Sinners Beloved

Matthew 21:23-32
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?"
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. 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?' But if we say, 'Of human origin,' we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet." 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.
"What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' He answered, 'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir'; but he did not go. 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. 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.

I’m very glad that you are here today because we have something very important to talk about and if you weren’t here it just wouldn’t be the same. What’s happening is that the world is coming apart. At least that’s how it seems. And what we need to say each other as we gather here on this very fine Sunday morning is that the fact that the world is coming apart…it’s not true. In fact, it’s downright wrong. In fact, it’s a pretty unchristian thing to say. Because the fact of the matter is…and this is really all I have to say to you today so if you want to get this down…the fact of the matter is that the world is not coming apart - it’s coming together and there is a related message: the universe does not run on fear - it runs on faith.

Is that a message you need to hear? It’s a message I need to hear. The world is not coming apart - it’s coming together and the universe doesn’t run on fear - it runs on faith - faith in a God whose name is love.

Now you know why I’m talking about this today. It’s because we watched the news, isn’t it? We turned on our TVs and there was Hurricane Rita blowing across the Gulf of Mexico and there were evacuees and flooding in the streets of New Orleans and suddenly we were right back to where we were three weeks ago. We had just finished packing up the relief kits to go help the victims of Katrina. We sent them out of here this weekend - stuff collected by United Methodists and other community members from all over the Shore. Then there it was all over again. Another massive storm. Another major blow. And it shook our confidence.

These days we don’t know where to turn for guidance. We’re not sure if the systems we’ve put into place to deal with disasters are up to the task. We’re not sure our leaders are up to it. Could anybody be up to it?

We found that as we looked around for things to be nervous about that there were a lot. It’s not only the war in Iraq but gas prices and heating oil prices and the national debt and health care and the environment and declining moral standards and crystal meth and out-of-touch politicians and crime and the economy - cats living with dogs - there are a lot of things for us to worry about and a lot of things that make us afraid. We wonder to ourselves, “Where are we going? And why are we in this hand basket?” Maybe you, like me, were feeling a little uncertain this week, a little uneasy, a little vulnerable.

But what I want to say today is that the world is not coming apart - it’s coming together and the universe does not run on fear, even though there is a lot of that to go around. The universe runs on faith.

How do I know this? Because the news is not all that I listened to this week. I know this because as compelling as the news is, with all of its drama and tragedies, we have another story to tell us how the world works and where it is headed. We have another story to remind us of what’s really going on. We have another message that revives our souls and confounds our expectations. When the bad news of Katrina and Rita and Iraq threatens to overwhelm us with fear, the good news of Jesus Christ calls us back time and again to a different way of seeing the world, a different way of understanding where it is headed, and a different way of interpreting who we are. I hope you didn’t come here today to hear the bad news, because it’s not here. We are here today to tell the good news and it is everywhere.

I know this because of Jesus. This week I’ve been listening to Jesus and he is just as cryptic and challenging as he ever is. Jesus is still there challenging me to see something new in a world that seems to be conquered by its fear.

You see, the text for this week is about a conversation Jesus had with some fearful people. It was late in the game and Jesus had finally come to Jerusalem - the city of his ancestor David - the place where God’s Temple was - the city of the prophets.

His followers had been waiting for this for some time. Jesus had been gathering crowds wherever he went and building up expectations. Every important movement had to get to Jerusalem eventually and Jesus had finally entered the city to cheering throngs and he was teaching in the temple each day, creating quite an uproar. Not everybody saw Jesus’ teachings as a good thing. He made some people very nervous.

Jesus was teaching in the temple and the chief priests and elders of the people came up to him. They had seen how he had captivated the crowds. They saw how excited people were around him and how little they seemed to be interested in what they had to say. The leaders of the people were losing the people. Worse than that, the leaders of the people were afraid of the people and fearful people do dangerous, dangerous things.

Jesus is teaching and the religious leaders come up to him and say, “Who gave you the authority to be here doing this?” It’s not an irrelevant question. If someone sets themselves up as a religious authority the people who have been designated as religious authorities should be a little curious about where the new guy came from.

But in the context it just shows how out of touch the leaders were. God has come to be among the people. People who are desperate, sick, hopeless and dying are finding healing, hope and life in Jesus. They know they live in a crisis and Jesus is bringing relief. For the chief priests and elders to stop Jesus on the authority question seems like all of those terrible stories we’ve heard of people bringing relief to New Orleans and being turned away because they didn’t have the right paperwork.

Of course, Jesus knows that it’s not just an innocent question they’re asking him. He knows they don’t like him and that they are plotting his demise. He knows how they operate. So he gives them a question that he knows will expose the chief priests and elders for the hollow leaders they really are. He asks them where John the Baptist got his authority. John was also seen as a powerful leader by the people. He was also a threat to the religious authorities and they had been secretly pleased when the ruler Herod had John beheaded. But they couldn’t say so.

So when Jesus asked them, “Was John’s baptism from heaven or only by human authority?” they don’t know what to say. It seems they can’t speak from conviction. They’re whole lives are bound up in political considerations. “If we say John operated by heavenly authority Jesus will say, ‘Then why didn’t you believe?’ And if we say he only operated by human authority…well, we are afraid.” That’s what they say, “We are afraid of the people because they thought John was a prophet.” So rather than look fearful they look ignorant. They tell Jesus, “We don’t know.”

Which leads Jesus to a story: “How does this seem to you? A man had two sons. He went to the first one and said, ‘Son, go work in the vineyard today.’ Number One son says, ‘I don’t want to,’ but later changes his mind and then goes. The man does the same thing with his second son who tells him, ‘Yep, I’ll go. I’m on it.’ but then never goes. Who did what his father wanted?”

