God say ‘amen.’