Homilies for Pentecost 18 - 21

18th Sunday after Pentecost

27 September 2015

Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa

If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire! Mark 9:43

The Exorcist

Millstones, lopped off hands and feet, gouged out eyes, unquenchable fire, worms in hell! Episcopal clergy plan their travel schedules with texts like today’s in mind. Leaving us to ask: what moved Jesus to these angry and violent words?

There is the home truth that there can be terrible choices, where only an unthinkable loss saves you. Aron Ralston, climbing in the Utah canyon lands, dislodges a boulder that pins his arm. Five days later, still trapped in a crevice, dehydrated and delirious, he hacks off his arm with a dull three-inch jackknife and, one-armed, climbs to safety. Or the Calcutta lepers Dominique LaPierre describes in City of Joy, eagerly lining up on the sidewalk for visiting surgeons to amputate their diseased limbs. And of course there’s Hedwig, spectacularly incarnated by Aar0n DeBoer last summer, who sings, “to be free, you must give up a part of yourself.” But why would Jesus, responding to John’s report about shutting down a competing exorcist, bring this up?

Versions of something at least called Christianity demand that we do whatever it takes to become acceptable to God, metaphorically cutting and gouging sins so we can come to Jesus. I once heard missionaries to the Amazon proudly spell out the list of things they required the indigenous people to give up—cigarettes, liquor, swearing, illicit sex and so

on—before they could come to Christ. It sounds like: before Jesus can save you, you have to prove that you do not need to be saved. It sounds like: keep doing that, and you go to hell; give it up, and heaven is the reward. So such for, “I came to call the sick, not the healthy.” So much for, “Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden.” If the so-called good news is that Jesus welcomes you but only after you clean up our act, lose the bad baggage, and do a bit of moral cutting and pruning, then I think I’d go along with Hedwig when her friend asks her if she has accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and savior. She says, “No, but I love his work.” Or, to get real, tell me that God will save me from my sins just as soon as I rid myself of my fear, anger, pride, envy and selfishness and I will tell you thanks…for nothing.

To make sense of Jesus’ shocking warning we need, I think, to take a look at the particulars of Mark’s larger narrative, keeping in mind that conclusions must be tentative, since the other gospels locate some of the things Jesus says here in other places. Keeping in mind too—as someone helpfully reminded us last week—that an interpretation might tell us more about the interpreter than about the text.

Caveats made, I want first to point out what goes on earlier in the chapter. Jesus−this is back at verse 14−finds a crowd gathered where some of his disciples are arguing with some scribes. We don’t know exactly what they are arguing about, but the situation is that there is a child possessed by a demon and that Jesus’ disciples have been unable to exorcise him. Knowing what’s ahead—in today’s lesson—a reasonable guess is that it’s about whether they should find someone else to try to do the exorcism, an option the disciples resist. When Jesus finds out what the argument is about, he is angry: “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you?!” (9:19). He has the possessed boy brought to him and the demon convulses him, throwing him to the ground where he rolls around, foaming at the mouth. Jesus orders the demon out; it leaves and the child is saved.

Jesus and the disciples move on through Galilee to Capernaum. When they arrive Jesus asks them what they were arguing about on the way. They are afraid to answer: they were arguing about which of them is the greatest: who is going to get the most esteemed positions when Jesus comes into his own as Israel’s messiah and king. The Romans and their allies in Jerusalem will get what’s coming to them, and Jesus will rule with his disciples at his side. This is particularly outrageous now, because Jesus has just been explaining what lies ahead for him: humiliation and death. Not wanting to hear this, they have not heard it. Their eyes are fixed on the power and the glory they think they are assured by their proximity to Jesus. No doubt, it was a heady thing: being in the entourage of the great man, the miracle worker, the healer. The adoring crowds. The excitement, the exhilaration of curing the sick and defeating the demons, of being confidantes of Jesus. They can’t imagine giving that up. They want no part in a coming cross.

We may suspect that the appalling scene from earlier in the chapter, the helpless child, tortured by the demon, and the vain and stupid disciples, concerned about who gets the credit, rather than about saving the child, is still vivid in Jesus’ mind. But if Jesus is angry, he does not show it yet. Instead, he tries to show them who he is, why he is there, why he has called them. He takes a child in his arms and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (9:17). Or: if you want to be with me, tomshare in who I am, this is what you have to care about, not your vain dreams of fame and fortune, not an awesome divine confirmation of your righteousness, but this helpless child who has only need, nothing the world values.

All this sets the stage for what happens next, where today’s lesson begins. John reports, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us” (9:38). John calls Jesus teacher, but what has Jesus succeeded in teaching him? Not much. Here, as earlier in the chapter, what’s all too clear is that what the disciples care about is not the people who so desperately need Jesus’ help, but who gets the credit. Is someone left at the demons’ mercy because they kept someone outside their circle from healing him? Maybe a tormented child, like the one they failed to heal before? Like the child Jesus has just dandled in front of them? All that matters to them is who gets to do the healing, not whether the victim is delivered. More important to shut down the competition than to deliver the lost and suffering people Jesus loves. This is of a piece with arguing about who should get to save the possessed boy, and about who will be greatest in the coming kingdom. What counts for them is their status, not what Jesus cares about, not the Jesus they are so proud to be seen with.

So I think Jesus is frustrated, indeed angry, and his harsh words reflect this. If anyone helps s0meone in need in my name; even if it’s just to give him a drink of water, just get out of the way! “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea!” (9:42). The “little ones” suggests that Jesus still has the image of those powerless children in mind, the ones the disciples could not care less about. The image of the stumbling block comes, apparently, from Leviticus, where, along with other admonitions about how not to treat the vulnerable, e.g., not to keep for yourself a laborer’s day wages until the next day, there is the command not to revile the deaf or to put a stumbling block before the blind (19:14). That’s a nasty trick: putting a stone building block in a blind man’s path so you get a good laugh. How low can you get? Better to be thrown into the sea attached to a much larger chunk of rock than to be the kind of person who would do that. If that is what you want to be, you might as well sink out of sight forever. Jesus lets John and the disciples know: that’s what you guys are like! You think you’re doing your vital part in God’s long-awaited deliverance of Israel, but really you’re blocking the way with your foolish selfishness.

And it is about what they are making of themselves, not about some sort of divine retribution. The warning shifts from them causing others to stumble to them making themselves stumble. They imagine that they are following Jesus, but they are making their own obstacles, tripping themselves up so they can’t get where he is going. To follow him means accepting terrible losses, giving up exactly what you think you cannot, and should not, give up. For them, it is the longed for vindication of oppressed Israel that they must relinquish. But better, Jesus says, to follow him maimed, lame, and half blind, having painfully rid yourself of exactly what seems crucial. For the disciples, giving up the current prestige and anticipated glory of God’s defeat of Israel’s enemies to make way for whatever incomprehensible sacrifice Jesus darkly hints at seemed as absurd and as painful as the cutting off of hands and feet, as the gouging out of eyes.

Jesus warns that to go on as they are is the way to death, to hell. The Greek term is Gehenna, literally the valley outside Jerusalem. Traditionally the cursed ground where the ancient worshipers of Baal and Moloch sacrificed their children. It’s the stinking, ever-smoldering dump, where the city’s trash and garbage, the maggoty carcasses of dead animals, wind up. The place of rejection, where things that have become worthless are thrown, where things once living decay. This is Jesus’ vivid picture of the path his disciples are choosing.

In Mark’s portrayal, Jesus’ friends, his disciples, come off worse than his enemies. The Pharisees’ objection to Jesus healing on the Sabbath is bad enough; they care more about keeping the law than the human beings who need healing, but at least they think it’s God honor they are defending. Sometimes it’s hard to see in Jesus’ disciples much of a concern for anything other than themselves. Indeed, even after Jesus’ angry words, it’s not long before they’re at it again: by the next chapter (10:35-37), right after another attempt on Jesus’ part to foretell his suffering and death, James and John, far from cutting off even a small bit of their ambition, are asking Jesus to promise that when he is glorified, they will get to sit at his right and left hand. And in the same chapter (10:13), the disciples try to keep parents from bringing their little children to Jesus to be blessed. Once again, Jesus sees that the disciples have no clue about what the coming of God’s kingdom means. There, on the far side of the cross and resurrection, Jesus’ disciples are a lost cause.

This might look like bad news. If the disciples, despite being on intimate terms with Jesus in the flesh, managed to be just about completely oblivious to what he was about, what are our chances? I assume that none of us harbor visions of theocratic power, but that’s no guarantee that when we think we’re doing God’s work in this world,

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we’re not really getting in his way, and that what seems most important to us is precisely what we most need to lose, if we are to get free and find the life he offers.

One of my all-time favorite literary characters is Mrs. Turpin, in Flannery O’Connor’s story, “Revelation.” Mrs. Turpin is a fine southern woman, a good Christian who takes great care to judge everyone properly, including herself. She is grateful to find that she is in God’s good graces although others, unfortunately, are not. Then she starts to learn her hard lesson. As Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “The thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side (Pastrix, p. 57). Mrs. Turpin’s revelation begins when a lunatic attacks her and hisses, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog!” Someone who works for her hears about it; he express mock astonishment: “Jesus [is] satisfied with her!” But Mrs. Turpin knows it’s not true, but she cannot grasp why. Indignant, she puts the question to God: “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her answer is a vision, the consummation of her revelation:

She saw…a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black[s …] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people she recognized as like herself…She leaned forward to observe them close. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

Mrs. Turpin is comical, but not so comical that we can’t see ourselves in her. To see ourselves as salvageable by grace alone, saved by the crucified God who saves us despite, not because of, whatever we think makes us worthy. Acknowledging that what seems our best may well in the end be what must be burned or cut away. Like the disciples’ commitment to the messiah’s restoration of Israel. Like Mrs. Turpin’s piety. Whatever the demons that haunt us, recognized or not, we can only rely on Jesus to cast them out. And we trust that not even when we are most sure of ourselves, we will be unable to make this exorcist leave us be. I don’t know what Jesus on the cross can mean other than that God will give us all the space we need to do our worst, to find our way to whatever deaths and hells we can devise, thinking, all the while, that we are doing good. And that even then, this God will not abandon us, but will take our worst and make it the means to our salvation.

Amen.

