Thompson's Blog

The Road to Regeneration
Isaiah 40:1-11

40:1 Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 2 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. 3 A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5 Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” 6 A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. 7 The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. 8 The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. 9 Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” 10 See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11 He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

It wasn’t easy for me to get a preaching grip on this Isaiah passage until my friend Gerald Cound insisted that I take a look at an article in his favorite magazine, Resurgence. I only gave the article a superficial reading at that moment, but what the writer was talking about put me in touch with the prophet Isaiah. I begged Gerald to lend it to me so I could read and digest the article, and it’s a powerfully prophetic piece of journalism. He’s not quick to let go of his new editions of this magazine because he doesn’t always get them back as quickly as he would prefer, but he recognized my desperation and let me have it. This magazine isn’t a religious publication, but the article dealt with what I believe to be the earthly manifestation of our belief system – the economy. It may be a bit of an overstatement to describe our economy as the manifestation of our true beliefs, but I don’t think it’s far from the truth.

What we think of as the economy is a vast and complex structure that no one group or agency controls. And it’s not like any of us have much input on how our economy operates, but I think it’s helpful to think of our economy as the creature that best represents what we believe to be true. The writer of the article, Dr. Herman Daly, is an economist who worked for the World Bank in the late eighties and early nineties, and is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. The article he wrote was entitled, Why we need a Steady-State Economy, and while I don’t fully understand much of what he had to say, what I do understand him to say is that our current perpetual expansion and utilization of resources is unsustainable.

And I find in his words a call for us to examine what we believe to be fundamentally true about our way of living on this planet. His article calls in to question how well we are caring for creation, and I believe that reflects our understanding of God.

I’ll say a bit more about this in a moment, but for now I want to shift attention to the prophet, Isaiah. I’ve actually experienced another one of those cosmic convergences this week – this same passage from Isaiah (which is one of the recommended readings for this second Sunday of Advent) was included in the material we covered in the daytime Disciple Bible Study group this week. Nobody arranged for this to happen – as I say, it’s a cosmic convergence. I think that has happened one other time over the past few years, but in addition to this remarkable coincidence – these words from Isaiah also inspired some of the music Diana had already arranged for the choir to sing this week. It’s not my intention to induce the rapture this morning, but we’ve got some powerful forces coming together today.

Like many powerfully poetic words, these words from Isaiah aren’t easy to comprehend, but they’ve had a powerful impact on people over many centuries. What we know of as the Book of Isaiah was actually written over the course of about 200 years – beginning in the middle of the 8th Century BCE and concluding in the early 6th Century BCE, so what we have are actually the words of more than one person who carried on the message of Isaiah. It’s sort of incomprehensible to us that someone would write a book without getting all the credit, but that was a different day, and a different economy. The people of Israel were much more communal than we are. They had a greater sense of community prosperity and community failure. Certainly they also understood individual achievement or debacle and individual fortune or misfortune, but they had these national trends, policies, and practices that either put them in good standing or set them on a course for disaster.

The prophets were those who could see where the nation was heading and they provided an interpretation of why they were going there. This prophet Isaiah spoke out against the extent of injustice within the nation of Israel and the folly of creating unholy alliances with neighboring pagan states. Isaiah called for people to be faithful to the God of Israel, but they didn’t do that so well, and when they were overrun by the Babylonians Isaiah helped them understand that to be a consequence of their unfaithfulness.

Many of the Israelites were sent in to exile in Babylon, and then when Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon, it was Isaiah who identified that as an act of God that would enable the Israelites to return to Israel and to restore Jerusalem. That is the context for today’s passage. These words of comfort and restoration were for the people who had been in exile and who were being provided a way to return to the land they called home.

To study the book of Isaiah is to try to get your mind around the faith and the politics and the economy and the sociology of people who were living in the middle east about 2600 years ago. It’s not easy for us to understand, and it’s not entirely obvious what bearing those words have on our lives today, but they serve to remind me how connected we also are to the fate of our larger community.

Certainly we all have our individual issues, and most of us are trained to become entirely focused on the details of our individual lives. How well we are doing as individuals is far more important to most of us than how the national economy fares. Where we are headed isn’t nearly as important to most of us as where we are right now and how things look for the immediate future.

And I think this reflects one of our corporate or communal beliefs. I think we believe God is more attentive to us as individuals than to the world in general. I don’t think we are inherently unfair people. I don’t think any of us want to prevent anyone from acquiring wealth, but I don’t think any of us really want to think about what the world would look like if everyone in the world had as many cars and drove around as much as most of us do. I don’t think we want to imagine what kind of pressure it would put on our natural resources if everyone in the world lived in homes as large and as well heated and cooled as most of us have. I don’t think any of us want to limit the comforts of the millions of people who live in squalor across the globe, but the truth is we can’t drill deep enough to run all of the power plants and to fill all the tanks of the cars if everyone had what most of us have.

Our economy seems pretty stable. Most of us don’t anticipate that it’s going to crumble anytime soon. In fact many of us who are the beneficiaries of it’s good fortune trust it to take care of us, but when I read this article about the unsustainable nature of our global economy I felt like I was reading something that could have been written by the prophet Isaiah. And not the one who spoke of comfort, but the one who warned of looming exile. It reminded me that while we all operate our own little enterprises and maintain our own personal financial portfolios with various degrees of success – we are all citizens of the same planet – and there are no borders when it comes to environmental collapse.

Now, I know we’re approaching Christmas. It’s the season to hang lights, eat large, and max-out the credit card. I don’t mean to play the role of the Grinch who stole Christmas. In fact I probably love the extravagance of Christmas as much as anyone, but I’m also troubled by our corporate unwillingness to engage in serious examination of where our economic policies are leading us. And I’m not just talking about the failure of any one political party to see where we are headed. The truth is the global economy is unsustainable. We assume there will always be more of what we need, but the earth is only so big, and the bubble we call our atmosphere is actually very thin. God’s not making any new water, and we can’t send our toxic waste to the moon. We know what we have to work with and we aren’t doing a great job of managing it.

I’m no prophet. I’m not an economist either, but I believe the people who are doing the math and telling us that we need to find a new way to live together on this big round ball we call home. What I do know is that this world is a beautiful place to live in so many ways, and I believe there are currently too many people who aren’t able enjoy it’s fruits and if we aren’t careful there won’t be much left for those who have not yet arrived.

I don’t just believe we are headed for doom. I believe I don’t know what the future holds. I also believe our chances for a vibrant future are greatly improved if we will make more room for Jesus in our hearts. I don’t believe Jesus is going to magically prevent us from experiencing any kind of environmental, political, or economic disaster, but I do believe that if we will seek to be near to Jesus, and to trust in his abiding presence we will be more equipped to deal with the challenges that face us as the human family.

I believe it’s people who truly love Jesus who are the most likely to push to find new and better ways for us to live together on this planet. We need good scientists in this world who can do the math and study the data, but I believe it’s going to be the people who love God and who love their neighbors as themselves who will have the courage to let go of old patterns of behavior and embrace the new world that we are approaching.

We aren’t in charge of this planet – we’ve just been invited to stay here for a while, and we need to be as hospitable as possible for everyone involved. That’s the kind of economy Christian discipleship demands.

As I indicated earlier – I enjoy this overindulgent season as much as anyone, and I’m probably not going to do anything differently than I have in the past, but I’m also trying to think about the future, and how to find this illusive path to global regeneration. Individually we are sort helpless to bring about the kind of changes that our world is crying out to experience, but there are ways that we can be more helpful than hurtful, and we need to be in search of those opportunities.

Wise investments take on a whole new meaning when you take the words of Jesus to heart, and when you think of the Kingdom of God as being your dream community. Don’t think of Advent as just the beginning of a new religious cycle of events – think of it as the beginning of a new way of living on earth – I believe that is the kind of conversion God most desires.

Amen.

Blue Sunday
Mark 13:24-37

13:24 “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, 25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. 28 “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. 29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. 31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. 32 “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. 34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. 35 Therefore, keep awake–for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, 36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

In the 1940s, my grandparents built a little lake and lake-house in the woods up on Crowley’s Ridge. To get there you would turn off Highway 64B about 3 miles east of Wynne onto a dirt road that wound through an apple orchard. When you came out of the orchard you would go down a short piece and then cross a low-water bridge (which is basically a slab of concrete that the creek flows both over and under) – then you would climb this steep hill that felt like it went straight up. When you got to the crest of the hill you had to hope there was a road on the other side and there was. There was a one lane path on top of a levee that cut across the lake, and the last adventure was to cross a narrow metal bridge that went over a cut in the levee that connected the two sides of the lake.

You may not fully visualize this trek, but what you need to understand is that while this piece of property wasn’t very far from town it was quite a journey to get there. It wasn’t exactly treacherous, but it tested your nerves to drive through the creek, up a steep hill with a blind pinnacle and across a bridge that wasn’t much wider than a car. And it was worth the effort. It was a wonderful little spot on the planet.

I did a lot of fishing out there with my grandfather, and as I was growing up my parents arranged many gatherings out there with other families with kids during summer evenings which was great – even though it was a spooky place for a kid at night. My family and I never spent the night out there, but it had two little bedrooms and a bathroom with a metal shower stall. It was a great little get-away place, and I loved going out there.