This time the chief priests and elders have an answer. It seems like a simple story. “The first son, of course.”

So Jesus jumps to his point: “It’s a sure thing I tell you. Tax collectors and prostitutes…” In Jesus’ day this was the equivalent of saying ‘the dregs of society.’ Nobody wanted to associate with tax collectors and prostitutes, but Jesus says these are the very people who are walking ahead of the religious leaders into the kingdom of God. Why? Because when somebody came to tell them the good news they believed and when the religious leaders saw that these folks who should never have had a place at the table of respectability were walking in ahead of them, they didn’t “change their mind later,” like the first son in the story, and believe.

In Jesus’ story the prompt that got the first son to repent, to turn around, to change his mind about going to work in the vineyard was his father’s command. The prompt for the religious leaders was how the people responded. When they saw the people they considered sinners responding to God and finding new life and turning over a new leaf, they should have believed.
The leaders of the people should have taken their cue from the people. But they couldn’t believe. They were too fearful and afraid.

Fearful people do dangerous, dangerous things. In this case it led ultimately to Jesus’ crucifixion. But there’s another thing fearful people can’t do - they can’t act on their convictions and can’t be their true selves. It is all too easy to say, “I would act in a different way, but I am afraid of the consequences of living that way and so I’ll behave this way even though it’s not really me.” I would love my enemies, but… I would turn the other cheek, but… I would do many things that Jesus says I ought to do, but…I’m afraid.

We do so much out of fear. Politicians do it when they propose new programs because they are afraid of what people would say if they didn’t rather than proposing new programs that offer real leadership out of a problem. Nations have started innumerable wars out of fear. Churches operate out of fear when they see their future only in terms of declining resources and the struggle to keep the doors open.

But when I look around Franktown Church the things that captivates me…the thing that convinces me that this is a holy and wonderful place is that we have seen the future and it is good. I mean, I had heard the stories before I came. What you should know is that you have a string of former pastors who believe that they discovered God’s kingdom in Franktown Church. You have converted pastors. That’s not an easy thing to do. You have convinced them that this is the most exciting place to be in the Virginia Conference. And now you’re converting me. You know the sun really does shine first in Virginia on the Eastern Shore.

Now it’s not that we don’t have things that need to change. We’re still on a journey here. But the operating system has changed. We seem to have figured out that the universe does not run on fear it runs on faith and I have seen that faith in a future determined by God.

When I see the response of people here to the hurricane relief needs, I see a movement based on faith. When I see the outpouring of support for Habitat for Humanity and Harvest of Hope and Children’s Hope Chest and Relay for Life and school supplies for social services, I don’t see fear, I see faith. When I see the families in this church that have opened their homes and their lives to adopted children…when I see Amanda Jones heading off to spend months as a Red Cross volunteer…when I see Carmen Colona giving so much of herself to the Hispanic Ministry…when I see Brenda Laws, who is an ordained deacon on the Horntown Charge AND a leader in Accomac social services working with children and their parents…when I see the investment this church has made in the community through this facility and through its programming…when I see the energy of our youth program and what Karen is doing with it…when I see the groups gathered on Wednesday night for Wonderful Wednesday…when I see all these things I know that this church doesn’t believe that the universe runs on fear, it runs on faith in a God who is making all things new. And to stop any one of these people and ask by what authority they do these things is an irrelevant question. What people who follow Jesus have discovered is that God is moving and they don’t want to miss out!

If you asked any of these folks why they do what they do, why they go out of their way to take bold action following Jesus, they would probably say that it is not out of their way at all. It seems entirely consistent with their vision that God is at work in the world. Franktown Church is a place where extraordinary things seem ordinary. That’s what converts me. This is a place where we can live out our calling as people who believe that God’s kingdom is not just something we say we believe in -- we believe that we are already living in God’s kingdom…it’s here…and you can find it on the Eastern Shore.

So what’s holding us back? What’s keeping us from belief? Are we held back by what we have done? Are we held captive to old wounds, old pains, old sins? Do we not feel worthy of the task to which God is calling us?

As Jesus’ story reminds us - that is no excuse. The sinners are the first in the line. The least likely people to be leading a religious movement are the very ones at the front of the line. God is at work at the world and the Holy Spirit will bring about the will of God which is to reconcile all things to God’s own self. The only question is: Will we be the agents? Will we allow the Spirit to move through us? Will we live out our calling as God’s people?

In the movie Braveheart, Mel Gibson plays William Wallace, the leader of a Scottish army in the 1300s that resisted the invading British. Gibson plays Wallace as a charismatic and visionary leader who attracts others to the cause by the depth of his belief and conviction that what he is about is the right thing to do. He has no social standing. He isn’t a king or a member of the nobility. But he has the one thing Scotland needed at the time in order to be free - he believes despite all the odds.

At one point in the movie Robert the Bruce, who is the legitimate leader of Scotland, talks about Wallace, whom he has betrayed into the hands of the English. As he talks with his father, the king, he says, “Men fight for me because if they do not, I throw them off my land and I starve their wives and children. Those men who bled the ground red at Falkirk fought for William Wallace. He fights for something that I never had. And I took it from him, when I betrayed him. I saw it in his face on the battlefield and it's tearing me apart.”

His father says to him, to excuse his actions, “All men betray. All lose heart.” But Robert the Bruce says, “I don't want to lose heart. I want to believe as he does.” I want to believe as he does.

That’s the desire of a person bound by fear who longs to be moved by faith. That’s the desire of each one of us because we know, don’t we?, that living out of fear takes a terrible toll on our body and soul. Our breathing is restricted, our movements distorted. We know that we are not being who we truly are when fear directs our actions.