18th Sunday After Pentecost

26 September 1999

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Matthew 21.28-32

Down and Out with Jesus of Nazareth

When I was a boy the kids across the street had the deluxe model Sears Roebuck chemistry set. I never had one, probably because my father, being a chemist, knew better than to trust me with one. My friends and I spent hours messing around in their basement, trying to manufacture explosives and to synthesize something called red fuming nitric acid because it, according to the Guinness Book of World records, is the world’s most foul smelling compound. At the time that rendered the desirability of having some self-evident. Sometimes we speculated about things we had heard of only by way of apocryphal schoolboy lore. One of them was universal acid. The idea of universal acid is that it’s an acid that can dissolve anything. No matter what sort of container you put it in - lead, diamond, kryptonite - it eats right through it. Nothing even momentarily resists its corrosive power. This also sounded like wonderful stuff to have, though we couldn’t figure out where we’d keep it.

Today’s parable, Jesus’ story of the two brothers, is about universal acid. If Jesus is right, God’s grace is a kind of universal acid. It eats right through any scheme we come up with to contain it. It dissolves every attempt to turn it into a way of keeping score, of saying who’s worthy and who isn’t; it disintegrates all the systems we devise for counting ourselves as worthy of God’s approval and others as unworthy.

By the time we arrive at the 21st chapter of Matthew’s gospel, we’ve seen it all. In the eyes of the religious leaders, the chief priests, the elders, the Pharisees and the scribes, Jesus has been getting away with murder. He has gotten mixed up with everyone who’s on the outs with God, with just about every kind of person on the wrong side of the law. If there’s someone who is tainted or second rate or outcast or plain bad, Jesus has managed to hook up with them: lepers, children, epileptics, the blind and the lame, the demon possessed and the hungry, the poor and the paralyzed, foreigners, tax collectors and prostitutes, a hemorrhaging woman, the deaf and even the dead, everyone unclean, ritually or literally. Those who patently don’t measure up to God’s exacting standards are just the sort of person this Jesus wants to be with. Jesus is down there, living it up with the down and out. For the religious authorities keeping tabs on this disreputable troublemaker from Nazareth, being in God’s good graces is all about drawing lines and staying on the right side, of keeping a sharp eye on who’s in and whose out, who’s a Jew not a dirty gentile, who’s a diligent keeper of the law and who’s one of the ignorant and unwashed mob. In their world, it’s guilt by association: Jesus is as bad as these characters he spends his time with; he is unclean, a sinner.

Things soon get ugly. The chief priests and elders are out to trap Jesus; they question him, hoping to catch him saying something so incriminating that they can put him away. But Jesus asks them a question. It’s one with an obvious answer: which of the two sons did the will of his father, the one who said he’d obey but then reneged, or the one who refused to obey but then repented? Of course they say it’s the one who really obeyed. They’re not stupid; they know that real obedience isn’t a matter of talk but a matter of action. Having pulled them in now Jesus slaps them hard: the lowest of the low, the tax collectors and prostitutes, they’re like the first son, the one who really does God’s will. You chief priests, you elders: you are the second son, the one who pretends to obey God but really doesn’t. What Jesus says is outrageous: the tax collectors, those cheaters who have sold out their fellow Jews to the Roman occupiers, and the prostitutes, those despised women reduced to selling themselves, are God’s children, and indeed, they will enter God’s kingdom before you! Fighting words: if the religious authorities didn’t already want to have Jesus killed, they do now.

Most of the commentators on this passage say the “ahead of” here means “instead of.”

That Jesus is saying the religiously proper will be excluded from the kingdom while the scum of the earth are allowed in. At face value our English text suggests that he says they will be let in, but they’ll follow behind these despised outcasts. I don’t find the commentators’ arguments compelling. Which would have made the religious authorities angrier: Jesus telling them the cheats and hookers will go into God’s kingdom but that they will not be allowed in, or that they will get in, but only in utter humiliation: on the heels of these despised outcasts the tax collectors and hookers? My bet is that Jesus’ words are supposed to be ambiguous. Whichever way of taking it that most shocks their religious and moral sensibilities, that’s how Jesus wants them to hear it.

Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story called “Revelation,” a contemporary retelling of this parable. Mrs. Turpin, the wife of a pig farmer who above all craves, and is convinced she has earned, respectability, is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. She’s looking her fellow patients up and down, categorizing them, inwardly judging their faults. In her heart she thanks Jesus that she isn’t like the blacks and poor white trash, the disreputable, lazy and unattractive slackers she sees all around her. One of the waiting patients is a young girl who has been angrily glaring at Mrs. Turpin all along. Suddenly she goes berserk, she leaps on Mrs. Turpin and tries to strangle her. As the other patients, the doctor and nurses struggle to pull her off, the demented girl whispers into her ear “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!” Surprisingly, Mrs. Turpin does not dismiss this as the raving of a psychotic. She takes it as a message from God, from the Jesus to whom she has just been happily praying. She goes home and broods; she feels she has been betrayed, she gets angrier and angrier with God for calling her a pig out of hell.

The story climaxes as Mrs. Turpin has a vision:

She saw...a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and of black Negroes in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself..., had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right...They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

O’Connor doesn’t tell us if Mrs. Turpin’s revelation led her beyond shock, anger and horror to faith. We do know how the men who heard the parable of the two sons reacted. They set in motion the wheels of murder to silence this outrageous revelation.

Time and familiarity have, perhaps, blunted the sharp edge of this parable. It’s easy enough to mishear it, to hear something that isn’t as alien and hard as what Jesus actually said.

It’s not that the tax collectors and prostitutes are O.K. in the end because, having gotten off to a bad start, they’ve at last straightened themselves out, nor is it that the religious authorities, after appearing to be straight arrows, are revealed as having gone rotten within. What we find here is not the hooker with the heart of gold. nor is it the hypocritical televangelist who buys her services. What we find here does not confirm and soothe our moral and religious sensibilities; it confounds them. The point is that nothing matters except God’s willingness to accept us as we. The way of reckoning that declares some screwed up and undeserving and others good enough is cast aside.

Jesus is down there with the outcasts, but the parable’s point is not that the respectable and conventionally good are really wicked while the down and out are really good and just waiting for God to vindicate them. There’s a world’s difference between correcting the accounts so things come out right and true justice is done and giving up on every way of keeping score forever in favor of absolutely free love. The point’s not the hidden virtue of the outcasts; it’s that the outcasts and the respectable are all, at the door to God’s everlasting celebration, just the same. The down and out aren’t better; they’re just luckier: it’s easier for them to believe that they have nothing to bargain with God, that their situation is hopeless. For them, it can be easier to accept the gift of being accepted by God no strings attached. It’s a bit harder to think you can deal with God on the basis of how good you are if the whole world tells you you’re a worthless bum.

The kingdom of God is at hand or, to shift the metaphor, the invitation to the mother of all parties have been sent out. Everyone’s invited. God announces he’s not in the business of keeping score, just in case anyone thinks he ever was. No more drawing lines, no more separating the clean from the unclean, the sinners from the saints, the good from the bad. The judge has dismissed all the charges, closed up court forever and invited all the felons out for a great time.

There’s no way to be kept out of this party. It’s impossible to be turned away. There’s just the possibility of keeping yourself out by self-righteous sulking. Remember Jonah in last week’s reading: sitting in his little hut petulantly watching the city of Nineveh as he nurses his offended sense of justice. Remember the prodigal son’s big brother missing the festivities because he’s ticked off at his father’s profligate love. Or those early-rising vineyard workers in last week’s sermon burned up at their boss’s crazy idea of fair play.

If it doesn’t sometimes stick in our craws we probably haven’t really heard it. Not a loosening up of the rules, not a lowering of the standard so the likes of us might, with effort, get by: that’s something we could easily accept. What we see in Jesus is not God giving the outcasts a break and letting them slip in the back door so long as they’re on their best behavior. We see God’s love breaking in, nailing all the scorekeeping to a bloody cross and throwing open the doors to everyone, each as a guest of honor. When the Romans killed Jesus God killed off our wisdom, he assassinated our sense of justice. God’s grace comes to us no strings attached but, as Rein Vanderhill said last Sunday: we keep trying to tie strings to it.

The thing about this is that it’s about impossible really to believe it, at least not steadily and not for long. There’s a tenacious little scorekeeper down inside each of us; a little judge, a would-be god. That’s my candidate for original sin. Each of us has two mental lists hidden away somewhere: one is the list of those we condemn as self-righteous, as the Pharisees and hypocrites of the day. The other our list of who’s deserving and who isn’t, of who doesn’t really measure up and who’s good enough. This is the list that shows we belong on the first list! We are as much the self-righteous sulkers as we are the losers and outcasts. There’s no place safe to stand: God’s grace dissolves all the ground on which we would try to justify ourselves.

Once we realize that about ourselves the jig is up. There’s no hope. We don’t even fit in completely with those lowlifes Jesus hung out with. We have to identify ourselves with the lepers and outcasts and with the religious rulers, with the prostitutes and collectors and with poor Mrs. Turpin. There’s nothing to do but trust that Jesus meant exactly what he said, and that he was telling the truth when he said it. Our only hope is believing that God really does love us with a love that breaks down all our defenses, a love that cuts every string our sneaky hearts try to tie on to his good news.

In the end the grace of God is universal acid. In contact with it all the subterfuges of our self-righteousness dissolve and we’re left with nothing but the living, dying and resurrected Jesus. Back in the 60’s Leonard Cohen wrote a song that calls this to mind:

Jesus was a sailor

And he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower

Until he knew for certain

That only drowning men could see him

And he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

Our only way out of the kingdom of judgement and condemnation is to go down and out with Jesus and with him to God’s kingdom of everlasting joy.

Amen.

18 Pentecost

22 September 2002

St. George’s Episcopal Church

LeMars, Iowa

Matthew 20.1-16

It’s Not Fair!

The story is as deeply engrained as it is compelling: the lowly unsung good, truly deserving but of no account in this world, vindicated. The successful wicked, proud and wise in the world’s ways, in the end cast down. The truth will come out. Things will be set to rights. Everything will turn out the way it should; justice will be done: God will see to it. The last will be first, and the first will be last.