One summer when I was in college I convinced my parents to let my friend, Richard, and I stay out there. They didn’t really like the idea, but they let us, and it was an interesting experience. Honestly, it remained a somewhat frightening place to be at night, but it was fun to live in that relatively exotic location. The cabin had running water and electricity, but there wasn’t a land line for a phone out there, and of course cell phones were unimaginable in the late 70’s. So between the circuitous route and the lack of communication you felt pretty isolated when you were out there.

Near the end of that summer I left town for a couple of weeks, and when I got back I decided to ride my bicycle out there one afternoon to check on things. I got out there and when I walked in I encountered what can almost be described as a bad apocalyptic vision. The cabin was in total disarray. Most of the wooden furniture was stacked up in one corner with magazine pages wadded and stuffed in various places between the pieces – ready for torching you might say. Liquor advertisements had been torn from magazines and stuck on the walls where pictures had formerly been hanging, and in other places there was white paint randomly brushed on the dark paneled walls.

There was sort of a cot in the middle of the main room under a ceiling fan, and the door that led to the back part of the cabin where the bedrooms and bathroom were was shut – which was unusual. I walked over to the kitchen area of the big room, and that’s when I noticed that there was a pan of water boiling on the stove.

That was the moment I decided I needed to get out of there. Needless to say, I rode home pretty quickly. I called the sheriff’s office and they made arrangements for me to ride out there with a couple of officers. We tore out there in the squad car and they entered the cabin with guns drawn. They even kicked open the door to those back rooms in that classic cop-fashion, but it wasn’t latched so they didn’t have to break anything. Nobody was there, but they examined the situation and asked me several questions. And as the main officer was writing up the report and going over the facts of the situation I came to realize how close to an episode of Mayberry this was because the officer suddenly looked up at me and said, You know – I believe that guy’s been staying out here!

I don’t know if they ever found the person who had created that odd mess. At some point they told us a drifter had been picked up in a nearby town who had been charged with arson and they suspected it was the same person. It was an unfortunate situation that sort of ruined my desire to spend any more nights out there. We cleaned up the place, but it was never quite the same for me. It’s still out there, but it’s in a terrible state of disrepair.

I’m sorry to spend such a long time telling a relatively trivial story, but what this story illustrates to me is the way in which the beauty and the belligerence of this world are so intertwined. That place was wonderful, but it was also unnerving. It was near town, but when you were out there you could feel pretty cut-off from everyone else. I always imagined it would be a good place for a deranged person to hang out, and sure enough it was.

The reality of our situation is that we live in a world where the beauty and the ugliness of life are never far removed from the other. The hard edges of life are rarely far removed from our great joys. About 10 years after my grandparents built their wonderful retreat my grandmother was in a car accident and she spent the last 20 years of her life as a quadriplegic and unable to take care of a spot she dearly loved. There is no way to keep the bad times at bay – but the opposite is also true. When we are in the midst of trouble we aren’t beyond the reach of deliverance.

Mark, the gospel writer, was addressing his words to people who were living in very harsh circumstances, and he was writing about a person who was the victim of the cruel hand of power hungry men who had no concern for the truth. Good times weren’t near to the followers of Jesus who were living in a territory that was occupied by Rome. But Jesus didn’t want anyone to ever think that the terrorism of the day would prevail. Jesus wanted his followers to always be watching for the glorious arrival of God’s delivering presence.

These words from our scripture lesson this morning are pretty cryptic. In fact it’s easy to just want to dismiss them. The sun and moon and stars remain in their place, and there has been no report of the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory – at least not any kind of report that a meteorologist could provide. But I don’t want to overlook the truth of these words. I believe the glorious delivering power of Jesus Christ continues to arrive. I believe it came to that first generation, and I believe it can come for us.

The little things that we construct in life to bring us pleasure are nice, but they never really last. We can generate some beautiful things in this world, but they can be torn up in an instant. There are no everlasting things on earth – Jesus reminds us that the earth itself is a fleeting thing. Probably the most persistent thing on earth is the presence of suffering, but even suffering isn’t the most eternally substantial thing. Jesus taught that the love of our eternal God is the only thing that endures forever, and for that we are to keep watch.

It’s not easy to imagine the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory, but I’m guessing it can look a lot like a person wearing gloves who comes with a broom and begins to clean up the debris of a vandalized business in Ferguson, MO. I’m thinking the power and glory of the Son of Man can also appear in the form of a thousand people standing peacefully on the street to express remorse over the death of another young black man and the need for our terrible racial dynamics to be rectified. I don’t believe the power and glory of the Son of Man ever takes the form of indiscriminate violence. But it can show up in great force in ways that we can see if we are paying attention.

We talk about the season of Advent as being that period of time in the church when we prepare for Christ to be born once again into our hearts and into our world. Certainly it’s reasonable to hold an element of joyful expectation in our hearts, but I also think it makes sense to acknowledge that we are in need of deliverance.

There are many distressing dynamics in our world in our cities in our families and in our very selves. Bad things are happening on every level of life, and we need some deliverance. We don’t need to ignore our problems, we need to acknowledge them, we need to seek God’s guidance for the wisdom to deal with them, and we need to watch for the ways in which God chooses to address them.

You would think the arrival of the Son of Man in the clouds with great glory would be obvious to everyone, but it turns out that God is more likely to sneak in unannounced. If we don’t pay attention to what God is doing and how we might get involved in God’s holy work of sharing peace and demanding justice we will not notice God’s coming until the timely opportunity is lost. I’m thinking Jesus can come and go without our awareness – and if we aren’t careful we will become the ones who are saying, Hey, I think that guy’s been staying here!

But he’ll be gone. And we will remain unchanged.

Something needs to happen. Something good needs to happen for us all, and something good can happen for us all if we will seek to pay attention to the eternal claim of God upon our world, our cities, our church, and our lives. These aren’t easy times, but times have never been easy, and the good news is that we have a God who offers deliverance. Pay attention, and you might well see what God has in mind.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Hope For The Doomed
Matthew 25:31-46

25:31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ 40 And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ 41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

There is a sense in which reading this passage of scripture from Matthew leaves me feeling doomed. If Jesus is in that multitude of people who are hungry, cold, wet, and in need of some hot coffee or cool water – he knows I have done my best to keep my distance from him. Jesus knows how many times I’ve walked right past him over the course of the last week and left him out on the street without enough clothes or a comfortable place to stay. I’ve provided a little food and a few clothes, but I’ve done my best to avoid getting overly involved. I sure haven’t gone to see him in prison. The truth is that I do a good job of maintaining good boundaries between myself and desperate people.

Consequently, this passage leaves me feeling sort of doomed. Damned to hell I suppose. A couple of weeks ago I read a passage from a sermon that was composed by Rev. Dr. Augustus Winfield (the original namesake of this facility) who described hell in a powerfully graphic manner, and some of the language he used came right out of this very passage. He talked about hell being that place where the devil and his angels go to burn in eternity. I didn’t have access to his entire sermon, so I don’t really know what he said would land you in that eternally horrible place, but I feel sure his image of eternal punishment was influenced by this very passage of scripture.

And what jumps out at me this morning is just how well qualified I am to be in the ranks of the devils angels. I’m sure I don’t know all the ways in which I’ve turned my back on people who have needed my help, but I could give you a pretty good list of those I know I’ve ignored, and that doesn’t bode well for my inclusion in heaven.

I continue maintain my hope that the circumstances we face at the end of our lives on earth aren’t as black and white as this passage might indicate, but Jesus didn’t hesitate to point out that there are consequences to the choices we make. How we treat one another leaves us looking like sheep – or goats. Welcomed in to God’s glory – or cast into a very unpleasant place.

And I’m doomed. I don’t just ignore the people Jesus most closely identified with – I fail in so many other ways. I once attended a gathering of preachers where we were directed to break up in to small groups and discuss the fine points of tithing to the church. The conversation among my peers left me feeling like it was assumed that we were all members of that rare and highly disciplined group. They seemed to think it was only lay-people who failed to give the full 10% to the church, and I felt compelled to own up to the fact that I wasn’t hitting the high bar of 10%. I still don’t quit hit that magic double digit.

They didn’t put me out of the group, but someone raised the question of whether or not a true tithe required a person to pay 10% of their gross income or 10% of their net income after paying taxes. At that point one of my clergy brothers said that if you aren’t paying 10% of your gross income to the church you are stealing from God. I took his assessment sort of personally, so I raised my hand and announced that I was a thief — which sort of killed the conversation for moment. I may be a thief, but I’m not much of a liar.

And I’m certain I’ve got what it takes to be a goat. I have surpassed all of the requirements. The devil and his angels know my name and where I live. I’m doomed if Jesus scores us accurately.

But who can pass the test of perfect compassion?

Based on this passage of scripture, if we were to divide the room between those of us who know ourselves to be goats and those who would self-identify as sheep I’m guessing there would be more seats available in the sheepfold. Now I may be wrong about that. I know this is an exceptional congregation. And you may be holding out great hope that I will one day become as sheeplike as the rest of you, but I’m telling you – it’s more likely that it will snow in that eternally hot place before I let go of all my goatlike ways.