God knows that we need to believe. God knows that a world that operates out of faith rather than fear is a world that has caught on to what God is doing. It is not true that the world is coming apart - the world is coming together and somebody needs to tell that story.

There are a lot of things to fear out there. There are a lot of reasons we could believe that things are coming apart at the seams. But we don’t just listen to CNN or Fox News. We listen to a more important story - we listen to the story of Jesus Christ, who calls every one of us to let go of our fears and embrace the “better angels of our nature.” There is plenty of labor to do in the vineyard of God’s kingdom. Let’s go work together.

Thanks be to God.

Trusting that the Bread Will Be There

Exodus 16:2-15
The whole people of Israel grumbled against Moses and against Aaron in the wilderness. The children of Israel said to them, "If only we had died at the hand of YHWH in the land of Egypt! There we sat by the pots of meat and ate bread to our fill. But you led us out to the wilderness in order to kill our whole people with hunger."

YHWH said to Moses, "Look, I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people shall go out and gather each day enough for the day. In this way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day when they prepare what they will bring in there will be double what they glean day to day."

Moses and Aaron said to all the children of Israel, "This night you shall know that it was YHWH who brought you out from the land of Egypt. And at daybreak you will see the abundance of YHWH because [YHWH] has heard your murmuring against YHWH. For what are we that you complain against us?"

Moses said, "When YHWH gives you meat in the evening to eat and bread at daybreak to sate you, you will understand that YHWH hears your murmuring that you utter against him. What are we? Your murmuring is not against us but against YHWH."

Then Moses said to Aaron, "Say to all the congregation of the children of Israel, 'Draw near before YHWH because he has heard your murmuring.'"

And it happened as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the children of Israel that they turned to the wilderness and, look, the abundance of YHWH appeared.

YHWH spoke to Moses saying, "I have heard the murmuring of the children of Israel. Say to them, 'In the evening you shall eat meat and at daybreak you shall be sated with bread. And you shall know that I am YHWH, your God.'"

So in the evening quail came up and covered the camp and at daybreak a layer of dew was upon the whole camp. And when the layer of dew went up, look, on the face of the wilderness there was a thin peel, like a thin frost on the earth. The children of Israel saw it and they said one to another, "What is it?" because they did not know what it was. Moses told them that it was bread that YHWH gave to them to eat.

Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in. Have you ever felt like that? Say you’re 12 years old and your parents send you off to summer camp. It’s an exciting thing at first. You’re looking forward to the canoeing and the swimming and the silly campfire skits. But then you get there and you’re in a cabin with a bunch of people you don’t know and you’re folks aren’t around and even though you thought that was a good thing, now you’re not so sure. And it’s a whole week before you get to go home again to your cat and your video games and even your little sister. Yeah, at times like that it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in and it takes a while - maybe a day or two -- until you’re reminded what a cool place camp really is.

Or maybe you’re off on to college and you get a roommate who is nothing like the one you would have ordered. And the hallway of the dorm is total chaos twenty-four hours a day. The classes are harder than you expected. Dealing with the university bureaucracy is a pain. And the cafeteria serves eggplant tacos as the healthy alternative to greasy pizza. Yeah, at times like that it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in.

I remember when Suzanne and I moved to Dallas from Virginia as I began seminary there. The first night we moved into this old cinderblock dorm building that was built in the 1940s. Sounds echoed so much that you could flush a toilet anywhere in the three-story building and you could hear it like it was next door. We lived in one-room efficiency apartment with a bed you pulled down out of the wall and which you could sit on the end of and be in the kitchen. You could make breakfast in bed…in bed. It was so small that I had to go out into the hallway to change my mind. Yeah, at times like that it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in.

But you don’t have to leave and go off somewhere new in order to experience this. Maybe you’re in the same space and you lose your job and the whole world suddenly seems to change for you. You don’t know what’s going to happen or how you’ll pay for it. Or your spouse goes through a serious illness. Or your child develops a drug dependency. Or a senseless moment of violence ends the life of someone you love. Yeah, at times like these it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in. At times like these it’s sometimes hard to see what God is up to.

Well, we’re not alone you know. Oh, no. It may feel like you’re the first person to have ever experienced the wilderness, but you most certainly are not. The wilderness has been there from the beginning and God’s people are always going out into it to discover what it is they really believe and whom it is that they can really trust. Abraham and Sarah? They had to pack up and leave when God called. They followed to the Promised Land and what did they find? A famine and a desert. It took some time for them to see what God was up to with them. Joseph? We talked about him a few weeks ago. The dreamer who always imagined he would be someone important and great -- he spent time in the wilderness, first in a pit and then as a slave in Egypt. Moses? When he fled for his life after striking down an Egyptian he ended up tending sheep in the desert until he encountered God in a burning bush.

And then there are the Hebrew people. We talked about them several weeks ago as the conflict was growing between them and the Egyptians among whom they lived. They were prospering in Egypt. You remember the refrain, “Multiply, multiply, multiply!” They were multiplying. In response the Egyptians made them slaves and made their lives unbearable.

So God delivered them from slavery. God sent Moses and his brother Aaron to tell Pharaoh to let the people go. It took some time. It took ten plagues of biblical proportions. It took an exodus through the waters of the Red Sea. It took a wall of fire and a great wind. But God delivered the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. They walked up on the far shores of the Red Sea into the Sinai wilderness and they were a new people in a new place.

They sang a song of victory. The women danced with tambourines and singing. They looked around at this new land they were in and said, “Wait a minute. There’s nothing to drink here!” Four verses. It takes four verses to get from “Sing to the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously!” to “Are we there yet?”