The faithful, obscure good, quietly doing God’s work, unknown to the world but great in the kingdom of God will, when all truths are told, receive the honor due them. If you’re lucky, you’ve been blessed to know some of these anonymous saints. But those who have clawed their way to the top, raking in money, power and privilege, will see it turn to dust and ashes and, past all remonstrance, know they have wasted their lives.

I love the story in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce; the damned can take a bus from Hell to Heaven to have a look around and, if they choose to, stay. The story’s narrator is getting a tour from his old Scot teacher:

All down one long aisle of the forest…the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light…a procession was approaching, and the light came from the persons who composed it. First came the Spirits…who danced and scattered flowers…then, on the left and the right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face. “Is it?…Is it?” I whispered to my guide. “Not at all” said he. “It’s someone you’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” “She seems to be…well, a person of particular importance? “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” The guide goes on to describe this woman’s anonymous faithful life, explaining to the visitor from Hell how her small acts of grace and kindness were like stones thrown into a pool, the concentric waves spreading out further and further. “Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”

This is great stuff. Indeed, it’s at the heart of Christian faith: Jesus, despised, rejected, crucified, made least and last is revealed as the first, very God of very God, the Lord and Savior of all. It’s part of the fabric of our hope in God. Yet I don’t think it has much immediate to do with Jesus’ parable about the laborers in the vineyard, nor about what he means when he winds it up saying “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” In fact what Jesus says here is closer to the opposite. His story is not about the loyal, underpaid guy who uncomplainingly does most of the work and then inherits the vineyard in the end. It’s about the guys too lazy to make it to the labor hall at the start of the workday coming out O.K. and the good guys being ticked off about it.

In class I sometimes tell a story, legendary in the annals of the Wacome family, to illustrate how deeply the insistence on fairness is hard-wired into us. We don’t have to learn it; it’s bred in the bone. We crave it, like water, like air. One day at my Aunt and Uncle’s summer house in New Hampshire there appeared from somewhere a cupcake with half a maraschino cherry on top. My four young cousins immediately started clamoring for it, so my ever judicious Aunt Ruth announced she would divide it among the four of them. She produced a knife and with great precision – she had been a nurse - cut it into quarters, while the children anxiously observed and awaited their shares. We’re now down to an eighth of cherry for each kid. Before they could be parceled out my cousin Todd’s hand shot out, grabbed two of the pieces and popped them into his mouth. All hell broke loose. His three sisters began wailing at full volume. The pandemonium drowned out my aunt’s scolding of her cheating son. The hysteria continued at great length, for us adult onlookers hilariously out of proportion to the stolen quarter of a half cherry. As I recall it ended with my cousin Kim, Todd’s older sister, simultaneously weeping, hyperventilating and bent over trying to vomit. It was great!

There are two ways to read the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. We could take it as saying there’s a certain way things are ordered now in terms of who gets what, but that God is going to reverse it, making those who are first last and those who are last first. (Those who are in the middle now will, I suppose, stay where they are.) This fits with the way we often understand the saying, but I don’t think it’s the right reading for this text. Instead we should hear “The last will be first, and the first will be last” as saying that God is going to throw everything topsy turvy: not a transition from an unjust distribution of rewards and punishments to a fair one where everyone gets what they really deserve, but that there’s a new world coming where what you deserve - good or bad – in some deep and profoundly unfair way just doesn’t count.

Sometimes it’s really off putting; conscientious folk that we are, we don’t much like God’s playing fast and loose with what his creatures deserve. We cling to the old economy of fairness as desperately as my cousins did to their pathetic bits of cherry. We want our little sum of worth recognized and rewarded; we don’t want to be tossed in with those lazy lowlifes. Or, truth be told, we’re afraid that the good news is after all too good to be true, that cosmic books are being kept and that we might be found in the red.

Sometimes, though, we get into the spirit of things, glorying with perverse delight at the thumbing of the divine nose at the rules; I think especially of Chrysostom’s sermon, the one we read at each Easter Vigil, the one that joyously welcomes everyone in gleeful indifference to who deserves what:

And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, as well as to him that toiled from the first. To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.

The last word is that not even something as great and important as justice defeats God’s love. Grace crashes down on everyone, the latecomers and the early arriving, the lazy and the toiling, the good and the bad. It’s crazy to get bent out of shape about who gets the fragment of cherry when there are orchards of cherries and cupcakes galore in the kingdom of God. It’s ridiculous to get up in arms about those latecomers getting a full day’s pay for an hour’s work because now the harvest is in, the wine is made and everyone – those who did the work as well as the freeloaders - is invited to the landowner’s never ending party where there’ll be too much fun being had for anyone even to think of settling old scores or to dream of keeping anyone out.

So let’s take that fine advice St. Paul gave the Philippians: live you life in a manner worthy of the gospel. I know good Christian people have had a couple thousand years working to turn this sort of thing into its opposite, to get out of it something like here are the rules you have to follow if you’re really going to be on the receiving end of God’s love. As tempting as that might be, it’s a lost cause: God is going to get his way and save the worst right along with the best. So why fight it? Let’s forgive as we are forgiven and follow God’s example, giving up on keeping score. Why wouldn’t we want to listen to Paul and live lives that make sense in light of the gospel? If Christianity is really true, anything else is just absurd. That’s what he’s talking about, not about duties or rules or conditions. Surely the fact that God will at last break into the hardened hearts of the likes of Osama bin Laden is no reason not to want to be more like Sarah Smith of Golders Green. That God will relentlessly show his mercy even to the ungrateful is all the more reason for us to live joyful lives of gratitude; it’s not a reason to want to be a miserable ingrate. Sure, we’ll all get the same pay at the end of the day, but why waste the day idling about with those boring characters on the street corner when there’s interesting and worthwhile work to be done in the Lord’s vineyards?

Amen.

19th Sunday after Pentecost

25 September 2005

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Saying Yes to God

Jesus rides into Jerusalem, enacting Zechariah’s prophecy:

Look, your king is coming to you,

humble, and mounted on a donkey!

and throws the city, already thronged with pilgrims there for the Passover festival, into an uproar. Then he goes into the Temple compound and attacks the merchants who are exchanging money and selling animals for the sacrifices. When he returns the next day, the priests and elders ask,

By what authority do you do these things?

In the circumstances, this is a pretty mild reaction. But Jesus’ response, the parable of the two sons that is today’s lesson, is contentious: The religious leaders who ask this perfectly reasonable question are the son who makes a show of obedience to the father, but in reality blows him off. Because they do not accept Jesus as their king, they say “No!” to God. In contrast those who seem to have been saying “No!” to God in every possible way, the prostitutes and tax collectors who follow Jesus are like the son who at first refuses the father, but in the end obeys. One more move in the end game where Jesus goads the leaders of Israel to accept him unconditionally as God’s anointed, or to reject him unequivocally. Saying “No!” to God can sound for all the world like saying “Yes!”

And what in time becomes a “Yes!” to God can sound like an emphatic “No!” Archbishop Williams writes, “To come to the point where you disbelieve passionately in a certain kind of God may be the most important step you can take in the direction of the true God.” Among the times I’ve suspected that I’m doing something worthwhile in the kingdom of God are those when a student sits in my office and says, “Dr. Wacome, don’t be shocked, but I’m not a Christian, I just don’t believe in God.” More or less impervious to shock, I say, “Really? Tell me what you don’t believe.” Almost invariably, I can honestly respond to whatever they say with, “Oh, I don’t believe any of that stuff either.” For the religion of control and condemnation they reject bears no relation to the good news of Jesus; the God in whom they have lost faith is not the loving God we meet in Jesus. For them, the only way to the gracious God who was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, is through disbelief. Before the coming of the true God, there is the breaking of the idols.

The question to ask ourselves is where we say “No!” to God, even if only in a whisper we hardly hear ourselves. The authorities Jesus contended with in the Temple are not alone in having a hard time accepting a God who comes to us not in the trappings of prestige and power, but in humility and weakness. Charles Moore, a member of the Bruderhof community, confesses, Jesus “is too powerless for my liking; he’s too much like the person I don’t want to be, but actually am....Humility I could handle, but naked vulnerability repulses me....Deep down, I am not willing to receive the one who unveils my powerlessness.”[1] We are, reasonably enough, put out that God does not use his power to keep bad things from happening–terror attacks, wars, tsunamis, hurricanes, buses filled with old people exploding–and behind that lies the fear that maybe God somehow has lost that power, that by recklessly making himself weak in Jesus he really has given up the wherewithal to make things right. How confident can we be in a God who acts as though he has no interest in being God? How can we trust a God who renounces his power and calls us to do the same? Nothing so effectively arouses our anger, fear and denial as feeling powerless. We want–we need–that inner stronghold where we’re in control, where we’re invulnerable, where we’re physically, spiritually, intellectually, morally, and religiously secure. We want to insist on God doing his job and guaranteeing that for us. Acknowledging the voice within that says “No!” to the God who is in Christ is vital to letting him be for us who he really is and not replacing him with a consoling but lifeless idol. The picture of Jesus humble on his little donkey is nice, but what we really want is the king who, after producing a satisfying display of shock and awe, rolls in in an M-60 tank, plants the flag, brings in the International Court of Justice, and makes everything come out right in the end. What we get instead is a God who gives it all up and dies in our place.

N. T. Wright notes that “when people ask, ‘Was Jesus God?’ they usually think they know what the word ‘God’ means and are asking whether we can fit Jesus into that.”[2] But the only God we know is the one made all too vulnerable flesh, the one who, as St. Paul told the church at Philippi, “did not regard equality with God a something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” God himself says “No!” to God, that is, to a certain possibility, to a plausible way of being God, in order to be the God who makes himself available to us, the empty God, who makes room for us in himself and quietly asks for his place in us. In Charles Moore’s words, “this weak God finds his home in impoverished places, in hearts that have nothing to offer.” Christus Victor who casts all sin, evil and death into hell...he is yet the one of whom R. S. Thomas can say in his poem “Crucifixion:”

Satisfied to be the savior

not of the world, not

of the species, but of the one

anonymous member

of the gambling party

at the foot of the cross.

The leaders of the Temple ask Jesus by what authority–by what power; the word is ekouisoa–he does the outrageous things he does. Jesus supplies no answer they can comprehend; he does not justify himself; he does not explain himself. His only answer is to become powerless for the sake of the powerless, weak on behalf of the weak, to give up what is his and to take upon himself–and into the very life of God–the world’s sin and suffering.