I haven’t given up on getting better. I embrace the Wesleyan notion of going on to perfection, but there’s a long way to go on that journey. Fortunately my hope doesn’t depend on my ability to be as compassionate as God calls me to be. My hope is rooted in the perfect compassion of God, and God’s willingness to remain with imperfect people.

One of the things that stands out to me in this passage is how surprised everyone was to find out how they were viewed by God. Both the sheep and the goats were amazed to find out how their lives were being measured. We can’t act surprised to find out that it’s important to care for one another and particularly important to watch out for people who are especially vulnerable. It’s no secret that it’s important to help those who are in no position to return our favors, but how that works out for us is rather mysterious.

I’ve given you a hint of the ways in which I’ve failed to be as compassionate as I know I should be, but I als know how amazing it feels to do what Jesus asked us to do. The surprising thing is not just how badly we can fail to love our neighbors as ourselves. The truly surprising thing to me is how rewarding it is to care for someone who’s suffering.

I don’t believe this passage today is a warning of how we are judged by God at the culmination of time or even at the end of our own lives. I believe this little story reveals how perfectly Jesus can be with us in the normal course of a day if we will live with some sensitivity to those who are around us. This isn’t a story that exposes the nature of divine scorekeeping. This is a story that reveals the surprising way we come to experience the presence of Jesus in our midst when we take those steps out of our own self-absorbed lives and in to the life of someone who is wounded, weary, or neglected.

None of us have the capacity to fix the life of somebody else, and it’s good to recognize those sacred boundaries that exist between us all, but a compassionate word can feel a lot like the breath of God to a person who is hurting, and I believe God finds ways to bless everyone who is involved in those holy moments.

Our king doesn’t reward with public pronouncements or grand positions. Our king provides us with rewards that don’t expire or become inaccessible. God blesses us in really surprising ways when we engage in this holy work of being compassionate to one another at critical moments.

We do fail. And there are consequences to those failures. When we fail to live we compassion for other people we have to spend more time alone with our selfish selves – which is probably not that much different from an eternity with the devil and his angels.

We aren’t perfect, but we are loved by a God who doesn’t want us to live in isolation from one another. God wants us to be happy, and God knows we need to experience the joy that comes with caring for other people. We aren’t perfect, but we aren’t doomed. Jesus knows that we need to learn to give of ourselves, and God will always provide us with those holy opportunities to flee the wrath of selfish isolation and in to the joy of God’s holy herd.

Thanks be to God.
Amen

God Talk
Matthew 25:1-13

25:1 “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3 When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; 4 but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5 As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 6 But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7 Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. 8 The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9 But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ 10 And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. 11 Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12 But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ 13 Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

When I sit down to prepare a sermon I usually take a look at what I’ve had to say in the past about whatever passage of scripture I’m intending to use for my sermon text. I always find something in those previous sermons that makes me cringe, but there’s often something worth salvaging and somehow repackaging. I’m what you might call old-school or hopelessly stubborn in my preaching routine, but I like to use the lectionary (the standardized readings for each Sunday) for my preaching texts, and as I’ve pointed out before, I generally use the gospel lesson. The lectionary cycle repeats every three years, and I think it’s accurate to say that I’ve worked through that cycle at least five times, but I couldn’t find a single sermon on today’s text.

Now part of that has to do with not wanting to dig through the hand-written sermons of my first few years of preaching – which I suspect would be particularly cringe-worthy, and there are some lost years in my computer files, but I have relatively accurate files for the last twenty years, and I don’t have a single sermon on this text. And it’s not because I read this text and decided to preach from one of Paul’s epistles or the Psalm for the day. I like this text – it’s odd in a good way. And it lends itself to saying whatever you want to say.

It’s a story that portrays one group of people as being wise and another group as foolish. Five of these bridesmaids were conscientious and got in to the party while the other five were dullards who got shut out. This is a story that emphasizes the value of wisdom, but it doesn’t really define the nature of wisdom, so I get to be the one to do that. What a great preaching text – I can’t believe I’ve missed out on it for all those years!

What this text does is to raise the question of what it takes to enter the kingdom of heaven. It doesn’t answer that question, but it makes you ponder that question. Jesus told this story in order to kindle desire to abide in God’s kingdom – to be one of those wise people who pays attention to essential matters and who gets ushered in to the grand banquet. Who wants to be one of those people who thought they were ready, but were shown to be deficient at the critical moment and failed to get in. This is a story that illustrates the reality of divine judgment and the consequences of spiritual failure.

Of course whenever you start talking about the possibility of spiritual failure our minds often go to the concept of hell. And I want to talk about that for a moment. I don’t know about the young people in the room, but people of my generation and older have been handed a pretty clear portrayal of hell, and you don’t want to go there!. For many of us, hell has been defined as the place you go when you die if you haven’t made the right arrangements with God. Many people continue to carry around that understanding, and I’m not in a position to say there’s nothing to that. I haven’t been provided with an indisputable memo from God on this matter, but my sense is that the frightening possibility of spending eternity in hell no longer has the credibility that it once did. I don’t think people fear the eternal flames of hell the way they once did.

I don’t have any research to back up my supposition, but I’m in touch with a few people, and I don’t sense that there’s as much fear of eternal damnation as there once was. And frankly, I’m not unhappy about that. I’m not saying I don’t believe there are consequences to living a spiritually ignorant life, but I don’t find that traditional portrayal of hell to be particularly believable or helpful. I think we need a new way of thinking about the consequences of spiritual failure because I think we’re living in a time where we’ve just done away with the old package without an adequate replacement.

And losing the fear of hell has been hard on the church. I suspect there’s a powerful connection between the erosion of fear of spending eternity in hell with the decline of attendance in church. I don’t know of any academic studies on this, but I’m inclined to believe there’s some truth to it. Fear of hell is powerfully motivating.

I dare say some fear of hell helped construct this very building. As many of you know, this church was originally named Winfield Methodist Church and it was named after Augustus R. Winfield. Dr. Winfield was the pastor of the second Methodist Church in Little Rock from 1880 until 1884, and that was the church that eventually became Winfield Methodist Church. And here’s an excerpt from one of his sermon’s:

Hell is a lake of fire and brimstone, prepared for the devil and his angels, and all that disobey God shall be cast into this lake, and burned forever. After you have been in hell one thousand years, the great clock shall strike one; but eternity has just begun, you shall burn forever.

I found this colorful excerpt from a book called Two Centuries of Methodism in Arkansas by Nancy Britton. It was noted that Dr. Winfield was known as an effective fundraiser. I’m guessing he could get pretty clear about what might happen if you weren’t as generous as he and God expected.

Fear of eternal hell was an effective preaching tool for a long time, but preachers like me in churches like this don’t have access to that ominous possibility any more. And like I say, I don’t regret that, but I’m also thinking we need to reclaim some urgency to exercise spiritual wisdom. This parable makes it pretty clear that Jesus wanted us to have some fear of missing out on something essential. His message was that people who live like those foolish bridesmaids will miss out on life in the kingdom of heaven.

A very notable American passed away last week. His name was Tom Magliozzi. I don’t know if he was Click or Clack, but he was one of the so-called Tappet Brothers of that groundbreaking radio show: “Car Talk”. Tom was the brother with the really big laugh. If you’ve never heard that show you need to tune in to our local public radio station, KUAR FM 89.1 on a Saturday morning at 9am and listen to one of the reruns. They stopped producing new shows in 2012 when Tom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but they haven’t stopped airing old shows.

In spite of the way Tom portrayed himself, he was no dummy – technically, emotionally or spiritually. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics, politics, and engineering from MIT, an MBA from Northeastern University, and a PhD in marketing from Boston University. He wrote a short online biography of himself, which is really entertaining to read, and he said the thing that drove him to pursue all of those degrees was the thought that he really wouldn’t have to work if he could become a college professor.

Tom’s theory about that didn’t turn out to be correct, but he was a person who tried very hard to live life to it’s fullest, and he wasn’t afraid to quit a job that didn’t feel right. One of his early jobs after he finished MIT was at a company that was about an hour away from his beloved fair city of Cambridge, MA. Tom was driving a little MGA at the time, and he was nearly smashed by a tractor-trailer rig. He said that as he sat in his car shaking and recovering from what felt like a near-death experience he asked himself this simple question, If I had bought the farm out there on Rt. 128 today, wouldn’t I be bent at all the LIFE that I had missed?

He drove to work, walked in to his boss’s office and quit. He said his boss was convinced that he had taken a job with a competitor. He said his boss couldn’t understand the actual truth. And the truth was that life was the issue. He didn’t like what that commute was doing to his life.

Things didn’t automatically fall in to place for Tom. He spent a good amount of time unemployed and underemployed, but he didn’t want to waste his life. He was in search of something more and a lot of people benefited from his unwillingness to live an unintentional life. He and his brother Ray eventually put together this radio show that did as much to soothe people’s souls as it did to help them repair their cars.