Then it only takes another five verses (during which God provides them with sweet water to drink) --it only takes another five verses to get to this lament: “Oh, if only we had died at the hands of God in Egypt! If only God had just gone ahead and killed us there! In Egypt there was bread and we could eat as much as we wanted. In Egypt there were fleshpots.” I always wondered what fleshpots were and why people would be nostalgic about them. It seems like a strange thing to want -- fleshpots. But it really just means - pots of meat. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet. “Oh in Egypt it was so great. There were Golden Corral Steakhouses and Old Country Buffet. There were Starbucks. Do you know how hard it is to get a latte in the wilderness? And forget about good shopping. It’s like the Eastern Shore out here!” I might not be getting the translation exactly right, but it went something like that. The people had a very selective memory of what it was like in the place where they had come from - out of slavery - across the bay.

The result is that Moses and Aaron have a mutiny on their hands. The people accuse them of plotting the whole “liberation from Egypt” thing as an elaborate ploy to kill them from hunger. Isn’t it amazing how quickly their perspective changes? The wilderness is one of those places -- one of those places where it is difficult to see what’s good about the place -- and the people of Israel have just wandered into it.

God sees what is at stake right away. Before Moses and Aaron can do anything God calls Moses aside and says, “Look, I know what’s happening here and this is a test. The wilderness is a test for my people to see if they can see something besides desert here. To see if they can see something besides scarcity and desolation and no water to drink and no food to eat. Can my people see something else here? Can they trust me? Can they know that I am their God?”

So God provides bread and instructions on how to gather it. Obviously God is going to have to go right back to the beginning when in six days God provided all that was necessary for life to flourish on the earth. This time, its bread that will rain down from heaven and provide food for the people for six days and on the sixth day they will have to collect double portions because there won’t be anything on the seventh day. That day is the Sabbath day and on that day they have something more important to do than collect bread. On that day they are supposed to worship God.

So Moses and Aaron are supposed to go out to the people and pass along the news. They are a little annoyed with the people. They don’t like the murmuring. God doesn’t talk about the murmuring much but Moses and Aaron do. A couple of times they say, “What are we that you should complain against us?” They keep trying to help the people see that underneath all the bellyaching and the aching of their empty bellies is a theological problem. The people have not yet learned to live in the wilderness and to trust in the Lord.

Moses and Aaron are interpreters in this story. They have to keep telling the people what is really going on because the people can’t see it. They have to keep pointing towards God and retelling the story and leading the people because, left to their own resources, the people will forget. They will be so distracted by the lack of food and the horrible living conditions that they will forget what God has done…what God is doing…what God has promised to do with them and for them. God hasn’t forgotten the command to be fruitful and multiply, multiply, multiply; the people have and they need interpreters.

So Moses tells Aaron to call all the people together and to tell them they will have bread in the morning and quails in the evening -- food to sustain them because God has heard their murmuring. And something mysterious and miraculous happens as Aaron is addressing the people. We don’t know exactly what it is because the text is a little mysterious here. It only says that as Aaron was speaking the people turned to the wilderness, where they had only seen barrenness and death before and the abundance of God appeared. It was probably the bread. God had told Moses that the people would see the abundance of God each morning. Now the wilderness was changing before their eyes.

Before the people can speak God speaks one more time to Moses and says, “This is the way the people will know that I am the Lord, their God.” This is the test God offers. Can the people see God’s grace invading the emptiness of their lives to bring what they needed, not only to survive, but also to flourish and thrive?

I have to say, the initial results were not too promising. The people woke up that first morning and saw this layer of material like a frost covering everything. They peeled it away and looked at it very suspiciously. They said, “This is it? What is it?” They didn’t know what to expect. They certainly don’t seem to have been expecting bread. They need an interpreter to tell them what they are seeing.

So Moses said to them, “It’s the bread God is giving you to eat.” And they called the bread “What is it?” which in Hebrew is manna. And from then on they had bread, though they weren’t done complaining. They had a long journey to go on before they learned to trust in God.

Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in. Sometimes we need interpreters to remind us that the wildernesses we find ourselves in are not devoid of God’s presence. Sometimes we need interpreters who will remind us that in those very wildernesses of our lives God is waiting to give us our daily bread…God is waiting to give us the things we need to survive…God is waiting to give us the things we need to thrive.

Oh, I know the desert can be a scary place. I’ve been there. You’ve been there. In the deserts of the southwest there are creosote bushes that will burn your skin, spiny cacti that will pierce your flesh, and snakes with vicious looking fangs. The deserts we walk through in our lives can look even worse. But in that landscape there are also flowers waiting to burst forth with just the smallest amount of rain. There are creek beds ready to gush with living water. There is life everywhere ready to blossom out. And it is the same in the deserts of our lives.

One of the great movies of the last decade is an Italian film called Life is Beautiful. This is one of those movies you need to see if you haven’t. In this film a Jewish man in Italy during the Second World War is sent to the concentrations camps along with his young son who is about five. Guido is separated from his wife but his son stays with him.

Guido is a clown. He has made a wonderful father because he is always finding humor in every situation. His son thinks that he can do magic.

But now they are in the death camps of Germany, the blackest places we can imagine. How can Guido find humor and hope here? But Guido is determined to do so. And by the sheer force of will and imagination he refuses to accept the dark consequences of the hatred that has placed him and his family in this place. He convinces his son that they are only away for a time and that they should make the best of their situation, even to celebrate its craziness. He mimics the goose-stepping soldiers and continues to play the clown and the son comes to see that even in the midst of what could have been the most God-forsaken place imaginable, life and hope could survive.