Jesus did not demand what was his by right; he did not insist on justice; on being treated fairly; in incomprehensible humility he gave all that up for our sakes. Paul calls us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling,” to make the humility of Christ our own. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus!” We are called to give up what is ours for the sake of Jesus, who gave himself up for us. For he is the one whose final, life-giving “Yes!” unhinges everything in us that says “No!” to God.

During apartheid, members of the South African security services, including an officer by the name of van der Broek, shot an 18-year old boy and, to destroy the evidence, burned his body. Several years after that, van der Broek returned, seized the boy’s father and, while forcing his wife to watch, tied him to a woodpile, poured gasoline over him, and set him on fire. Years later, apartheid at last ended and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took up these murders, among the 20,000 human rights violations it sought to bring to light. The Commission’s rule was that if the perpetrator of an atrocity told the truth about his crime and confessed his guilt, he would not be punished, but receive amnesty. This is, of course, a flagrant disregard of justice. Hundreds of individuals avoided punishment for thousands of horrific acts. Often, the friends and family of victims were present at the amnesty hearings. For them to share in the amnesty process was to forego the retribution to which they had every right, and for which many had longed for years.

The woman whose son and husband van der Broek had murdered was present as he recounted his crimes. When he finished, one of the judges asked her, “What do you want from Mr. Broek?”

Gazing on the Afrikaans officer, the frail black woman, now in her seventies, replied, "I want three things. I want him to be taken to the place where my husband's body was burned and to gather up the dust so I can give his remains a decent burial." Van der Broek, his head down, nodded agreement. Then she continued, "My husband and son were my only family. So I ask for Mr. van der Broek to become my son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend a day with me so that I can pour out on him whatever love I still have remaining within me." She paused: “And, finally, I would ask someone to help me across the courtroom so I can take Mr. van der Broek in my arms, embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven." As the bailiff led the elderly woman across the courtroom, Mr. van der Broek, overwhelmed by what he had heard, fainted. Spontaneously those in the courtroom, friends, family, and neighbors–all victims of similar oppression and injustice began softly singing: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found. ‘Twas blind, but now I see.

That South African woman emptied herself, refusing to regard what belonged to her as something to be exploited, and instead took on the humility of Christ, who embraces his killers, giving place to his forgiving, healing love in this wrecked and bloodstained world. Let the same mind be in us.

Amen

19 Pentecost 21 September 2008 Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa Matthew 20.1-16

Get To Work!

So the last will be first, and the first last. Matthew 20.16

It’s a compelling vision: the lowly faithful good, truly deserving but of no account in this world, vindicated. The successful wicked, proud and wise in the world’s ways, in the end cast down. The truth will come out. Things will be set to rights. Everything will turn out the way it should; justice will be done: God will see to it. Great stuff. It resonates with the heart of Christian faith: Jesus, despised, rejected, crucified, made least and last is revealed as the first, very God of very God, the Lord and Savior of all. It’s the very fabric of our hope. The last will be first, and the first will be last. Amen. And yet…Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard keeps this from meaning precisely what we might want it to mean…

The parable does not stand on its own. It continues a discussion that starts in Chapter 19: a rich young man all his life has scrupulously observed the law. He comes to Jesus, just in case there’s anything more he needs to do to deserve eternal life. When Jesus says he must give away all he has to the poor and follow him, he goes away, he can’t bring himself to part with his great wealth. Jesus comments about how hard it is for a man like this to enter the kingdom of heaven; in fact, it’s impossible, like squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle. This astonishes the disciples: if someone like this can’t make it, who can!? Jesus replies, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible!” (19.26). But Jesus’ answer makes Peter mad: “Look, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” (19.27). I think that what gets to Peter is the idea that God might miraculously save this privileged, self-righteous guy even though he would never make the kind of sacrifices Peter and the other disciples have made to be with Jesus. So what’s the point of throwing your lot in with Jesus if that rich jerk can play it safe, smugly enjoy security and comfort, and still have salvation handed to him on a platter so he lands in God’s good graces right along with Jesus’ longsuffering disciples? Jesus immediately assures Peter that he understands what his disciples have given up, and he promises that God is faithful and generous, eager to give more than they can ask or imagine to those who have given up something for him. He seems to be saying that people like that rich young man might be on top now, but when God’s kingdom comes, the lowly who have followed Jesus will come out ahead. The first will be last, and the last first.

Peter would have been happy if Jesus had stopped right there, but he doesn’t. There’s something crucial Peter doesn’t get, something that subverts the tantalizing prospect of this desperately upside down world being set right.

Maybe we should first move the parable closer to home, say into the parking lot at Home Depot or Menards, where we see them, trying to be inconspicuous and visible at the same time, or to a street corner near a bodega in a seedy part of town. All men. Smoking and talking quietly, usually in Spanish. Playing cards. Reading the newspaper. Waiting and watching. Occasionally, a pickup or car drives up; there’s a brief negotiation and one or two get and it drives off. The rest go back to waiting. It’s the precarious life of the day laborer. They’re mostly “undocumented.” The pay, even for the highly skilled, way below market. Some days there’s no work. On those days they and their families might not eat. If they get hurt on the job, tough luck: no insurance. If an employer stiffs them, too bad; they’re illegals, what can they do? They’re lucky to get anything. Justice in any meaningful sense is a luxury they cannot afford. Yet we know how they would react if an employer paid someone hired at the last minute the same as someone who puts in a long day’s work.

Jesus’ parable is not the kind of story Peter wanted to hear. For the parable of the workers in the vineyard is of course not about the loyal, underpaid guy who uncomplainingly does most of the work and then inherits the vineyard in the end. It’s about the guys too lazy or hung over to make it to the labor hall at the start of the workday coming out O.K. and the good guys being angry about it. Jesus rejects the good guys’ all too reasonable anger. Telling this story, he sharply rebukes Peter for objecting to the idea of the rich young man receiving what he so obviously does not deserve.

Jesus wants Peter to see himself in the disgruntled workers, and to lose the idea that God’s generosity can be boxed in by human unworthiness. Let’s admit it: this really is off putting. Conscientious folk that we are, we don’t much like God’s playing fast and loose with what his creatures deserve. But Jesus insists that we see ourselves in those tired workers, bitching at the landowner’s carelessness about handing out undeserved pay. As long as we’ve kept company with Jesus, we’re still invested in the old economy of fairness and we still nurture the vain hope for a God who will dispense justice, rather than pour out unseemly grace that overwhelms all calculations of merit. We want to be like those early risers who had something to put on the table to negotiate a fair day’s pay with the master. We don’t want to be like those bums called at the last minute, with nothing to rely on but hope in his reckless kindness. We want our little sum of worth acknowledged and approved; we don’t want to be tossed in with those lazy lowlifes. But Jesus calls us to repent.

Sometimes, God’s Spirit works his way through to us and we get with it, glorying with irreverent delight at the thumbing of the divine nose at the rules we hold sacred. Remember Chrysostom’s sermon we read at each Easter Vigil. Punctuated with holy noise it joyously welcomes everyone in holy indifference to who deserves what:

And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let him not be afraid by reason of his delay. For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, as well as to him that toiled from the first. To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.

We cannot defeat God’s love. God is just, but God’s justice is nothing less than his commitment to saving us, even when he can save us only despite ourselves. In biblical terms, God’s justice is his utter fidelity to his covenant, not some cosmic accounting that weighs good and bad acts and dispenses fair rewards and punishments. God’s justice is the grace that rains down on everyone, the latecomers and the early arriving, the lazy and the toiling, the pious and the irreligious, the good and the bad. It’s God’s celebration, so those who sleep through the service and show up just for the potluck are welcomed right along with those who were here at 9:00 a.m. to get the bread out of the freezer! It’s crazy to get bent out of shape about who gets what pay for picking the grapes when the best wine will flow freely for all in God’s kingdom. It’s ridiculous to get up in arms about those latecomers getting a full day’s pay for an hour’s work, for the harvest is coming in and everyone—those who did the work as well as the freeloaders—is invited to the landowner’s never-ending party where there’ll be too much fun for anyone even to think of settling old scores or to dream of keeping anyone out.

So let’s take the advice St. Paul gave the Philippians: live you life in a manner worthy of the gospel. Good Christian people have had a couple thousand years to morph this into its opposite, to get out of it the rules you have to follow if you’re really going to be on the receiving end of God’s love. As tempting as this always is for old sinners like you and me, it’s a lost cause: God is going to get his way and save the worst right along with the best. So why fight it? Let’s laugh with the landowner at his little joke on all of us. Let’s forgive as we are forgiven and follow God’s example, giving up on keeping score. Why wouldn’t we want to listen to Paul and live in a way that makes sense in light of the good news? If Christ is really risen, anything else is just absurd. God will at last break the hardened hearts of the wicked and indifferent, but that’s no reason not to want to get on with the work. God will stubbornly show his mercy even to the ungrateful, and that’s all the more reason to live with joyful gratitude; it’s no reason to be a miserable ingrate. Sure, at the end of the day we’ll all get all the ‘pay’ we can possibly use, but why waste the day idling about when there are interesting and worthwhile things that need doing in the Lord’s vineyard? Maybe that vineyard will turn out to be some unlikely place like the Home Depot parking lot, where those guys could use some help getting a better deal. Maybe it’s somewhere else. But the owner’s here, saying, “Let’s go to work!”

Amen

20th Sunday in Pentecost

26 October 2003

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Mark 10.46-52

Leap in the Dark

Take heart, get up, he is calling you…So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Mark 10.50

One night Karen and her friend Mary wanted to go from one place to another in New Jersey. Karen didn’t know the way but that was O.K.; she would drive and Mary would navigate. This was a bit odd since Mary was blind, but it’s an old story that the blind sometimes see things the rest of us can’t.