I don’t know that it’s possible to create urgency for ourselves. Sometimes it takes a brush with death or disaster to get our attention and to get us focused on the pursuit of life. Maybe we need to retain some fear of hell to keep us in search of the kingdom of God. I don’t think we need to worry so much about where we will abide after we die, but I’m inclined to think that we’re existing in hell when we don’t pay attention to the essentials of life.

I think what Jesus is wanting us to know is that it’s entirely possible to be unprepared for life in the kingdom of God. It’s possible to be very thoughtless about what it takes to be ready for life.

Earlier I said I was happy to get to define what it means to be wise, but I don’t know what wisdom may require of you. What I do know is that it’s not the same for all of us, and it’s not so easy for any of us to chart a wise course. Finding the course of true life requires us all to exercise courage, persistence, sensitivity, and attention to all the ways in which God’s truth is made known to us.

Sometimes it’s very clear. But there’s not a single answer for everyone. Tom Magliozzi knew that he didn’t need to be spending two hours a day driving to and from a place that didn’t feel like home. For someone else it might be essential to continue to make an arduous daily journey to a difficult place. The fact that the foolish bridesmaids couldn’t borrow oil from the wise ones says to me that we can’t count on the solutions of others to provide answers for ourselves.

The journey in to the kingdom of God is a difficult trek. It can also be long and boring and annoying. But to avoid the discipline of seeking God’s kingdom – to settle for some kind of life that may not be great, but is predictable and safe and full of nice distractions is to settle for some kind of hell. To settle for anything less than the true life that Jesus came to offer is to decline an invitation to the banquet.

I don’t believe Augustus was right about the geography of hell, but I know it feels like hell when you get left out of a party, and I don’t want that to happen to any of us. Pay attention, be prepared, love God, serve your neighbors, and you will enjoy the banquet!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Costume Religion
Matthew 23:1-12

23:1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; 3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. 6 They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 7 and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. 8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. 9 And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father–the one in heaven. 10 Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

Before you think too poorly of the Pharisees I want you to think about this: the Pharisaic movement developed within Judaism in much the same way the Methodist movement grew out of the Anglican Church. Some of the same sad dynamics existed within both of those religious environments that gave rise to these reform movements – and the Pharisaic movement started out as a revitalization movement. Just as John Wesley was driven to confront the way in which Christianity had become an enclave for privileged members of 18th Century English society, the early leaders of the Pharisaic movement sought to turn Judaism in to a more vibrant exercise of faith for all the people of Israel instead of a dead set of practices that were carried out by the aristocratic priests.

The Pharisaic movement only came to life within Judaism about 150 years before Jesus was born, and it was very much a reformation movement. Around that time the faith of Israel was pretty much directed by elite members of Jewish society who were known as the Sadducees, and for the average person in Israel, proper observance of Judaism was reduced to showing up at the Temple for the major feasts of the year and making the proper sacrifices. Judaism was directed by the priests who were handed those privileged positions by the aristocratic leaders of the Sadducees. They only recognized the Torah, or the first five books of the Hebrew bible as being authoritative, and they didn’t recognize the value of any commentary on those books. Under those circumstances, the faith of Israel had become very static and removed from the hands of common people.

In a similar fashion, being a member of the Anglican Church in the early 1700s was largely an exercise in being a proper member of English society. There was very little effort to connect faith in God with life on earth. The role of the priest was to baptize and to bury those who were considered to be worthy of such attention. The church of England exhibited little interest in the plight of the impoverished members of society, and it offered little resistance to the social evils of the day – which were rampant.

It was in to a situation where faith in God had become largely divorced from any kind of outreach to the world that John Wesley came along and put the two back together. Consequently he was largely shut out of the cathedrals of his day, but he created a huge movement among people who were hungry to hear the good news that Jesus Christ came for all people. And he connected faith in God with services for the poor. John Wesley moved the church out in to the neighborhoods of the people who weren’t welcome in the cathedrals. He didn’t intend to start a new denomination within Christianity, but what he did was too large to be contained within the Anglican Church.

In a very similar way, the Pharisees moved Judaism away from the Temple and in to the hands of the people. Some have described the Pharisaic movement was an exercise in democracy. It represented a movement away from a priestly led institution in to a movement among lay-people to study and to connect their faith with their daily lives. The Pharisees emphasized the importance of practices that anyone could do. Pharisees were average members of society who sought to educate themselves on the Mosaic tradition, and they honored sacred writings other than the Torah. What the Pharisees taught was very appealing to the common people of Israel because it made the faith more accessible to anyone – at least at first. It clearly began as a reform movement, but it became a nightmare.

What started out as an exercise in encouraging people to learn and to study turned in to an institution that over-emphasized the importance of purity and imposed endless demands upon people. Instead of just going to the Temple two or three times a year to give the priest their due, the Pharisees called people out for all sorts of technical violations. It was the Pharisees who condemned Jesus for not washing his hands properly, and doing things like gathering food and healing on the Sabbath. That reform movement was in need of reformation by the time Jesus came along, but it grew out of something that once had vitality.

There aren’t perfect parallels between the Pharisees of Jesus’ day and the United Methodists of our day. I think it’s a lot easier to be a Methodist than it was to be a Pharisee, but I think it’s worth noting that both communities began as reform movements within institutions that needed reformation. I’m happier to call myself a Methodist than to wear the label of a Pharisee – I’m proud to say we’ve got them beat when it comes to being less religiously pretentious, but I don’t think it’s ever easy to see self-deception.

The way the gospels are written it’s easy for us to see the ways in which the Pharisees wore their religion a bit too proudly. Matthew clearly wanted us to see the ways in which the Pharisees over-emphasized the wrong things and were ignorant of essential things, but for the most part they were people who were wanting to wear their religion well. There may well have been some who were consciously hypocritical – those who were out to maintain their position as leaders of the religious community regardless of what they knew to be true, but I’m guessing there were many Pharisees who were genuinely distressed by Jesus – of the way he violated what they believed to be important.

And that’s what scares me about being an Elder in an institution that began as a movement. And that should concern everyone who is attached to a church – even a church that became reborn as a new and more socially conscious church.

I know Halloween is over. I know I shouldn’t be trying to scare you this morning, but this is a scary passage of scripture! Jesus was warning us not to be like the religious people of his day – people who wore the costume of faith in God without having the inner understanding of such faith.

Today is the day we celebrate All Saints Day in the church. It’s traditionally the day we acknowledge our loved ones who have passed away, and that’s an important thing that we do. We don’t know all the ways in which other people enrich our lives, but we do know we are touched by the lives of other people. Communities of faith in particular are guided by those who have gone before us, and while we know those people weren’t perfect, we learn a lot from the ways that others have lived. I think the reason we have such a day in the church is to acknowledge our debt to those who have gone before us.

We have all been touched by many people in very personal ways, but there are some indivituals who have been very influential over many of us. I’m mindful today of the way our spiritual ancestor, John Wesley, helped steer the Anglican Church away from being such a deadly club-like institution in to a vibrant community that helped people develop actual faith in God. John Wesley is truly one of the saints of our the church, and one of the best contributions that he made to Christian theology is his emphasis on our ability to grow in faith. He rejected the notion of Christianity as being a static rank you obtained when you made the right confession. Wesley believed faith in Christ was the pursuit of a lifetime. He believed we could grow in our knowledge and understanding of God and that there was always more to be learned and experienced.

Wesley was an advocate of practicing what he called the means of grace, which included things like attending worship, reading scripture, partaking of Holy Communion, fasting, praying, attending to the needs of others, engaging in spiritually edifying conversation, and a few other outwardly good things. Wesley believed it would help our spiritual lives develop if we would engage in these rather physical activities, and I believe there’s some truth here.

You might argue that doing these outward things are really no different from what the Pharisees were doing when they wore garments and accessories that were supposed to remind them of what they were all about, and there’s probably some truth to that. I know there have been some terrible people who regularly attended church, read their Bibles religiously, and took communion whenever it was offered. Outward signs of faith never provide an accurate picture of what exists in the heart, but I think it would take an incredibly hard-hearted person to tend to the sick, visit the imprisoned, and feed the hungry on a regular basis without becoming a more gracious person.

But of course, there are no guaranteed avenues to faith. As surely as many of the Pharisees lost their way as they sought to avoid the ditch the Sadducees were in, we Methodists need to remember that it’s possible for us to wear equally ridiculous costumes of faith. In fact I think we all know that some of our official doctrines stand out like bad costume jewelry, but our task is not to just get the costume looking right. Our task will always be to seek the relationship that the outward practices represent.

Our goal is to be more righteous than the Pharisees and more compassionate than the Methodists. Our hope is not to become official saints, but to join the endless list of unofficial saints who’s lives weren’t guided by the goal of looking right, but who truly yearned to get it right.

Gratefully we aren’t alone in this process – God is with us. Pulling for us, guiding us, forgiving us, and strengthening us.

Thanks be to God for providing us with the opportunity to wear authentic garments of faith.
Amen.