Guido, like Moses, was an interpreter of a larger reality. When all of the traditional indicators pointed toward death and despair, he pointed to the manna in the wilderness. When the people of Israel forgot who they were and where they had come from…when they forgot that God was on their side and not against them…when their memories failed them and they began to believe that slavery was better than freedom…when they could not see…they needed an interpreter who could make it absolutely obvious that we have no cause to doubt God’s acceptance of us and no cause to doubt God’s provision for us and for our flourishing.

Jesus knew something about the wilderness. Jesus knew something about providing bread in the desert to a hungry people. Jesus knew something about pointing beyond death and despair to what God was really doing in the world.

Because, you see, the truth of the matter is that the devil is a hapless fool. The forces of despair and darkness are not equal to the task of enslaving us again. What God needs are interpreters and here’s where the story turns to you. What God needs is you, not to recognize yourself in the people of Israel. God knows we’ve been there and asked that “What is it?” question way too often. What God needs are more Moses and Aarons and Miriams -- prophets who can describe the world in such a way that what God is doing is absolutely obvious.

Because you’re going to walk out of those doors in a little bit and it will be tempting to think that the world is the same as when you left it this morning. But it’s not the same. The world is full of the abundance of God. There is manna everywhere. And people are starving because they cannot see it.

Who are you going to tell this week? Who are you going to tell about this amazing God who doesn’t accept the way things are but turns the world upside down? Who are you going to tell about where to find life and hope? Because people are starving. They’re hurting. They’re murmuring. And they don’t know where to take their pain. They need to know where they can find the holy manna. They need to know whom they can trust. Are you going to tell them?

Thanks be to God.

To Know Forgiveness By Heart

Matthew 18:21-35
Then Peter came up and said to him, "Lord, how many times should I forgive when my brother or sister sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus said to him, “I don’t say to you ‘up to seven times’ but rather seven times seventy times. For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a ruler who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. Now upon beginning his reckoning, one was brought to him owing ten thousand talents; and since he didn’t have the money to repay, the ruler ordered that he, his wife, his children, and all that he had be sold and repayment to be made.

“So, falling down, the slave prostrated himself before the ruler saying, ‘Be patient with me and I will repay you everything.’ And being moved by sympathy, the ruler of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.

“Now that same slave, upon leaving, happened upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Repay what you owe.’

“So, falling down, his fellow-slave implored him saying, ‘Be patient with me and I will repay you.’ But he did not what to and instead went and threw his fellow-slave into prison until he would repay the debt.

“So, upon seeing this, his fellow-slaves were extremely distressed and they went and reported to the ruler himself all that had taken place. Then his ruler summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all of that debt because you implored me. Weren’t you compelled to show mercy to your fellow slave, just as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his ruler handed him over to the extractors until he would repay the debt.

“So also will my heavenly Father do to you if you do not each forgive your brother and sister from your hearts.”

It happened ten years after her father died of alcoholism at the age of 56. Jacki Whitford woke up in the middle of the night with tears streaming down her face. She was a 43-year-old woman. She thought she had dealt with her father’s disease and his death. But on this night, ten years after his passing, she had a dream.

“I was standing in a thick fog by a mailbox in front of my mother’s house,” she said. “My father came slowly forward through the fog. He was about thirty and he looked good. He put his arms around me, and he seemed to be telling me that everything was okay. I cried so hard because I wanted to hold on to that feeling forever.”

The journey that began for Jack Whitford was a journey toward forgiveness: forgiveness for her father for his alcoholism and forgiving herself for thinking she was somehow responsible for his disease. It was forgiveness long overdue and it did not come easy. Forgiveness is work. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen just because we want it to. Forgiveness is something God does and which God enables us to do. And even though, in God’s time, it might take place in a flash, immediately -- in our time and space, it is a journey of healing with very few landmarks along the way.

Forgiveness is what today’s gospel lesson is about. And even with this parable it is sometimes no easier for us to understand how it works than it was for poor Peter who had his note pad out ready to write down the number of times you could legally forgive before justifiably turning your back on a person. As Jesus reminded him, it’s not a matter of counting marks on a pad -- 7, 77, 7 times 70 -- it really doesn’t matter -- forgiveness is a matter of the heart and the truth of the matter is that we don’t know our hearts very well.

This morning I’d like to walk through this strange little parable from Matthew with you and try to discover what it is that Christ might be saying to us through it. I want to begin by saying that I am no expert on forgiveness. Translating the Greek here is a lot more comfortable for me than getting a hold of forgiveness. But I want to make several claims. One is that forgiveness is what we are made to do as God-created people. Secondly, without forgiveness the world can seem like a pretty God-forsaken place. Each of us has wounds that have been done to us and wounds we have caused. Those wounds are important because God is acting in them, bringing healing by bringing forgiveness.

Peter’s question to Jesus, you’ll remember, was “How many times must I forgive?” Jesus’ answer, which must have been extremely frustrating for Peter, was, as it often was, a story--a parable--and a complicated parable at that. Peter just wanted a straight answer for future reference. Jesus wanted something more and giving an easy-to-remember number of times to forgive just wasn’t going to be sufficient.

Jesus seems to be saying that limited forgiveness is not the rule in the Christian community. You can’t limit God’s forgiveness and we shouldn’t limit ours. Infinite mercy--that’s what Jesus seems to be about and that should make us a little nervous.

Jesus goes on to illustrate his point with a story about a king, a ruler, who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. Now I know what you’re thinking. “Okay, there’s a king in this story; that must be God. And the slaves must be us.” But don’t be too hasty here! Parables are meant to be a little fuzzy about who they’re referring to. That’s why they’re stories.

Anyway, the king brings in a slave who owes him 10,000 talents. We don’t know exactly how much money that is, but it is a lot--more than any slave could ever hope to repay in any lifetime. It’s obvious that this poor slave will never be able to repay this amount of money. How in the world could he have gotten into such a predicament? So the king is totally justified in his day and age in ordering the slave to be sold along with his wife and children and all his worldly goods until he can repay.