That’s how it is with Bartimaeus in our lesson from Mark’s gospel. I imagine him sitting there at the gate, day in, day out, mostly invisible to those going in and out of the city. He can’t see but he hears – snatches of conversation, bits of rumor about a man from up north who consorts with the worthless and defies the keepers of the Law, but who preaches good news, casts out demons, and…heals the blind! He pieces together an inkling of a deliverer from God, the long-awaited Messiah. At first it’s just daydreaming and wishful thinking, but as he hears more it grows into hope. Suddenly, parsing the sounds of a passing crowd, Bartimaeus realizes he’s here, Jesus himself, walking by, on his way out of the city. It’s his one chance. He starts to yell: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

People in Jesus’ entourage tell him to shut up. That’s surprising at first. Why discourage the blind beggar? Don’t they want to see another miraculous healing? I suppose they tell him to keep quiet because they’re afraid; they’re close to Jerusalem and here’s this guy yelling about Jesus being the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed deliverer. Earlier in the chapter (10.32) we read that Jesus was heading toward Jerusalem, and that this amazed and frightened his followers. Dangerous confrontation with the authorities might be avoided if Jesus stuck to the countryside, but surely not if he went into Jerusalem itself. Jerusalem, city that murdered the prophets, killed rebels, and crucified would-be messiahs. To proclaim Jesus Messiah was deeply provocative, an overt challenge to Rome and to its allies who controlled the Temple. Now, here in Jericho, just a few miles outside Jerusalem, this reckless blind man is shouting out the messianic title “Son of David.”

All along, Jesus himself has tried, mostly without success, to keep exorcised demons and persons he’s healed from making such incendiary claims about him. Just two chapters back, when Peter confessed “You are the Messiah,” Mark tells us that Jesus sternly ordered him not to tell anyone about him (8.29-30). Something different is going on here; it’s those following Jesus, not Jesus himself, who tell Bartimaeus to keep quiet. At last the time has come to say who Jesus is, and to go on to Jerusalem for the last battle, to be welcomed as Israel’s Messiah or rejected and put to death. Now it’s time to shout.

I don’t know what Mark had in mind, but it’s interesting to reflect on where this story takes place. Everyone knows about Jericho, how Joshua – that’s Yeshua, i.e. Jesus – led the people of Israel as they marched around the city for seven days; on the seventh day they gave a great shout and the walls fell, the city was taken and the conquest of the land was underway. The historical resonances are hard to miss: here’s another Yeshua, another Jesus, outside the same city. As the invading people of God lay siege to Jericho, Joshua instructed them to circle the city in silence: “You shall not utter a word, until the day I shall tell you to shout. Then you shall shout” (Joshua 6.10). The day comes, they shout, the walls come down, the city falls, and the claiming of the land of promise begins in earnest. The great shout announces at last that God’s deliverance is at hand; promises long delayed will now be fulfilled. Setting the stage for Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, Mark puts into the mouth of the blind beggar the great shout announcing that the time of God’s deliverance has arrived.

The account of the fall of Jericho in the book of Joshua ends with an imprecation. Standing over the vanquished, ruined city Joshua invokes a curse on anyone who would rebuild it, upon them and on their descendants (8.26). Once before God invaded this land, breaking down the walls that kept people from his promise. That invasion brought death and destruction. It fulfilled the promise of a land for the people of Israel; but this invasion, the coming of God in Jesus his Messiah, secures healing and blessing for all people. The people of Israel, long under the curse of exile and alienation from God, are now saved: Jesus the divine invader is here.

Commentators point out that Mark wants us to see Bartimaeus as the ideal disciple. Earlier in this chapter (10.26) Jesus tells his disciples that it is hard even for a rich man to be saved; shocked, they ask “Then who can be saved?!” The calling of Bartimaeus is Jesus’ dramatically enacted answer to the question. To be saved don’t be like the rich man, confident in his standing before God; be like this blind beggar, who cries out in desperation. Jesus tells them (10.31) that many that are first will be last, and the last first. This is what he shows us: Bartimaeus is the last person to be healed, the last person to follow Jesus before the Passion. We encounter him on the verge of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the rapidly unfolding events of his arret , trial, and execution. The last called, the last healed, is first; he represents what it truly is to be Jesus’ disciple. The best traits of those Jesus calls and those who come to him seeking help and healing converge in Bartimaeus.

Through the book, the ‘official’ disciples are notoriously obtuse. Jesus warns them that he is to go up to Jerusalem to be humiliated, abused and killed; they respond with worries about their powers and privileges in the coming kingdom (10.32-37). When they begin to grasp what Jesus’ dark predictions mean, they’re fearful, following him only hesitantly. The insight and courage of the helpless beggar contrasts starkly with their faithlessness. The disciples have their sight, yet they are blind to what matters. Bartimaeus is blind, yet he sees Jesus as God’s deliverance.

Jesus hears Bartimaeus shouting: “Son of David, have mercy on me!” He stood still and said “Call him here.” “They called the blind man, saying to him ‘Take heart, he is calling to you!’” Here’s my favorite part: “So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus” (10.50). What strikes me is that it’s a blind man doing this. He’s jumping up without being able to see. He can’t look before he leaps, but he leaps anyway. He’s taking a leap in the dark toward Jesus who calls him. That’s a picture of our life of faith: never properly dressed and not knowing where you are.

Jesus puts the stunningly unnecessary question: “What do you want me to do for you?” What a thing to ask: what else does a blind man want but to get his sight? But Jesus knows what he is doing. He knows the human heart, its capacity for self-deception and evasion. The awful possibility lies in that gap between the call and the response. Maybe he should play it safe, just ask for some coins? Or for some wise advice on how to keep the Law when you’re blind. However wretched his life as a roadside beggar, he at least knows his place, with whatever small comfort and security it affords. We can’t take it for granted that he will, when it comes to it, be willing to take the step of faith, to resist the pull of the old life; he might forego the sudden sharp pull into the light, with the choices and responsibilities and unfamiliar sights and perils it offers. Maybe safer to step back from the call of the overwhelming love that promises to demolish the identities, securities and justifications so carefully constructed, even if only the story of oneself as victim, outcast, sufferer, loser, tragic hero. Jesus calls us, whoever and whatever we are; he accepts us without condition, our true selves, but at the same time “says no to our fantasies and our consoling images of ourselves” (Rupert Shortt, Rowan Williams, p. 34). Jesus calls us and we must, as W. H. Auden knew, “climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

Bartimaeus takes the leap of faith. He asks for what only Jesus can give: “Let me see again.” “Jesus said to him: ‘Go, your faith has made you well.” Jesus tells him to go on his own way, so he goes, but it’s Jesus’ way that he has made his own. Jesus is on his course toward Jerusalem, toward (almost) certain rejection and death and uncertain but hoped for vindication by God. It’s the road the other disciples feared, but Bartimaeus immediately sets out following him on his way.

In the final years of his life Henri Nouwen became enthralled with the circus, especially with the trapeze act. He flew to Europe, rented a small camper, and attached himself to a German circus. Traveling with the Circus Barum for several months, he became close friends with its four trapeze artists who called themselves the ‘Flying Rodleighs.’ As Nouwen observed the Rodleighs’ careful planning, endless rehearsing, and post performance analysis, he was more and more amazed at the technical skill behind their seemingly effortless, graceful act. One – the flyer – would be released at high speed from a swing high above the ground and sail through the air to be caught by a fellow performer on another swing – the catcher. Marveling at the assiduously honed skill that the flyer must have to arrive at the right place at the right moment, Nouwen was surprised when the flyer told him “the public might think that I am the great star of the trapeze but the real star is Joe, my catcher. The flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything…When I fly to Joe I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me. A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust with outstretched arms that his catcher will be there for him.” Nouwen, at that time in his life fearful of many things, including his approaching death, says that when he heard this these words flashed though his mind: “Don’t be afraid. Remember that you are the beloved child of God. He will be there when you make the long jump. Don’t try to grab him; he will grab you. Just stretch out your arms and trust, trust, trust” (Our Greatest Gift, 66-67).

Jesus calls us to take the leap, to live in faith, to trust, trust, trust. Yet we get no guarantee of a safe landing short of the final safety of his everlasting love. Taking a flyer in the dark can get you hurt. You can crash into things and make a mess. There’s always risk in stepping off into the unknown at the call of faith. For some, as it was for whoever followed Jesus into Jerusalem, it involved real physical danger. Think of Christ’s followers right now in the Sudan or northern Nigeria. For us it’s often not life we risk but whatever we imagine makes our lives worthwhile. Or it’s the danger of looking foolish, to others and to ourselves, of seeming too naïve, unrealistic, immoral, prudish, too liberal, too conservative, too religious, too stubborn, too accommodating, plain stupid and so on and on. When we navigate by faith there’s no telling where we might end up; it might be what is to all appearances the wrong place. It’s faith after all, not sight. (Karen and Mary somehow crossed the Hudson, Manhattan, and the East River and ended up in Long Island that night, by the way.)

I’ll conclude with something I heard from M. R. Ritley, one of the priests at St. Gregory’s in San Francisco. On her way to Jesus, M. R. first found a gracious and merciful God by way of the Sufis, in the mystical tradition of Islam. She shares these words by André Fikri, called Following the Way:

This is the lesson on following the way. Remember it.

How do you follow the Way?

Go where you are sent.

Wait till you are shown what to do.

Do it with the whole self.

Remain till you have done what you were sent to do.

Walk away with empty hands.

How much will it cost?

The cost is everything, for all you are and all you have will be

asked of you before the journey runs its course.

How will you know your fellow travelers?

Their faces are marked by the scars of love.

No one will ever tell you that the Way is easy; only that it is possible.

No one can tell you if the journey is worthwhile, for your wages are

concealed in the hand of God, and will be shown you only on

the last day of eternity.

But whoever chooses to follow the Way will have the joyous

company of God’s beloved fools as fellow travelers, and a resting

place, at journey’s end, in the Mecca of the heart.

This is the lesson on following the way. Remember it.

(quoted by M. R. Ritley in Gifted By Otherness)

Amen.

20th Sunday after Pentecost

18 October 2009

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

The Ransom

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. Mark 10.45

To what can we compare the Kingdom of God?

It’s the last class of the term. The students have just taken their last quiz. Some have done well but many have struggled. The professor instructs the class: “Now everyone put a 100% on your quiz and hand it in.” As she collects the quizzes from the grateful students, she asks, “What about the students who aren’t here, should we give them 100’s too?” There’s an outcry “No! Not fair!” but it fades away into an embarrassed silence. The professor is as wise as she is gracious. One of the questions called for the definition of a Hebrew term, chesed, the “lovingkindess” of God.