Equipped For the Journey
Matthew 22:34-46

22:34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” 41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: 42 “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” 43 He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”‘? 45 If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” 46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Last Spring I attended a mandatory Gathering of the Elders at 1st UMC in Jacksonville. For those of you who aren’t familiar with United Methodist lingo – an Elder is an ordained minister. You might say it’s a person that’s been admitted in to the United Methodist preacher’s union. And there’s hardly anything that gets United Methodist preachers as excited as a semi-mandatory meeting on a Friday morning. A semi-mandatory meeting is a meeting you’re supposed to attend but there aren’t any consequences if you don’t. But I showed up, and honestly, I thought my four-shot Americano would be the most stimulating thing I would encounter that morning, but we had a presenter named Doug Hester who captured my attention. Doug Hester is an ordained Lutheran pastor who works primarily in pastoral counseling. And he’s a student of the school of thought known as the Murray Bowen Family Systems Theory.

Murray Bowen was a psychiatrist who developed a method of psycho-therapy that’s rooted in looking at the way in which individuals are shaped by their family dynamics. He created a way of doing therapy with individuals, families, businesses or any other type of organization that’s based on identifying the ways in which patterns from the past continue to play out in the present, and how those patterns keep individuals or organizations stuck.

I had heard of this method of analyzing situations. There’s a book called Generation to Generation, by Edwin Friedman that’s based on the research of Murray Bowen. Many of my preaching peers purchased this book a few years ago, and a few of them actually read it. I had been hearing people talk about this way of understanding church dynamics for years, but I had never actually read anything about it or looked in to it.

Maybe it was my low level of expectation that set me up for a positive experience, but as I say, I found Rev. Hester’s presentation to be compelling. Doug Hester isn’t what you would call a dynamic speaker. He’s sort of soft spoken and academic in his presentation, but I was gripped by much of what he said.

One thing he said was that everybody gets stuck. And by everybody he was talking about individuals, couples, families, churches, and every other type of living organization. Getting stuck is just one of those things that happens to us. And when you get stuck you really can’t think your way out of the situation. It’s hard to think your way out of a situation because it’s hard to not focus on the things you already know, and the things you already know are probably the things that got you in to the situation you are in.

I don’t know if this is actually what he said, but this is what I thought I heard him saying, and what really got my attention was when he said the best way to get unstuck is to go on an adventure. And what he meant by an adventure is not just a physical journey. What I understood him to say is that you go on an adventure when you go in a direction that you haven’t gone before.

Heading out in a new direction can be disruptive to a family, or a couple, or a church, or any other system that has achieved a form of stability, and disruption is hard to deal with, but it can also lead to health.

And I think this is a great way to understand what transpired between Jesus and the religious establishment of his day. Jesus was distressed by the way the faith of Israel had become so distorted. Judaism had become this odd mix of practices that were driven by contradictory demands. The faith practices of the day were largely shaped by people who were overly focused on hyper-religious purity – people like the Pharisees, but it was also informed by people who were driven by the need to comply with the demands of Roman occupation – people like the High Priests and Sadducees, and there were also these people who had replaced their love for God with fervor for the Jewish nation – people like the zealots. Judaism had become a strange creature, and Jesus had become very frustrating to every arm of that odd body.

Representatives from all of these groups had offered challenges to Jesus, culminating in today’s passage, where the Pharisees asked him what he considered to be the greatest commandment, and he gave them a straight answer. He told them what was most essential to God, and in spite of the way that all of the various interest groups had replaced the most fundamental teaching of their faith with lesser agendas, no one could dispute the answer that Jesus provided.

Jesus reminded them of what they were to be about, and in so doing he identified what he was all about. Jesus was never confused about what was most essential, and that’s what drove him to do what he did. You might say this agenda to love God and neighbor was the basic equipment that Jesus took on his journey, and it proved to be the adventure that Israel needed.

I like a good adventure. That may be why I liked what I heard Rev. Hester say at the Gathering of the Elders last spring. I had been contemplating a bicycle trip before I went to that workshop, but his words put me over the edge – so to speak. It’s not that I was feeling particularly stuck at the time, but it’s easy for me to believe that most of us are pretty stuck most of the time. We all get comfortable in our routines, and we don’t even know what motivates us to do what we do. I don’t generally think we are badly motivated, but I think we are often unconscious of why we do what we do.

The truth is that my two weeks on a bicycle didn’t provide me with any great revelations about what motivates me or what I’m doing with my life, but it was nice to step out of my routine for a little while. And I think it did leave me wanting to be a bit more intentional about how I operate.

And there’s one thing I know I learned from that trip – having the right equipment makes all the difference. I didn’t do an over-abundance of training for my trip. I have a little body maintenance routine that I’ve been doing for years, so I wasn’t totally out of shape for my trip, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on my bike before I left. In fact the longest ride I went on before I embarked on my trip was 37 miles. So I knew two things on the day of my departure. I knew my body could hold up for at least half the distance I planned to go on the first day of my trip, and I knew I had good equipment.

I had a good bicycle. I knew I could trust my bicycle to hold up under the weight of my stuff. I knew I had good bags that the rain wouldn’t penetrate, and I knew I had good racks to hold those bags. I had a great little holder for my iphone that provided me with relatively good information about where I was going, and I had an extra battery to keep my phone going. I had new high-pressure tires that were very durable but with little tread, so I knew there was a minimal amount of friction between me and the road, and I was happy about that because I knew I needed all the help I could get. And I spent a good amount of time contemplating and shopping for the clothes I would wear. I had to strike the perfect balance between comfort, durability, protection, visibility, and fashion.

I probably spent more time getting my equipment together than I did actually training for the ride, but I think that was time well-spent. I believe it was that good equipment that enabled me to keep going.

Now I also know that equipment isn’t everything. Better equipment is not going to improve my ability to play golf, but it could if I didn’t have decent equipment. I know it’s easier to hit a metal driver than a wooden driver. Having the right equipment is essential for most undertakings, and maybe it’s a stretch, but what I’m thinking is that the right concept of God is a powerful piece of equipment.

Knowing what’s most essential is a powerful tool. Remembering what Jesus said was the greatest commandment is what equips us to live intentional lives. Regular examination of the words of Jesus can help keep you from falling in to an unconscious pattern of living, and appealing to the Holy Spirit to illuminate his words can help you get out of those patterns when you do.

It’s not easy to stay focused on the most fundamental teaching of our faith. Just like the Israelites of Jesus’ day, we are vulnerable to the non-essential pressures of our day, and it’s easy for us to substitute those lesser causes and agendas that unconsciously guide our lives for the most important commandment that Jesus identified.

I’m not sure what question Jesus would ask us that would cause us to recognize our own faulty logic, but Jesus was able to do that to the Pharisees. He wasn’t able to cure them of their misguided agenda, but this question about the lineage of the messiah somehow gave them pause. Today’s scripture ends by saying they dared not ask him any more questions – they dared not ask because they were afraid of what they might find out.

Our spiritual wholeness depends on our ability to welcome the truth. Such wholeness is an elusive quest, and it can be a confusing journey. It’s so much easier to stay on familiar paths that take us to comfortable places than it is to go in a new direction, but we should never settle for comfort when there is the possibility for renewal. Jesus was provocative to the religious people of his day, and if he’s not somehow provoking to us we probably aren’t paying attention.

The journey of discipleship is far more interesting than we often allow it to be. I don’t believe we should ever stay home when we have the opportunity for an adventure, and that’s what we are offered by Jesus. Jesus invites us to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. The destination is true life, and we already have the only equipment we need. We have been given the greatest commandment – let’s not keep it hanging in the garage or buried in the closet any longer!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rendered To Life
Matthew 22:15-22

22:15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. 16 So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20 Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” 21 They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” 22 When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

Jesus touched a lot of nerves as he went about his ministry in Israel, and the tension was high when he arrived in Jerusalem for Passover. This is fourth week in which our Gospel lesson is set in the Temple during that huge annual festival and Jesus is addressing his Jewish adversaries. For those of you who can’t get enough of the same thing over and over, we’ll have the final of these encounters next week, but today we aren’t dealing with a parable or an allegory as we have for the last 3 weeks (but who’s counting). Today we’re looking at some straight dialogue, and this conversation had some interesting dynamics.

It was a remarkable thing for the Herodians and the Pharisees to collaborate on anything, but Jesus brought them together. Under normal circumstances the Pharisees and the Herodians couldn’t stand each other. The Herodians were Jews who supported the Roman occupancy of Israel. They were rewarded by Romans with positions of authority within Israel, and the Romans used the Herodians to collect the taxes and to help maintain the kind of order within Jewish society that the Romans desired.

Herodians were considered to be horrible collaborators by the Pharisees and the other sects within Israel who longed for independence from Rome. The Herodians and the Pharisees were as far apart on the political spectrum as they could be, but both of these interest groups were challenged and threatened by Jesus, so they got together to ask Jesus about the thing that always gets people stirred up – taxes.

The Herodians were beneficiaries of Jewish taxes. You might say the Romans provided them with lucrative government contracts. They managed the tax collection program, and they were appointed to the highest offices. The High Priest was actually appointed by the governor as were all of the other priestly positions associated with Temple functions in Jerusalem.