But here’s where the legal part of this story ends. Justice has been determined. The king has ordered the sentence to be carried out. But the slave falls down on his face before the king and says, “Be patient with me and I will repay!” How ridiculous! How pitiful this slave must have looked, laid out there in front of the king saying that he will repay a bazillion dollars when he knows, and everyone in the room knows, that there’s not a chance in high heaven he’ll be able to do it.

Maybe there is a chance in high heaven, though, because something totally unexpected happens now. The king is moved by sympathy, the text says, and suddenly everything is changed. The king lets the slave go and not only does he let him go, but he forgives him the debt. Every last penny of the bazillion dollars is forgiven.

Now it’s the king who’s being ridiculous. What would happen if the world really operated like this? People going around forgiving outstanding debts and letting them go with no consequences? Why, they’d start expecting compassion instead of justice! Where would that lead us? Chaos, that’s where!

It’s because the world doesn’t operate this way that the ruler’s action stands out. It’s not an easy thing that he does. This was a large sum of money, even for a king. The precedent he is setting in showing sympathy for the slave is a dangerous one. But he seems to recognize that this is the right thing to do. And if Jesus were to stop the story right here it would be a lesson on unlimited mercy -- it would underscore what he had told Peter. But the story doesn’t stop here. The plot only thickens.

The first slave, who has just had his bazillion dollar debt wiped out walks out of the king’s court and sees a second slave who owes him $8000 (that’s 100 denarii in the story). It’s nothing to sneeze at but it’s nothing like the bazillion dollars he’s just been relieved of finding. But the first slave is indignant that he has not been repaid so he grabs the reprobate by the throat and snarls, “Repay me what you owe me.” Unlike the ruler, this slave literally goes for the jugular.

The second slave’s response is the same as that of the first. He falls down before him and begs with the same words he had used, “Be patient with me and I will repay you.” But this time there is no change of heart. No mention of sympathy. The text simply says that the first slave “did not want to” forgive him the debt. He was within his legal rights to have the man thrown into prison until he could repay and that’s just what he did.

Now we have contrasting situations to look at. In the first case, the ruler has the right to put the slave into prison and chose not to, and in the second the slave had the right to put his fellow-slave in prison and chose to do it. But this is not about rights and prisons -- it’s about forgiveness and the world without forgiveness is an unlivable world. His fellow-slaves know this. The Bible says that they were “extremely distressed” by what they saw and they go to tell the king, not because they’re tattle-tales, but because they recognize the consequences of a community without compassion and forgiveness. They are slaves, living on the edge. They probably owed this other slave money, too! The law was not going to protect them. In this world only forgiveness could.

These last two weeks we have watched heart-breaking images of people in New Orleans. At the convention center, at the Superdome, the people we saw looking for help, crying out for food and water, they were the people on the margins like the slaves in this story. For them the system didn’t work. For most of them it didn’t work before the hurricane and it certainly didn’t work afterwards. They know that in this world, only mercy can make things right.

But back to the story. The ruler, after hearing from the other slaves, does a curious thing. In a story that’s meant to show why forgiving seven times is not enough, the ruler quits after one time! He chastises the first slave for failing to see that he should have mercy, too, and then he rescinds his debt-forgiveness offer and hands him over to the torturers, or extractors, until he can repay the debt. We might cheer that the wicked slave got his due, but we have to be a little disturbed by the ruler who seems to take back his unconditional forgiveness. And then, as if to press the point, Jesus tags a lesson onto the end of the parable. “The same thing will happen to you,” Jesus says, “if you don’t forgive your brother or your sister from your heart.”

Now this is a mess we’ve wandered into here. Is Jesus really saying that we should forgive because if we don’t we’ll face the same punishment as the wicked slave? If that’s the case, then how can we really be doing it from the heart? And is Jesus legislating compassion? How do you command your heart to show mercy?

These are the kinds of questions we preachers love to wrestle with. We can spend hours exploring the swamp when most people would rather just get on through it. But I suspect there’s a lot more personal question we might want to ask after having gone through this parable with Jesus: How do I forgive from my heart when I’m not even sure I want to forgive?
Sometimes the hurt is so deep and the wrongs are so wrong that to forgive seems impossible. And forget about forgetting! That can never happen. How does a Tutsi in Rwanda forgive the Hutu clans who burned their home, took their land and murdered their family? How do we forgive great outrages like that? How do we forgive what happened here on September 11 four years ago? Where do we find the capacity for that?

Or on a more personal level, how does the adult child forgive the parent who physically or sexually abused them for year? How does the wife or the husband forgive the spouse who has been unfaithful? Who do we forgive ourselves for the truly hurtful things we have done to others and done to ourselves? Even the torture chamber doesn’t seem as bad as the state of unforgiveness. How can Jesus tell us to forgive from the heart and make it sound…possible?

It’s an unnatural thing in this world to forgive. It can only happen when the world we occupy every day is interrupted by a God who also cannot abide an unforgiven world. It can only happen when a cross breaks the plane of our unredeemed existence. It can only happen in the heart of Jesus.

And that is the heart from which we are to forgive. I said at the beginning of this sermon that we don’t know our own hearts. I believe that. You see, our hearts are not the sentimental organ of the body, filled with all the fickle emotions of human existence. Our hearts are not the places where we concoct plans for revenge and plot to do harm to those who have done us wrong. Our hearts are not even the places where we put together all our best intentions in a Herculean effort to be good, to really try to be good. That’s not what Jesus is talking about in this parable when he says that we must forgive from our heart.