To what can we compare the Kingdom of God? It’s early in the morning. Suddenly, you are being awakened. What’s happened? What’s the emergency? “You’ve just won the Nobel Prize!” You think you must be dreaming. “The Nobel Prize? Me? What for?”

To what can we compare the Kingdom of God? You’re at O’Hare Airport. The anxieties and annoyances of delayed flights and missed meetings circle endlessly in your mind, like the plane you’re waiting for. You go into a public restroom. There across the mirror with felt tip pen someone has written in large red letters, “Judas, come home, all is forgiven!”

Again and again in the Gospels Jesus tells us and shows us what the kingdom of God is like: a lost sheep, a lost coin, loaves and fishes, a mustard seed…God’s grace breaking in upon us, at once joyous and offensive, inverting the world, disrupting our certainties and insulting our proprieties, deleting all the spreadsheets on which we have so scrupulously recorded who deserves what, simply saying “Yes!” to one and all. And this all somehow depends on Jesus. He does not just announce that the rule of God is at last at hand. It’s here because he is here, because of who he is and what he does. His life, death, and resurrection bring God’s kingdom from future hope into present reality.

But how? To ask the question whose very obviousness makes it hard to ask: What did Jesus do? The authorities put Jesus to death so we are saved. Jesus is condemned, so we are forgiven. Jesus is resurrected, so we live. Why? What’s the connection?

It’s remarkable that over the centuries the Christian Church found it necessary to formulate confessions about the nature of God—the doctrine of the Trinity—and about the nature of Jesus—the Incarnation—but it never fixed on an answer to the question: What was Jesus for? Of course, what the Church says about the Trinity and the Incarnation are not explanations. They don’t give us understanding of these things. Those formulae—“Three persons in one God,” “Fully human and fully God,” “Homousia not homoiousia!” —don’t explain a thing; they simply establish ways to proclaim the good news not obviously absurd, contrary to Scripture, or at odds with the practice and experience of the faithful. But when it comes to the very core of Christian faith, the meaning of Jesus’ life and death, the purpose of his cross, we have not even gone that far. Here, the main Christian tradition has drawn back from the mystery of God’s love for us. And perhaps rightly so, for here more than anywhere else one suspects that, as Leonard Cohen sang, Jesus sinks beneath our wisdom like a stone. I think of a New Yorker cartoon: Two scientists ponder a blackboard covered with arcane equations. Beside them a dog goofily looks up at the board. One scientist says to the other, “Dogs are so cute when they try to understand quantum mechanics!” There’s no guarantee that we can comprehend what Jesus did, what his life, death and resurrection means within the life of God, and for God’s relation to the world. Maybe we should stick to what Jesus himself says and hope for just a bit of insight. But it’s also remarkable how little Jesus says to explain himself.

Leading up to today’s text in Mark, Jesus on three occasions (8.31, 9.30-31, 10.33-34) has warned his friends and followers that he is going to be arrested and killed, but that he will rise from death. The disciples are strangely obtuse, unable, or maybe unwilling, to grasp what Jesus plainly says. What Jesus doesn’t do is explain. He says almost nothing about the point of the suffering and death he foretells. So the words at the close of today’s lesson stand out: Jesus says he came to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10.45). That’s why he is going to die: he will be a ransom. “A ransom.” Mark’s Greek term is lutron (λυτρον); literally “to loosen, to untie.” Thus, to ransom someone: to give what it takes to get him untied and set free. I have it on good authority that this term bears strong connotations of the Jewish sacrificial system, which, when Jesus says this, is still going full tilt in the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus is thinking about his impending death at the hands of the authorities in the context of the ancient practice of making sacrifices to God. (By the way, our English word “ransom” derives via Old French from the Latin word redemption, to buy back.) Jesus gives his life to redeem us, to ransom us, but from whom?

As I said, the Church at large has been reticent about coming up with an “official,” credal account of why and how Jesus saves, and on the whole this is probably good, but a downside is that this theologically empty space can get filled with things that are false and potentially destructive, things that make the good news sound like bad news, things that make people crazy. One big bad idea, one I—and maybe some of you—grew up with, is that it’s God from whom we need to be saved…that God needs to punish us but doesn’t want to punish us and doesn’t punish us because Jesus is punished in our place, but this works only if we ask God to accept Jesus as substituting for us. The traditional way to work this out is to describe justice and love as two distinct motivations within God: in the sacrificial death of Jesus God’s love found a way to redeem us while still satisfying divine justice. God loves you so much that he won’t torture you forever if you trust Jesus. This seems profoundly mistaken. The God of Christian faith is our savior. Period. Not the God who saves us from….God. There are a lot of things from which we need to be saved but God is not one of them. There is no daylight between God’s justice and God’s love: God’s justice—the righteousness of YHWH—is precisely his faithfulness to his covenant, his commitment to his creatures, as wayward as they may be. There is no conflict between God’s justice and God’s love. There cannot be, for “God is love;” the everlasting communion of Father, Son, and Spirit is rock bottom reality, where no principle competes with love. God’s justice emphatically is not the justice of the human heart, the insistent demand that everyone get what they deserve. Indeed, the cross where Jewish piety and Roman law puts the innocent Jesus to death is where God reveals the futility of all human allegiance to justice.

Is there an alternative? If Jesus doesn’t give his life to appease a God who demands that someone pay, a God who needs the cosmic account books to balance, then what did he do? It is not easy for us, at our historical and cultural remove, to understand what Jesus and other first century Jews would have taken for granted about the sacrificial ransom. No modern scholar has fully figured out everything that was going on in the Old Testament sacrificial system, but one idea about the meaning of the sacrifice of animals is crucial. When an individual sins, he cuts himself off from God and from the community of God’s people. God is the source of life, so the sinner, one who has reneged on the covenant with God, has lost his life. He has acted in a way that makes shared life impossible. He is “dead” to God and everyone else. But God restores the dead to life. God takes the life (which is in the blood) of the sacrificial animal and gives it to the sinner. God forgives the sinner and restores him to fellowship. Sacrificing the animal is not a way to give God something in exchange for what we need. It’s God giving us what we need, something we can’t possibly come up with on our own.

This sharply contrasts with what everyone else in the ancient world was doing as they sacrificed to their gods. My assumption is that in inventing the Jewish sacrificial scheme God condescends to, and ultimately subverts, the deep religious impulses of human beings, hijacking them for his own purposes. In a world where everyone is constantly trying to pay off and placate imaginary gods, the one real God teaches some people to do something that looks very similar, but which is in reality the exact opposite. The true God is not to be placated, appeased, bought off: the true God loves and gives life; he does not take it. Still, vivid as those sacrifices must have been—the sprinkled blood, the burning flesh—they were provisional, always showing that God’s aim is permanently to restore lost humanity to life with God, but not effectively doing it for keeps. After all, the life doesn’t really transfer from the sacrificial lamb to the human being who sacrifices it. That’s mythological. What can God do to make something really happen?

A few weeks ago, Karen, Mike Kugler, and I went to Beth Shalom synagogue in Sioux City for Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement.” The service is very moving, and for a mere gentile, grafted onto God’s people by grace, humbling. The ancient prayers (some exquisitely sung by Linell Moss, a cantor there) in which we call upon God for mercy go on at length. The truth is that after an hour or so of imploring God for forgiveness, I became keenly aware of the absence of any response from God, some good news that God has acted in a decisive way to reconcile the world to himself, and that we are left with more than the hope—or maybe just the wish—that this year we’ll do better, and maybe please God. The audacious Christian claim, of course, is that God has so acted. Jesus gave his life as a ransom for all and this does not just show us what God is like, but he really gives us God’s life, not in some metaphorical way but in reality.

We go further with this by bringing in the rest of our lesson. Jesus has just spoken more explicitly than ever about what awaits him: They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem…He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.’ (Mark 10.32-34) The disciples’ appalling response it to get into an argument about who will have the top jobs when Jesus ushers in the new administration. Peter and James try an end run around the others and try to get Jesus to promise them the prestigious places at his side when he comes into power. They are so focused on the glory they think lies ahead that Jesus’ words about humiliation, suffering, and death haven’t registered. This elicits a rebuke: Among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. (10.42b-44) For Jesus himself came not to be served but to serve. God himself is with us, not as powerful ruler but suffering servant, not to demand sacrifice but to be sacrificed, to give himself and, in doing so, to invite us into the life of God. Here we see what the old sacrifices pointed to, the God who defeats our expectations, giving where a god is supposed to take, offering life just where a god is supposed to demand death. We see God’s own life of love in the flesh, here on earth, saints and sinners, insiders and outcasts, those on the left and those on the right, invited willy-nilly to the table. What Jesus told his ever obtuse disciples then is what he tells us now: we are bound with fatal attraction to power over others and to whatever else we imagine makes us safe and free, but Jesus, the first born of many servants, offers his life to unbind us, to ransom us free to love and free to serve, called to share in the very life of God.

Amen.