And the Pharisees hated those Roman taxes. The Pharisees were out to create religious purity within Israel, and they were highly offended by the control that Rome had over their state. They considered Roman coins to be dirty money because the Romans worshiped Ceasar, and they considered Herodians to be dirty collaborators. For the Pharisees, paying taxes to Rome was like bowing down to a false god. And they represented popular opinion within Israel. Not everyone who hated Roman taxes were associated with the Pharisees, but there were many different sects that felt the same way about those taxes.

So it was a rare day when the Herodians and the Pharisees got together on a plan, but neither of these groups had any affection for Jesus. The Herodians considered him to be an insurrectionist, and the Pharisees considered him to be an infidel. Both groups feared his popularity, so they shared this interest in getting him to say something unfortunate. This was an interesting political alliance that approached Jesus to ask him about taxes. They didn’t know what he was going to say, but they thought his answer would either result in his arrest or in the loss of his popular support. They thought they had him between that proverbial rock and a hard place.

I’m reminded of my friend who was once the pastor of a struggling congregation. It was a church that was largely financed by one couple, and they became unhappy with the nature of my friend’s preaching. My friend wasn’t hostile to the affluence of his primary contributor, but they didn’t see eye to eye on some things, and this couple got in touch with the District Superintendent about getting my friend moved to a different church. Unfortunately for the District Superintendent, when the word got out that my friend was going to be moved the bulk of the congregation let it be known that they would probably stop coming to that church. So the District Superintendent had to decide if he wanted to have a financially stable church with one family, or a poor church with a significant congregation.

I hate to own up to taking pleasure in the discomfort of others, but I was a little amused by the dilemma of that District Superintendent. I think the affluent couple ended up going to another UM church, where they were properly appreciated I’m sure, and they stuck that struggling congregation on with another church.

Religion, politics, and money – that’s a powerful brew. You mix those elements and you produce some interesting situations. It’s a combination that moves people to do unusual things, and it reveals raw agendas. When Jesus stepped in to the Temple people were compelled to decide what they valued the most, and much of what emerged wasn’t very pretty.

Newer versions of the Bible don’t use the word, render, to describe what Jesus said to his questioners. The New Revised Standard Version has Jesus saying that we should, give to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s and to God what is God’s, but older English translations say we should, render under to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s and to God what is God’s. I think this speaks to the fact that most of us are pretty far removed from any kind of rendering process, but older Americans were more familiar with the term.

I’ve never done any rendering, nor have I ever toured a rendering plant, but I’ve driven by one, and I can testify that it’s an aromatic process. A rendering plant is a place where they basically cook animal carcasses down until they are reduced to their elemental materials. It’s not a pleasant process to ponder, but it’s very useful in a utilitarian sense. I’m not saying the way we treat animals is right, but it happens and most of us probably use some products that are somehow connected to that process.

And our Jewish ancestors were very familiar with that process. In some ways the ancient Temple had as much in common with a slaughterhouse as it does with a church sanctuary, and holy rituals were very much connected to what we might think of as butchering and rendering. So I think it’s helpful for us to think about the rendering process. It was how they used to separate the most precious form of fat from the less valuable animal byproducts.

In some ways you can think of rendering as the process of reducing a creature down to it’s essential elements, and in a figurative sense, that’s a process that we sometimes find ourselves going through. Hard times put us in touch with what we are made of, so to speak, and that’s not an entirely bad thing to experience. A life crisis isn’t anything any of us would choose for ourselves or for others that we know and love, but it’s not a bad thing to recognize what we value most and love the dearest.

You might say Jesus created a crisis for the Jewish community, and what emerged from that crisis wasn’t all good. It turns out that there were some people who valued and loved the wrong things. Jesus revealed the truth about God, and there were these people who preferred their own illusions of God. There were people who loved their own sense of power more than anything else. When they were reduced to their essential elements they chose to serve themselves.

We live in a far different but an equally difficult world. In some ways it’s not as easy for us to identify the ways in which the demands of Ceasar are placed upon us. There aren’t people in this world who blatantly establish themselves as gods and ask others to bow down to them. That just doesn’t work so well anymore, but there are ways in which institutions and individuals continue to lord themselves over other people. And many of us often give unwitting support to these rivals to God in our world.

It’s not easy to recognize the ways in which we give our best to Ceasar and our leftovers to God, but I think this admonition from Jesus to render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar’s and to God that which is God’s, is a powerfully pertinent thing for us to ponder.

If we were to be reduced to our most essential elements what would be revealed. To whom do we give our best, and who is it that we reluctantly give what we must.

I think Jesus was acknowledging that there are these Ceasars in the world that must be fed. It’s all but impossible to not pay tribute to some ugly entities in this world, and I’m grateful that Jesus didn’t say to ignore Ceasar. Jesus said to give Ceasar what Ceasar deserves. Ceasar doesn’t deserve much, but you’ve got to give Ceasar what Ceasar is due.

And this sounds sort of easy, but it’s not. Ceasar wants our complete allegiance and Ceasar rewards that kind of attention. In many ways, if you want to do well in this world you’ve got to give your best to Ceasar, but if you want to find true life you give your best to God. I’m speaking very metaphorically here. In fact I’m being intentionally vague about what it means to serve Ceasar or to serve God because I don’t want Ceasar to get upset with me. And I don’t feel that bad about it because Jesus was a little vague in the way he responded to this situation. You need to exercise some shrew caution when you’re dealing with powerful and hateful individuals and institutions.

To whom we choose to give our best makes all the difference. It’s the difference between being rendered to death or rendered to life. I hope we will all find that narrow way of giving our best to God and what we must to the rest. Thanks be to God – Amen.

Our Properly Unpredictable God
Matthew 22:1-14

22:1 Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2 “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ 5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6 while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. 8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ 10 Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. 11 “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12 and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. 13 Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Last week I talked a little bit about the difference between an allegory and a parable. I pointed out that an allegory is generally sort of a straight story who’s fictional characters represent identifiable people or entities, and that a parable is a story that goes off in a strange direction in order to make you question your view of reality. This week’s story reveals how fuzzy the line can be between those two types of stories. What we have this week is a story with some strong allegorical features that concludes with a twist that’s fitting of a parable. So when you start reading this parable you think you know what it’s all about. You think you know who represents who in this story and how it’s going to play out, but the story ends with a bizarre twist. If you don’t find yourself saying: What?!! – you aren’t paying attention.

I mean the situation is that Jesus is in the temple and he knows the chief priests and the Pharisees and all of the other people who didn’t like his message and leadership style were plotting against him. He knows that he’s dealing with some biblically literate people, so he knew it wouldn’t be hard for his detractors to understand what he was saying. They knew that he was connecting them with that long line of false prophets and leaders who lead the people of Israel astray. This story of the wedding feast is a pretty transparent tale that identifies the current leaders of Israel as being like those guests who were invited to the king’s wedding banquet and then refused to show up.

This story portrays the kingdom of God as being a place where you are not likely to find the people who were originally invited to be a part of God’s holy community. It reveals the ongoing tradition of abuse within the leadership of Israel and it identifies God’s rejection of those false leaders in a rather graphic way. You think you know how this story is going to end with the king inviting to the banquet those who were formerly uninvited. That is in fact what happens, and the king seems pleased that these new guests actually show up. It seems to be such a nice story for people like us who were never a part of the community that originally rejected Jesus, but out of no-where the king sees someone who isn’t dressed properly and he has his guards grab that man, bind him, and throw him in to an entirely unpleasant place.

Did anyone expect this to be the way this story would end? Does this not make you wonder what kind of organization you’ve stepped in to?

You may have come here this morning in search of some kind of refuge from the terrible stories that inundate our digital news-feed-lines – you come in here in search of some respite from the world and you hear a terrifying tale that seems to portray God as being far less hospitable than you would expect from the One we call the Author of Salvation and the Giver of Grace.

Luckily this is a story that utilizes fiction and hyperbole to illustrate a point – this isn’t a literal portrayal of how God treats houseguests, but the truth is that following Jesus is not a free ride down a lovely lane through a peaceful valley. The Judeo-Christian faith journey is simply not for everyone.

If you are looking for a safe organization you need to join an alumni association or something predictably hospitable like that. It’s sort dangerous to get involved in a church. Alumni associations only want your money, so they will always be nice to you and tell you how wonderful you are. The church wants your money also, but that’s not all that it wants. There are other expectations as well, and if the church is true to it’s roots it’s going to make life a little more complicated for you. The church is an easy organization to join, but following Jesus is hard! It’s actually sort of scary.

I was visiting with a man the other day who had been the Chairperson of the Finance Committee in another UM church here in Little Rock. He had been in that role for a number of years, and he said he still remembers what it felt like to wake up on New’s Year’s morning when he first rotated out of that position. He said his first thought of that year was how thankful he was to be finished with his commitment to that work. I recognize that this isn’t a very good story to tell as we are currently finding people to fill various positions within the church, but it doesn’t matter whether you are willing to do that kind of work or not – if you pay attention to the call of Christ in your life you are going to experience some uncomfortable demands.

