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.