21st Sunday after Pentecost 28 October 2001 St. George’s Episcopal Church Le Mars, Iowa Luke 18.9-14 The House of Christ Let’s begin with a good word for the Pharisee; he’s gotten a raw deal from history and maybe we need to make amends. He comes out the bad guy in the parable, but how can he deserve it? It’s a bum wrap: so far as the parable gives us any reason to think, he’s a good man. He says “I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even this tax collector” and what he says is, we can assume, the truth. He is an honest, decent human being. He’s no hollow hypocrite, talking a good line but not acting as he advocates: he fasts and gives a tenth of his income. He’s good and he knows it. He’s not just good, he’s truly religious: he rightly attributes to God the goodness that he has. He’s righteous, and he thanks God for this as a gift. A pious Jew, a Pharisee especially, he sees righteousness as possible only because God has given his Law, and enabled us to live in accord with it. He is a careful, sincere adherent to that Law so it is entirely fitting that he should know he is righteous and thank God for this. He represents the very best of morality and religion. On the other hand, we’re far too generous with the tax collector. Here too, we introduce alien elements into the parable, tweaking it to make our kind of sense. If there’s a hypocrite in the story, it’s him; he’d be the one who shows up at the temple for the veneer of respectability it provides. Think of those Mafiosos who regularly attend mass knowing they’ll be ordering a hit after Sunday dinner. We have no reason to think he has repented, that he has at last seen the light and is now on the way to amend his life. This crook, this thug – remember, this is Tony Soprano, not an overzealous IRS agent - stands there before God knowing it’s hopeless, that there’s not a thing he can offer in his own defense, not even – so far as this story gives us any reason to believe - the sincere intention to do better. For the story to satisfy our sense of propriety we need to put that in, but it’s not there. All we can get out of what Jesus actually says is that this character stands there in the temple looking into the depth of the hole he has greedily dug for himself and seeing the stark truth that there’s nothing he can offer God to buy his way out of it. We have no reason to think that deep down he’s a good guy who, despite his faults, is at least humble, in contrast to that prideful Pharisee. This guy is a total loser and may well go right on being one. We have to keep this in mind, and resist the temptation to revise this story so the scandal of what Jesus says is lost. The point is not that the Pharisee is, despite outward appearances, really bad, not acceptable to God, while the tax collector is really good. It’s not even that they are equally bad; the Pharisee is very good and the tax collector very bad. The point is one we find very hard to swallow: when it comes to being accepted by God, being justified, these things don’t count. What counts is being hopeless. What counts is not counting. I think we can see the same thing in this morning’s text from Jeremiah. The people of Judah find themselves in crisis. There’s a terrible draught and they see that they’ve brought it upon themselves. They land is dead and they’re dying with it because of their sins, their iniquities, their apostasies. They plead with God. But see how they make their case. It’s crazy. They recognize how bad they are, how they’re just getting what they deserve. Do they tell God they will try to do better? Do they tell him they’re going to turn things around and start behaving like God’s elect people for once? Do they at least try to put their best foot forward? Not at all. I’d say they’re so far gone they’re past the point of having what it takes even to convince themselves momentarily that they can change their ways. They talk like people who are totally hopeless, people who have nothing to lose. Listen to the reckless way they address God; they don’t even see the point in trying to get on his good side by being respectful. Their words are irreverent, even insulting: “O hope of Israel, its savior in time of trouble, why should you be like a stranger in the land, like a traveler turning aside for the night? Why should you be like someone confused, like a mighty warrior who cannot give help?” These people are broken and helpless, absolutely undeserving, and they know it. They’re before God empty handed, angry and defiant, bereft of the most rudimentary righteousness. In their extremity they know there’s nothing they can do to justify themselves before him.And yet this God they plead with is the God we meet in the Jesus who called the rotten taxman justified. It’s the God who hears the cries of the truly helpless. Most of you know Victor Hugo’s great story, Les Miserables. Its main character is Jean Valjean. Valjean has just been released from prison, where he spent 19 terrible years, the first four for stealing a loaf of bread, the rest for various escape attempts. As a paroled convict, he carries the dreaded yellow passport that describes him as a wicked and dangerous man. This is a description that in his broken heart he accepts. He is condemns himself; yet he thirsts for revenge. He is, Hugo tells us, a man who has lost all hope. He is crushed by the world: “If a millet seed under a millstone had thoughts, doubtless it would think what Jean Valjean thought.” Exhausted after having tramped for miles, he arrives in a town looking for a meal and a place to sleep. Obeying the law, he shows his passport to the authorities; word spreads through town and no one will take him in, He is evicted from the inns and turned away at door after door. He can’t even buy a drink of water from poor peasants. He tries to sleep in a dog kennel, but even the dogs bite him and drive him away, as though they too know who he is. He decides to sleep under the stars, but it begins to rain: God above all is against him. He comes to one last door, the door of the bishop. Desperate and beyond caring, he knocks. When it opens he announces exactly who he is, defiantly presenting himself as a dangerous criminal, a man beyond human law. The bishop calmly invites him in, treats him as an ordinary person, and offers him a bed for the night As they prepare to retire for the evening, Jean Valjean expresses his amazement: “You don’t despise me. You take me into your house, you light your candles for me, and I haven’t hid from you where I come from, and how miserable I am.” The bishop responds “You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Christ. It does not ask any comer whether he has a name, but whether he has an affliction. You are suffering, you are hungry and thirsty; be welcome.” The bishop’s graciousness seems to have no effect on Valjean. He wakes up in the middle of the night and leaves, taking the bishop’s silver dinner plates with him. The next morning, there is a knock at the rectory door: it is the police; they have Valjean in tow, caught red handed with the stolen goods. The bishop tells the police that yes, the story Valjean told them is true: the he had given Valjean the silver. The police leave and Valjean once again sets off, but not before the bishop speaks to him one last time: “Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong now longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.” Valjean is shocked beyond comprehension but, if you remember the story, he still has not changed his ways. It will not be until he commits one more shameful crime, robbing a poor, helpless child, that the power of the grace he has been given starts to change him. But notice: his welcome into the house of Christ does not start then. He was accepted completely as soon as he stood at the door, hopeless, miserable, angry, confused, defiant. Exactly like the wicked tax collector, he was justified simply because he turned toward God in his hopelessness. His being good or bad, ready to change his life or with larceny in his heart: it doesn’t matter. Nothing counts but the grace of God, who is in the business of justifying the unrighteous. His interest is not in reforming the reformable, or in helping those who are ready to help themselves. God is dedicated to raising the dead. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God welcomes us wholeheartedly into the house of Christ, not because we are bad, not because we are good, but each of us as the particular mess we happen to be right now, simply because he is in the business of bringing the dead to life. That good man, that Pharisee in Jesus’ parable had one problem: he took it for granted that his goodness, as admirable and valuable as it might be in some other context, could give him an in with God, that it gave him life, a place in God’s presence. In reality he was absolutely powerless to move an inch toward God. He was a dead man who didn’t even know he was dead, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Fortunately for the tax collector, his being dead was to all too obvious. He could not deny the stench of putrefaction. The same with Jean Valjean: his advantage over those respectable townspeople who turned him away from their doors was that he at least realized he was a lost cause, worthy of nothing but rejection; they still considered themselves alive and well, acceptable to God. Hugo says Valjean’s “wretchedness was constantly before his mind;” theirs was hidden behind their good morals and right religion, their hopes for respectability and good standing. It was the same with those people of ancient Judah: all they had going for them was that they had been brought down so far that knew they were a lost cause, beyond hope or help, but for the mercy of a God who decides to throw out the sensible idea that the we make ourselves acceptable to him by doing what’s right. Instead, beyond all imagining, the God who accepts all comers, no requirement but being there in need of him. What a thing to let loose upon the world! We can sympathize with that worthy pagan Celsus, writing in the fourth century to criticize the Christians, whose scandalous ways horrified him: “Those who summon people to the other mysteries, make this preliminary proclamation: ‘Whoever has pure hands and a wise tongue.’ By contrast with that universal stipulation of worthiness, let us hear what folk these Christians call. ‘Whoever is a sinner’, they say, ‘whoever is unwise’, ‘whoever is a child’, and in a word, ‘whoever is a wretch sill be received by the kingdom of God’.”Celsus, plausibly enough, finds this as senseless as did those who heard Jesus say the bad tax collector, not the good Pharisee, went home that day justified.But it is, we must say, the gospel truth. It is not the whole truth but only its beginning. God rejects all calculation of who deserves what and justifies the undeserving, making acceptable to him all who turn to him, no matter their state or condition. Justification, being made right with God, is salvation. Jesus could have said that the taxman went down to his house saved. The word “salvation” comes from the word for health; to be saved is to be healed. Jesus our savior is our healer. We don’t know how it might have gone with the tax collector’s healing; there’s nothing to know since he’s just a character in a story. There are only possibilities. He might have gone no further than that initial recognition that he stands condemned before God and gone on in his wretched existence. Or that initial realization of his need, and of the persistent offer of God’s mercy, might have enlarged and deepened, so that in time God the healer could have gotten at him. We know how it went with Jean Valjean. Most of the 1222 pages of my Modern Library edition of Les Miserables are devoted to Valjean’s being transformed, healed and made whole by God’s grace, to his becoming a new man who gives rather than steals, trusts rather than fears, loves rather than hates. All this the intricate working out of his being unconditionally welcomed into the house of Christ.(Part of that, we cannot forget, is his being pursued over the decades by the mad inspector Jarvet, the man who would rather die than give up living by the law.) Dimly enough, we have some sense of how it’s going with us, as we come to learn our need and the grace of the God who is with us in it. The other night Karen and I saw the film K-PAX. Its hero, Prot, claims he is a visitor from the planet K-PAX, 1000 light years from Earth. The well-meaning authorities regard him as crazy and confine him to a psychiatric ward. Before long, the doctors and other scientists notice some remarkable things about this inmate; he has some surprising knowledge and abilities. They’re starting to suspect that his unbelievable story might be true after all, and they go to work investigating some intriguing bits of evidence. What they don’t see is what’s obvious: the other residents of the psychiatric ward, long time schizophrenics, psychotics, obsessive compulsives are being made whole. The professional healers do not notice that all around them their patients are being healed. Thanks to Prot’s presence among them, the mists of madness are clearing away, life and lucidity are returning. He is the true healer and the health and hope he brings to those hopeless lunatics is the overwhelming proof that he is who he says he is. That Prot is the man from space is obvious to all the hapless psychiatric cases, to the crazed ex-doorman who wanders around telling everyone they stink, the young man who is morbidly frightened of dirt, germs, death, the young woman reduced to utter silence by a great weight of guilt…those without hope know salvation when it comes. Yet it is invisible to those who have a stake in their own health, to those who think they’re alive and whole and still have something to lose. A colleague of mine has a five year old daughter. She has been raised on Children’s Church, Sunday School, Bible stories, Veggie Tales…the whole bit. So it was with some consternation one Sunday when on the way home from their very conservative Church she mused “I wish God were real.” Taken aback to discover that his child is an atheist, my colleague asked her why she wished that. She said, “Then he could help me out.” I don’t see cause for concern. In time it’s likely that she will come around to belief in God. She’s got the hardest thing right, our neediness, a neediness we need a real God to satisfy. Far better to be confident of your need for God yet only wishing he were there to help than to be one of the many who are supremely confident that there is a God, indeed one they own the truth about, but who are oblivious to their infinite need of his help. God’s grace is the point where his love and mercy meets our need. God grant us the mercy to see our hope in him, to find our lost lives in the house of Christ. Amen. 21st Sunday after Pentecost 24 October 2004 St. George’s Episcopal Church Le Mars, Iowa Luke 18.9-14 Beneath Contempt

“Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” Luke 18.9 Back before the Soviet Union went out of business, the story circulated that one day General Secretary Brezhnev was particularly pleased with Natasha, his mistress. He asked what favor he could do for her, promising to do anything she wanted. She thought for a moment and then said how about letting anyone who wants to leave the country do so? Brezhnev smiled: “Ah, Natasha, you little devil; you want to be alone with me!” In today’s parable two men go up to the Temple to be alone with God: the Pharisee “standing by himself,” and the tax collector, “standing far off.” They have different reasons to separate themselves from the other worshipers: the Pharisee thinks he’s too good to mix with other people; he thinks everyone else deserves to be excluded. The taxman thinks he’s too sinful to be included. This week, Jesus’ story strikes close to home, as we begin to assimilate the Windsor report on the divisions in the Anglican communion that have arisen from the attempts by the American and Canadian churches more fully to include gays and lesbians in the life of the Church. The ugly stuff surfaces again: the drawing of lines between the worthy and the contemptible, questions of who is acceptable to God and who unacceptable, bitter charges and counter charges of self-righteous hypocrisy, weak-kneed cultural accommodation, and heresy; the pronouncement: “I’m excluding you because you’re excluding me by not excluding him!” and the temptation to respond in kind” “Fine, and good riddance!”