Following Christ has it’s benefits. After all, Jesus is comparing it to being invited to a wedding banquet, but don’t expect it to be an easy party to attend. You may think you know what’s right and wrong and who needs to do what in order for everything to work out right, but if you pay attention to what Jesus said and did and you earnestly want to take his words seriously he is going to disrupt your comfortable way of viewing yourself and others. The church isn’t like an alumni association – it doesn’t just tell you how wonderful you are – it makes you engage in some self-examination and life-evaluation.

Frankly, it would be so much easier to be Christian if we didn’t read the Bible. It would be so nice to turn Jesus in to the kind of lord and savior that good reasonable people like us expect him to be. It would be nice to create some clear formulas for successful living, but Jesus makes it hard to do that. Just when you think you know who the bad guys are, and who is at fault for the problems we face in the world, in the church, and in our communities – you experience Jesus in a way that makes you wonder about yourself. This business of seizing a man who isn’t wearing the right clothes to the party is frankly pretty unsettling to me.

Now I’m not here to scare you to death. I honestly don’t believe that God is as brutal and bloodthirsty as this story might indicate. This is a story, and I don’t believe Jesus intended for us to live in fear of what God’s going to do to us if we don’t act right. I just don’t believe that this story is designed to portray the actual way God rewards and punishes people. But what I do believe is that if you want to find your way in to the most abundant life – into the rich community that God has most graciously invited us to be a part of – there are some expectations.

We don’t have to show up for this party. In fact it may be very reasonable to ignore this invitation to God’s banquet. We can continue to live really normal lives and be perfectly content with ourselves. I don’t expect God will ever leave us alone, but we don’t have to respond to God’s initiatives. I think God probably sends out more invitations and solicitations than your average politician. And we can ignore God’s invitations as easily as we ignore those endless political fliers that are coming in the mail these days. I don’t know if God can match the size of some of the post-cards that are coming in the mail these days, but I’m sure you can actually trust the information that comes to us from God.

I don’t think the intent of this passage is to generate fear of God, but I do believe it is designed to illustrate the importance of connecting our lives with our professed desire to show up for God. If we accept the invitation to this divine banquet that we call the kingdom of heaven – we need to pay attention to what we put on.

I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you are wearing totally inappropriate clothing at an event, but I have, and I hate that feeling. I think the worse time I ever did that was when my daughter Liza was about 2 years old and I had taken her to a Mother’s Day Out program at a YWCA in Durham, NC. After dropping her off I went home and started working outside. I was doing some painting on our house and it was hot and I had taken my shirt off. When I realized I was about to be late picking Liza up I jumped in the car and started driving to get her. I was about half-way there when I realized I didn’t have a shirt on, and there wasn’t one in the car. It wasn’t a short drive, and I was already a bit late, and I was mortified by the thought of walking in to that day-care situation without a shirt on.

I was near a restaurant where I knew the manager, and of course it isn’t proper to go in to a restaurant without a shirt on either, but that seemed like my best option. I ran in with $10 in my hand begging for a t-shirt and luckily my manager-friend was nearby and they sold me a shirt before throwing me out. I was so relieved to get a shirt on before I stepped in to the Mother’s Day Out community. I was late, but I avoided the humiliation of being so improperly covered.

It’s a terrible feeling to be inappropriately dressed. And I think Jesus told this parable so we would pay attention to our spiritual clothing. This parable stresses the need for us to be faithful to claim of Christ. I don’t think of this as a warning about what will happen to us in the afterlife if we ignore the demands of our professions of faith. I think Jesus wants us to feel the discomfort right now if we aren’t wearing our faith well. Jesus told this story to expose the impropriety of the religious pretenders of his day and of ours. The living Christ doesn’t want those of us who recently got invited to the party to think that we are fine just because we aren’t the former people.

There are so many ways to become ill-fit for the kingdom of heaven. It’s so easy to get this business of discipleship wrong. It’s always easy to take a little bit too much pride in not being like someone who seems obviously ill-clad, but that’s an even uglier way to dress. It’s hard to know exactly what God expects of us, but we need to pay attention. I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you than to warn you to watch out for the way you are wearing your faith, but God has some clear expectations for the way we look.

You probably came here this morning thinking it doesn’t matter what you wear, but I’m telling you it does. Shirts and shoes aren’t required, but don’t expect to feast at the banquet of the Lord without putting on some compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and love for your enemies as well as your friends.

There’s a strict dress code in the Kingdom of God – you’re better off ignoring the invitation than to try to get in without putting on some hand-me downs from Christ. But if you are willing to wear some of that Christ-like-self-giving love you will find that there is a place for you at the banquet of the Lord! And thanks be to God for this!
Amen!

Farm Management
Matthew 21:33-44

21:33 “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. 34 When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. 35 But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. 36 Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. 37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” 39 So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. 40 Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” 41 They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” 42 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? 43 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. 44 The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” 45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. 46 They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

You could have stayed home this morning to watch CNN and heard a better story than what we have in this morning’s scripture lesson. What we have here is not a pretty picture. It’s sort of a reverse fairy tale. This is a story with a happy beginning and a sad ending. But I’m glad you chose to come to church. What Jesus had to say is not easy to hear, but trust me – it’s not all bad. Maybe hearing this story has already made your workplace feel much more hospitable than you previously considered it to be. It could be worse – you could be working with people like this!

Matthew labels this story Jesus tells as a parable, but it seems to function more like an allegory. Unlike a parable, which usually involves a story with a familiar circumstance that goes off in a strange direction in order to disrupt your usual way of seeing and interpreting the world. A parable causes you to think. An allegory is a literary device where the characters in the story are designed to represent identifiable characters, and it’s usually not very hard to figure out who represents who.

And it seems very clear in this story who the various characters represent. The landowner is God, and the vineyard that the landowner established is Israel. The members of the Jewish establishment are the tenants, and those who came throughout time to collect what was due are the various prophets. Of course the landowner’s son that was killed by the tenants represents Jesus, and the new tenants of the vineyard would be the church.

It was pretty clear to the chief priests and the Pharisees who was who in this story, and they didn’t like it, but they didn’t choose to change their role in the story. Upon hearing this story they became even more determined to have Jesus arrested and killed. There isn’t much of a surprise in this text, and if this was the end of the story it really would be a downer, but this story ends with the vineyard being leased to a new group of tenants. That new group of tenants is us, and our challenge is to be better tenants than those who went before us. I think it’s important to note that we weren’t given the vineyard – it has been leased to us. We have an arrangement with the landowner – not a deed to the property.

I didn’t grow up around a vineyard economy. I grew up around rice and soybean fields and farms. In fact my grandfather carved out such a farm. And he created a very nice farm. It wasn’t as picturesque as the vineyard portrayed in this morning’s passage, but there are some similarities.

My grandfather didn’t start out with much, but his hunger for a better life matched up with some opportunity, and it turned in to some good fortune. Tom (that’s what we all called my grandfather) figured out how to navigate the economy of the twenties and the thirties. During that time he became a successful Chevrolet/Oldsmobile dealer, and in the forties he bought some swampy forest land west of Wynne, AR and he turned that land in to a rice and soybean farm. But he didn’t just want to make money, he wanted a place to hunt ducks, so he left a perimeter of trees on the lowest part of the land so he would have a place to hunt ducks, and my cousins and I continue to enjoy the benefits of what he established. We don’t have the duck population that he had, but I feel very fortunate to have access to some flooded woods to go stand in on cold winter mornings.

My grandfather loved his farm. When I was a child he would pick me up and drive me out to his farm. It seemed pretty boring to me at the time. He didn’t talk much. We would drive around fields that all looked the same to me, but there would be some fishing or shooting at something sprinkled in with watching the crops grow, so I went along with him often.

Our roles reversed when we both got older and he could no longer drive. He loved for me to drive him out to his farm. I’ll never forget one of the last times I ever drove him out there. It was about this time of the year. We drove around the fields and saw what was harvested and what wasn’t, but then he wanted me to drive him in to the woods. As I say, he didn’t talk much. He didn’t tell me why he wanted to go in to the woods, but I did as I was told.

The road in to the woods was more of a trail than a road, and we were in a car – not a truck with four wheel drive. I kept stopping thinking we had gone far enough, but he kept motioning for me to go on. I kept driving until we were literally surrounded by these thick vines. I stopped the car and when I did he said one word, muscadines. And sure enough we were in the middle of a muscadine vine. My grandfather was a man who knew what he wanted and he would push until he got it.

My grandfather loved his farm. And he had a good tenant on his farm. The same man farmed the land for probably forty years. I don’t know how fair their arrangement was. My grandfather wasn’t an overly generous man, but I guess he was fair enough because a number of people worked for him for decades.

I didn’t grow up with the same passion for business that my grandfather had. He grew up hungry and in search of opportunity. I grew up comfortable but in search of meaning. He carved out enterprises and I spend my time trying to understand this enterprise we call life. You might say I had the luxury to embark on that enterprise.

And it seems to me that there’s an interesting relationship between the physical economy and the spiritual economy. We tend to think the word economy only refers to financial matters, and that is about the only way we use the word, but the word, economy, is derived from two Greek words that combine to mean something like: household management.