What he is talking about is the heart we have not yet discovered. That heart which we perhaps had a glimpse of as a child -- a heart that was made by God and made for God. A heart which knew that its ultimate destiny was not to be distorted by sin and failure and loss and hurt. The ultimate destiny of the human heart is, as St. Augustine put it, to find its rest in God.

That’s the heart of Christ, the heart we don’t even know we have. It is given to us in God’s work on the cross. It is given to us as we are forgiven, as we claim God’s forgiveness. And because we are forgiven we can forgive. The first slave was able to show mercy because he had first been shown mercy by the ruler. He had the capacity for it. When he didn’t show mercy, it had to be extracted from him. He had to find that spot in himself that knew what forgiveness was all about.

It’s not really about the threat of punishment at all. The punishment is holding on to that fear and anger and resentment until it eats us alive. When we come to see that our lives are in Christ, then we can let go of the hurt and welcome the healing that forgiveness is. We can come to know forgiveness by heart and the journey to healing has begun.

But what if the person we want to forgive won’t change and won’t stop hurting? Forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. We are called to forgive, but reconciliation may take much more time and may not come at all. As when Jacki Whitford forgave her dead father, even though he could make no response to her at all.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing the hurt to continue. We can’t remain in abusive situations or allow others to remain in them just because we want to forgive. Mercy demands action in these cases. But when we get beyond being a victim and begin to reclaim God’s image for ourselves, we can also get beyond the power the hurt has over us and refuse to accept its power in our lives.

What does it take to forgive? It takes God. How many times do I have to forgive? More than you can count. How long does it take? It takes your whole life. When does it begin? It can begin right now. And just who am I again? You are God’s own child and deep down in your heart, you know that. You’ve had the power of the Spirit all along, because you were made for God. Thanks be to God.

Light Clothing

Romans 13:8-14

Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For this--Do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not covet, and any other commandment is summed up in this word--You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does not bring about evil for a neighbor, so love is the fulfilling of the law.

Besides this you know the time, how now is the time for you to wake from sleep, for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is far gone and daylight is growing near. Therefore let us take off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

As in daylight let us walk about properly outfitted, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and debauchery, not in strife and envy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not give your concern to the flesh and its unrestrained desires.

This morning I want to talk about what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. I want to talk about what it means when Paul says that we should take off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. I want to talk about what it means to believe what we say. And I want to start by talking about my pants.

I have been having a problem with my pants. It’s a good problem, but it is a problem. Back in March I left Camp Occohannock with a group of college students who had been with me on a spring break mission trip. For one whole week I had been eating the cooking of Emily Bundick, the camp cook, and I knew I wasn’t going to like looking at the scales when I got back. Sure enough, during that week, when I had been out working every day and should have been losing weight, instead, because of Ms. Emily’s cinnamon buns and clam fritters, I had put on three pounds.

So something had to give. I started swimming. I started working out in the gym. I started eating better. And it worked. I started to lose weight. That’s when my pants issue started to develop.
I couldn’t keep them up. I’d be walking around the house and they’d fall right off me. I’ve been through three belts since April. I couldn’t put my keys in my pocket for fear they’d pull my pants down. This was a crisis, I’m telling you.

Fixing the problem was an expensive proposition. New pants don’t come cheap. But there was a theological issue at stake, too, and this is where my pants problem rises to something more than a personal concern. Theologically what was going on was that my pants no longer reflected the person I was becoming. I needed clothes that were more appropriate to my new self. To really be thinner I needed to have thinner clothes.

Now that may not sound theological but the point I want to make today is that there a lot of us Christians running around in inappropriate clothes. What we are supposed to be "putting on" is what Paul calls the armor of light. What we are supposed to putting on, (and that’s exactly the language Paul uses for it, like clothing), is Christ. And there a lot of us walking around with our pants falling off--metaphorically speaking. (Although from the fashions I’ve seen in some places having your pants falling off you is the in-thing.)

You know the old saying, "Clothes make the man…or the woman." We’ve made a whole industry out of fashion because of that very basic belief. New clothes make us feel differently, don’t they? They can be statements about who we want to be.

That’s why clothing is such a contentious issue in schools and between parents and children. One of the first ways that we express our desire to be different from what we have been is through the clothes that we wear. It changes through time - what we choose. But whether it was Nehru jackets or bellbottoms or skinny ties or bling -- every generation has its statement.

Clothes can carry symbolic weight. As we watched the news this week and saw the national guard arriving on the scene in New Orleans, the sight of the uniforms made us feel that maybe some order was going to be restored. When a football player puts on the pads and the jersey with the school colors for the first time, he feels differently -- stronger, more confident, part of something bigger. When nurses finish their training they receive a hat -- a symbol of their profession that gives them a sense of confidence that they can care for others despite any lingering insecurities.

When I lived in Texas I started wearing cowboy boots because it was appropriate church wear. And, you know, when I first put them on I felt like I could ride horses and kick rattlesnakes and yodel. It was great feeling.

But to put on the armor of light? To put on Christ? Now that’s another story. Which of us feels like that’s our natural clothing? Like John the Baptist we don’t even feel worthy to touch Jesus’ sandal, much less take on Christ’s wardrobe. It’s not just the pants that won’t fit!

Paul says that this is exactly the clothing we should wear. It’s pretty obvious from the way we have lived when we’ve tried it on our own that our "fashion choices" look pretty ridiculous -- like showing up in cutoffs for the senior prom -- like getting married in platform shoes and a rainbow afro wig -- we all too often show up inappropriately dressed for the kingdom feast. We make our own rules. We live our lives with disregard for others’ well-being and even with disregard for our own. We can be so self-centered that we have a hard time seeing where our center should be.