Luke says Jesus aims this story at people “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt;” my theological radar locks in on the first part: the great theme of justification by grace through faith in stark opposition to the endlessly creative confabulations in which we try to portray ourselves as acceptable to God. It’s easy to skip over the second part about regarding others with contempt, to see that simply as a symptom of the underlying sin of self-justification: they think they’re good enough for God and ipso facto better than those who are not. But as I thought about it, these two things came to seem more tightly bound together, inseparable, in fact.

What’s wrong with the Pharisee anyway? If what he says is true, that he is not like the thieves, rogues, adulterers; that he really does live by the Law; and, crucially, he does not approach God with all this as a line of credit that buys divine approval, but instead recognizes that whatever in him puts him into right relation with God is itself a sheer gift, and thanks God for it, then it is not obvious where he is at fault. Seeing that pathetic tax collector over there, he thinks, “that’s me—but for the grace of God.” Isn’t our Pharisee’s Reformed theology completely in order? Where does he exalt himself? Where’s the attempt to justify himself?

Yet Jesus says the tax collector is justified, and implies the Pharisee isn’t. To be justified is to be related to God in the right way. There’s exactly one way to be properly related to God: it’s to be on the receiving end of his undiscriminating mercy. Stand there, in that life-giving relation to God, and no matter what else about you is fouled up, so far as God is concerned, you’re in the right; stand anyplace else and, no matter what else you’ve got going for you, you’re in the wrong. The condition you happen to be in—good, bad or indifferent—is of no account. The only way to escape justification is to find a way to deny or reject the mercy God sends your way. Despite getting so much right, the Pharisee must somehow be standing outside the circle of God’s mercy, and this must have something to do with his attitude toward the tax collector.

There’s one part of the Lord’s Prayer that used to seem to me a bit off: “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or, in the contemporary version, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” It seems presumptuous; it’s God’s business to forgive sins, not ours. How can we put ourselves on the same level, as though sinners like us are in a position to be handing out forgiveness, instead of just being glad to get it?

But the surprising thing about God’s grace and forgiveness is that it isn’t just done to us; we’re commanded to share in it, to do for others what God does for us, to forgive as we are forgiven, to love as we are loved. Anyone and everyone gets a place the light of God’s life-giving grace, but you can’t stand there alone. As soon as you push someone else into the shadows, you find yourself in the dark. Trying to accept God’s forgiveness for myself, while denying it to someone else, amounts to rejecting it. William Countryman, in his wonderful book Forgiven and Forgiving, writes “God’s forgiveness isn’t available to me as a separate, private arrangement. That’s a fundamental reality I have to live with. It’s available to me only as part of this big package…. If I want to withhold forgiveness from my neighbor, I’m effectively withholding it from myself too. If I am willing for God to forgive my neighbor, I am allowing God to forgive me too. It’s all or nothing, everybody or nobody.” We can’t draw a line around those who are, and those who are not, in the circle of God’s grace without finding ourselves on the wrong side.

This does not imply some sort of easy-going relativism; it doesn’t mean whatever the other guy believes is right, or that whatever he does makes sense in light of what God does for us. But it does mean that as soon as I say there’s something about someone else that excludes him from God’s merciful acceptance—his stupid, heretical beliefs, his deplorable behavior, his asinine fundamentalism, his vacuous liberalism, his homosexuality, his homophobic bigotry, his casual indifference, or overt hostility, to God—I’ve stopped believing the good news that God accepts me just as I am, without one plea, but that Christ’s blood was shed for me. I accept God’s unconditional grace for all, or I reject it for myself.

Ironically, it can be harder to believe this when it comes to those within the Christian Church. Back when I wasn’t yet, but wanted to be, an Episcopalian, I would visit a parish and love the liturgy, but I would find myself wondering if the guy sitting down the pew—a complete stranger— really meant what he was saying, like me, or if he was just repeating the words by rote. Part of what got me over this was realizing that I needed to attend church where I worried that people might not mean what they were saying, rather than one where I was afraid they did mean what they were saying! But part of it was facing up to the sheer incongruity of finding myself grasped by God’s utterly unconditional love and acceptance, but at the same time wondering whether these other folks were satisfying God’s conditions. It is impossible to sit down for a meal with Jesus while pushing someone away from the table. Archbishop Rowan Williams writes, “the first thing you know about any other Christian in any context is that they are the desired guests of God.” Even if you have a hard time not feeling the invitation is in some cases ill-conceived, the fact is, as Williams puts it, that “being close to Jesus is something which never lets off being close to neighbors we have not chosen…to be in mysterious proximity to all kinds of people who have not signed up to anything but whose neighbors you now are.”

The good news would not be so good if it stopped here. For whose heart doesn’t house a homuncular Pharisee of one persuasion or another? Who doesn’t hold others in contempt? Who doesn’t exalt himself and inwardly embrace a vision of order that denies God’s anarchic mercy? If we weren’t inveterate, hopeless, compulsive self-justifiers we wouldn’t need God’s absolutely free grace. We may exalt ourselves, attempting the impossible: to transform God’s grace into something we deserve and others don’t. But God doesn’t; he is faithful, steadfastly humbling himself, accepting us even as we do our best to reject his acceptance of us. God reaches down, past our contemptuous self-righteousness, to save us despite ourselves. We try to push others beyond God’s reach, to send them off to hell, but succeed only in putting ourselves where we cannot see the love God has for us, the love that is there no matter our denials. The limitation, as Countryman puts it, is not on God’s love, but in how we take hold of that love. Whoever our tax collectors might be, they appear to be separated from us, unlike us, cut off from God’s love; but this is an illusion. The metaphor I’d use is that the world God reconciles to himself in Jesus is like a Möbius strip—remember: you take a strip of paper, give it a twist, and attach the ends together—the thing at first seems ordinary, but then it seems impossible; the topological freak has just one side. Two points on its surface might seem to be on opposite sides but they’re not; there’s just one side for them to be on. We delineate boundaries; we distinguish who is within, and who is outside, God’s saving grace—we hold others in contempt—but God doesn’t; for him, there is just the one side, the side on which Jesus is crucified and resurrected for all.

The tax collector went home justified, but the parable does not tell us what becomes of him after that. But Luke has assembled his narrative so that, in a way, there is a follow up. In the next chapter he tells the comical tale of a tax collector, Zacchaeus, who was too short to see Jesus over the crowd, but because he climbed a tree to have a look, has a life-changing encounter with him. Like the tax collector who stands a ways off, seeking the God concretely present in the Temple, Zacchaeus looks to Jesus, God’s full presence in human flesh, from a distance. Seeing the tax collector in the tree, Jesus calls to him and, to the consternation of those around him who hold this notorious sinner in contempt, invites himself to stay at the outcast’s house. Zacchaeus, finding himself accepted by Jesus, responds by repenting of his crooked way of life and promising to make amends to those he has defrauded. Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham:” No one, however contemptible, falls outside the reach of God’s love. “For the Son of Man came to seek out and save the lost” (Luke 19.10).

Whathappens to the Pharisee? It’s easier for the tax collector to throw himself on God’s mercy. His quest for security and identity, his wretched pursuit of wealth and power over others, is so obviously hollow, so obviously deadening. It has the great advantage of marking him as a moral leper, a traitor to God and Israel, so he cannot fool himself too easily; he can’t be too far from turning to God in desperation and crying out “Be merciful to me a sinner!” Beyond all hope, despising himself, he finds the God who brings himself low to save those who are beneath contempt. The Pharisee is in a more precarious position: he is dangerously good. There is enough truth in his view of things to stand between him and acceptance of God’s love. He wants to do what’s right; he aspires to serve the true God, but his vision of heroic integrity for the sake of Israel’s God, his ideal of a religious purity that excludes the outcast, is the very thing that ensnares him, blinding him to God’s mercy.

My favorite story of a Pharisee saved despite herself is in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Revelation.” Mrs. Turpin: it is hard to believe one middle-aged Southern lady can contain so much prim self-righteousness. She takes God’s approval for granted and has no doubt that he shares her polite disdain for the lazy, irresponsible, morally suspect, and badly dressed people she encounters every day. She is equally sure her Maker appreciates her respectability, regular habits, modesty, and sunny disposition: until she has a shattering epiphany, a gift from God she did not expect or want.

The revelation comes in two stages. First, in a doctor’s waiting room, a mentally disturbed young woman—named Mary Grace (!)—has some kind of fit and, before she is sedated and taken away, as she convulses on the floor, her lunatic eyes lock on Mrs. Turpin and she hisses: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” This being a Flannery O’Connor story, poor Mrs. Turpin has no doubt that this is a message from God, one she resents. Why has it been delivered to her, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman? Why is she treated so unfairly? “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” She gets her answer, a second epiphany as she looks toward the setting sun: a vision that is her unmaking but also her salvation:

A visionary light settled in her eyes…a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of blacks in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself… had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right….They were marching along behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they always had been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away….At length she…made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry fields and shouting hallelujah.

Amen.