And it’s interesting that Jesus would use these economic examples to help us understand how to be more spiritually awake. What we have in today’s passage is the story of how a particular household was mismanaged in order for us to understand how things are managed in the household of God. Of course understanding how our current physical economy functions is as esoteric as the mysteries of heaven, but on a very basic level I think we can see what Jesus was saying.

What I get from today’s story is that God loves this world, and God wants us to live in this world in a harmonious fashion. God didn’t expect the tenants of God’s vineyard to give up the entire yield of the vineyard – God wanted them to release a fair share of the produce. The problem was that they wanted to keep everything for themselves. The problem was that they wanted more than their share – they sought to put themselves in the place of God.

I guess this is always the problem that comes with a degree of success in this world. It’s always hard not to think that the most important thing is to maintain and expand your influence over others. It’s easy to think that the power that comes to us when we are in charge of a physical enterprise is more important than the power we receive when we become active participants in God’s spiritual enterprise.

I don’t know how to live in this world without participating in the physical economy. We are all involved in one kind of enterprise or another. We all play a role in those various enterprises. Some of us are in positions of authority in those enterprises – some of us do as we are told. Many of us experience a little of both.

I don’t think Jesus expects us to live without engaging in the economy of this world, but he’s also very clear about the need for us not to take the roles we play in the vineyards of life too seriously. None of us have as much authority as we think we have, and if we put too much stock in the physical economy we will fail miserably in the spiritual economy. If we spend all of our time and energy managing our physical households our spiritual households will suffer.

I had the good fortune of growing up around a man who had a lot of authority in this world. I am the beneficiary of a man who knew how to make things happen. I also had the good fortune of seeing how inconsequential money really is when your health fails and death looms near. When I told Tom I was going to seminary his response was typically brief and memorable. He said, Well, money isn’t everything.

Of course the lure of power and money doesn’t go away for people who go in to ministry. Today’s passage clearly points out the way in which religious professionals can become particularly twisted by the power of the position. A career in ministry doesn’t provide immunity from godless pursuits – it just provides you with a thin mask to hide behind. The truth is that it’s a struggle for us all to not become consumed by worldly pursuits and to seek the rewards of earth at the expense of those that come from heaven.

Learning to become good tenants of God’s vineyard is a challenge for us all. Each day is filled with opportunity and fraught with danger. As followers of Christ we are challenged to be those rare economists who understand the dynamics of this world and the next. May God help us all to understand how we might best manage our resources, invest our lives, and provide the most bountiful yield. May, by the grace of God, we become worthy tenants of all that has been given to us. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Revealing Questions
Matthew 21:23-32

21:23 When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” 24 Jesus said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. 25 Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 26 But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” 27 So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things. 28 “What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ 29 He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. 30 The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. 31 Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. 32 For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.

Dr. Charles Campbell is a professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School – which means he tries to teach people how to preach. And that’s got to be one of the hardest jobs there is. I don’t know how you train people to speak for 12 to 20 minutes in a way that’s creative, inspirational, relevant, insightful, wise, witty, and true to the Biblical text. I wish someone could have trained me to be all of those things. Actually I wish I had given them the chance to train me to be those things. I hardly took any classes in preaching. I’m not sure what I thought I would be doing when I became a preacher, but it turns out that preachers do a lot of preaching.

I came across something Charles Campbell wrote as I was working on my sermon earlier this week, and it made me think he’s the kind of professor I would have enjoyed having. He mentioned that while he was channel-surfing one day (which is very endearing to me – I like a professor who owns up to engaging in a mindless activity). So while he was channel-surfing he came across someone who was interviewing the celebrity psychologist, Dr. Phil, and he heard Dr. Phil say something that got his attention.

Dr. Phil usually does the interviewing, but on this occasion Dr. Phil was being interviewed, and when Dr. Phil was asked who he would like to interview if he could interview anyone from any period of time he immediately responded by saying he would like to interview Jesus Christ. He said he would like to have a conversation with Jesus about the meaning of life.

Charles Campbell said that when he heard Dr. Phil’s answer he immediately thought to himself how badly it would go if Dr. Phil tried to interview Jesus. It just never went well for people who tried to extract information from Jesus. Jesus would probably not have given Dr. Phil the interview of his dreams. It’s far more likely that such a conversation would turn in to a nightmare.

Children could probably ask Jesus questions without being frightened by his response, but it usually didn’t go well for the adults who asked him questions. Of course, the people who questioned him were usually out to do him in, so they were often trying to get him to say something that would either get him stoned to death by a crowd or arrested by the police, but that’s not what generally happened. Such interrogators usually found themselves running for theological cover.

But even those who weren’t out to get him were often troubled by his response to their inquiries. I’m thinking of the well-meaning and well-endowed young man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life and Jesus told him he should go sell everything and follow him – which is not what he was hoping to hear. Maybe Dr. Phil could do what no-one else ever did, which was to leave a conversation with Jesus without having your world turned upside down, but I’m with Dr. Campbell on this – I don’t think it would be a real career-boosting move for Dr. Phil to interview Jesus.

One of my early life lessons came when I was old enough to throw a rock relatively hard and accurate, but not old enough to know when to use such a skill. What I learned one day is that it’s not a good idea to attack a wasp nest with a rock. I had brute force on my side, but they had numbers and speed. I don’t think I’ve ever trusted brute force as much after that day. And you should never underestimate the ability of your adversary to retaliate. That was a very educational experience for me. An educational experience – that’s what you call an idiotic act a couple of decades later

I don’t know if the chief priests and elders were ever able to recognize this encounter with Jesus as being an educational experience, but they certainly underestimated their adversary, and what they exposed was not what they wanted people to see.

I’m guessing these chief priests and elders were accustomed to being in the role of Dr. Phil – they were the ones who put people on the spot and made them answer uncomfortable questions. They were hoping to expose Jesus as being someone who was totally out of bounds, and I can understand where they were coming from. This conversation happened the day after Jesus had gone in to the temple and totally disrupted the religious marketplace. When they asked Jesus who gave him the authority to do those things, the things they were talking about included turning over the tables of the money changers, freeing the unblemished animals that were for sale, and driving the sales staff out with a whip. Those things Jesus did had not gone over well with the temple authorities, and they wanted to know who gave him the authority to do such things.

They thought their question would get him to say something blasphemous or incriminating, but it blew up on them. His question to them about the authority of John the Baptist put them in an exceedingly awkward position, and their hesitation to answer him revealed them to be the ones who were operating with false authority. He exposed them to be like the son who said he would go in to the field but didn’t. He declared them to be less righteous than those who were generally considered to be the least righteous people in the community, and it was believable.

Last week I heard someone quote that old saying: It’s better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. I don’t always let this wisdom guide my mouth, but I know there’s some truth to it, and it’s not that hard for me to keep my ignorance to myself. I have learned to be careful. I think I would have known not to challenge Jesus. I’m not like Dr. Phil – I’m careful about who I choose to engage in conversation.

Being careful has it’s benefits. Careful people don’t provoke powerful adversaries, but it’s possible to be too cautious. We don’t have any stories in the gospels about the careful people who kept their distance from Jesus. Careful people didn’t get close enough to him to be questioned or challenged, and in so doing they avoided having the most profound educational experience you could possibly have.

When I read this morning’s passage I find myself being grateful that I’m not like one of those chief priests or elders who are blinded by their allegiance to their religious institution. I can tell you, I don’t have that kind of allegiance to my religious institution. It would not hurt my feelings if someone cleansed our denominational temple, but I’m not unindicted by this passage. What I see in this passage is the value of encounter with Jesus, and how important it is to become engaged with who he was and to hear what he had to say.

It’s not good to avoid those educational experiences that happen when you engage with the unknown. It’s important to step in to situations that are out of our control and disruptive to our comfortable patterns of behavior. It’s in those situation that we can learn the most about ourselves and become more fully alive. Jesus didn’t challenge people because he enjoyed giving people a hard time (he may have, but that’s not why he did it). Jesus challenged people because he wanted them to discover true life. Jesus didn’t call for repentance because he was a religious brute who wanted to exercise his godly authority. Jesus wanted people to leave their old lives behind in order to live better lives.

The religious executives could understand why the tax collectors and prostitutes needed to let go of their old lives, but they couldn’t see their own form of unrighteousness. The only thing they could see is the need to get rid of this man who would do these things that were so disrespectful of their authority. I don’t know if any of them were able to see what Jesus actually revealed. We don’t know if any of them learned the right thing from this educational experience, but I think I know what he would want us to see.

Jesus wants us all to see the truth about ourselves. He wants us to understand what it is we are professing without doing. He wants us to know who we are serving, and who we are hurting. What illusions are we promoting and what truths are we denying.

Honestly, I think Dr. Phil had a good answer when he was asked who he would like to interview. I’m sure that’s not an interview he would be able to control, but that’s an interview we all need to have. We need to be in touch with the one who sees us for who we are and who loves us enough to ask us those perfectly unsettling questions.

When you leave here today don’t go out and be careful. Go out and be faithful. Be dangerously faithful to the one who doesn’t just want us to be comfortable. Be faithful to the one who wants us to find true life.

Thanks be to God that Jesus knew how to disrupt deathly behavior and to bring us to life.

Thanks be to God! Amen.