So what do we do? We put on new clothes. We put on the armor of light that Paul talks about. We live as people of day even though the world around us is living in the dark. We put on Christ because it’s the only way to become Christ-like. It’s such an unnatural thing for us who have grown accustomed to the dark.

And it’s awkward and uncomfortable at first -- like new jeans before you break them in. When we grow in holiness and try to walk in Jesus’ footsteps it feels like someone else is doing it, or someone else should be doing it, and we’re just along for the ride. Have you ever noticed this? You go to pray after a long period or maybe your whole life not praying. You go to pray and the words come haltingly and you stumble and you don’t know what to say.

Or you take on a discipline--reading the Bible or fasting or tithing and for a long time there is the voice inside you saying, "This is not you. This you acting like a Christian. This is you putting on a front. It’s not really you."

But the voice is wrong. What’s really happening is that you are becoming the ‘you’ you were meant to be all along. You are taking on a persona but it’s the persona you were meant to have all along. Because what you are putting on is Christ and the scriptures tell us that our lives are hidden in God with Christ [Col. 5:3]. Who we are is Christ’s. Who we were meant to be is Christ’s. We’ve been looking pretty ridiculous for way too long because we’ve been trying to keep up appearances…we’ve been trying to pretend that we’ve got it all together…trying to put up a brave and ‘with-it’ front. But I’ll bet you’re exhausted from the effort. I’ll bet you’d like to shed the coat and tie (or the pantyhose) of other people’s expectations and trade them in for the sweatshirt that is as comfortable as your own skin.

Well, you’ve got clothes like that. If you’re baptized you got them at your baptism when you went under the waters to die to your old self and to be reborn with Christ. We’ve got appropriate clothes; they are the clothes of Christ.

"O.K.," you say. "O.K., Alex, I’ll accept that I’ve got new clothes. But they don’t seem like they fit. They don’t seem like me. I don’t know if I can accept being Christian if it means being really different. Won’t I look funny to my friends and funny to my co-workers?"

And to that I say, "Yes, you’re going to look funny." You are going to look different and that is exactly how you ought to look. The world, enslaved to darkness, needs some people who look different. The world needs some people with light as their armor. The world needs some funny-looking people because the world needs Christians who love the world enough to tell it that it needs to be transformed.

This week I read that the Evangelical Lutheran Church has agreed to enter into a covenant with the United Methodist Church to share in the communion table. This is a good thing. It means that Lutherans and Methodists can meet at this table and share in this meal with no barriers. But one of the Lutheran delegates had a quote that caught my eye. He said he could think of no church that was less offensive than the United Methodist Church.

I’m taking this out of context, I know, but that is sad. It’s sad because having open hearts, open minds and open doors should not mean that we Methodists never give offense. There are a great many things out there to which we should be offensive. We ought to be offended when our media culture tells us that our highest aspiration ought to be as a consumer of that our greatest pleasures can only be found in sex or alcohol. We ought to be offended when lying is an acceptable form of discourse in public or private. We ought to be outraged when the poorest members of our society are left behind, left out, and treated as leftovers.

Which brings me to the flood. Hurricane Katrina may be the greatest tragedy our nation has endured in our lifetimes. We have watch in horror this week as the levee broke in New Orleans, as dead bodies floated in the streets, as survivors endured heat, hunger and homelessness, as all of the wonderful resources we have at our disposal didn’t seem to be sufficient to stop the suffering.

We wondered what our nation had become, didn’t we? We wondered how it could happen here, in the United States, in our country. We wondered what would happen on the Eastern Shore if we got the storm. Would our community stick together or would we see the same fighting, the same divisions, the same violence?

We asked, perhaps, how God could allow such disasters. And maybe we asked what we as a nation had done to deserve it.

Well, there are no end of possible failure for us to point at but I don’t think God singled out the poor folks of New Orleans to teach us a lesson. We may learn some lessons from this, and I hope we do, but the loving God we serve does not wish evil for any of God’s children. The ‘whys’ of this tragedy will take many days to discover.

But there is a challenge for us who believe. Steve Long, a professor at our United Methodist seminary in Chicago, Garret Evangelical, says that what marks Christians is that they put themselves in places where they would not be if the gospel they proclaimed were not true. Christians put themselves where they would not be if the gospel they proclaimed were not true.

Do you really think that human community can never rise above the murky depths we have seen displayed this week in New Orleans? Do you really think that God is against us and that death and destruction are the last and ultimate words to be spoken over each and any of us? Do you really believe that hurricanes have the power to express the will of God? If you believe that then there is not much to say today.

But I don’t believe there is a hurricane that has that power, even if it’s a category six. I don’t believe New Orleans is gone. I don’t believe God says ‘yes’ to death and ‘no’ to life.

I do believe that God can move across the face of the waters and create life. I do believe that God can take a homeless people and move them through the sea to a new land and a new home. I do believe that Jesus walked on water and calmed the sea. I do believe we are made new in Christ by water and the Spirit. I do believe that there is a new city of God and that a river runs through it. And I do believe that Christians can be witnesses to what they say they believe by what they do in this moment.

When the people of Israel were about to go into exile many centuries ago, the prophet Jeremiah did a very strange thing. Jerusalem was about to be destroyed--the people led away into captivity. And Jeremiah bought a piece of land in the city. Foolish in light of the circumstances, but a witness to what God would ultimately do. God would bring the people back.

It’s time to buy land in New Orleans. It’s time to put ourselves in places we would not be if we did not believe that the gospel was true. It’s time for us to say that God is still with us. The world of darkness needs light and hope and we’re the ones who are most excellently well-appointed. How’s your uniform looking, my sister…my brother?

Thanks be to God.