We Are Made For Freedom

The priests and the elders in this morning’s gospel are located somewhere near the center of power in their part of the world.  No, they aren’t Romans, but they are high up in the religious and cultural life of their time.  Their cultural and religious dominance may be under dispute—Jesus himself is clearly calling their temple-centered authority into question, and it’s important to note that they represent one kind of Judaism, not “the religion as a whole”—what they stand for may be under dispute, but they still manage to locate themselves at the top of a hierarchy.  They are to be treated with respect.

And yet, for all their power and privilege, what’s most notable about them here is their fear and their lack of agency.  As Jesus gets them to admit, they are so afraid of what they call “the crowd” that they can’t even think straight.  For all their power and privilege, the high priests and the elders in this morning’s gospel are unable to make a simple declarative sentence about John the Baptist.  They have nothing to say about him.  How can you have nothing to say about crazy John the Baptist?

It’s clear that, from their central position of power in Jerusalem, they have been unable to make the journey out to the wilderness to be baptized.  They may have gone to see what John is up to, but they have been unwilling to pour out their souls in a confession of sin, unable to repent by the Jordan River. But neither can they ignore this wild prophet. From their position at the top of the religious and social hierarchy, they are unable to go against the will of the people and declare that John the Baptist is a fraud.  They fear the people.  How can that be? The anxious priests have nothing to say. 

No wonder, then, that they are baffled by Jesus, who has no problem making declarative statements.  In this chapter of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has just entered Jerusalem in triumph, in what we think of as the events of Palm Sunday.  He has gone to the Temple and overturned the tables of the money changers.  He has healed and cured and been proclaimed “The Son of David.”  He has even withered a fig tree that failed to provide him with fruit.  He is powerful and unafraid.  

No wonder that the fearful priests and elders question him first about his authority.  No wonder their concern is to tear him down.  They’re afraid of being taken down themselves.  They themselves are hostages.  Hostages to their position of power, their lineage, their geographical location at the Temple, their position of wealth and honor.  But Jesus is so free.  He is so certain that the love of God is a gift to the poor and the lowly.  He can be angry.  He can forgive.  He can face what will surely be death in Jerusalem, without apparent anxiety.  Where did he get this confidence?

And he can talk to anyone about anything.  We’ve been hearing him for some weeks now, teaching in ways that are challenging and rich.  Whether you’ve noticed it or not, we’ve been going through some mental and spiritual gymnastics in recent weeks, hearing complex ideas about forgiveness, parables about farmers who sow seed in ridiculous places and servants who fail to be as generous as their masters.  Jesus is a consummate teacher, a speaker who can communicate the most mysterious truths with power.  And in this moment, confronted by some of the more privileged and sophisticated religious figures of his day, he shows his verbal skill again, even as they demonstrate their inability to answer a direct question about John.

This time, his verbal skill takes the form of complete and utter simplicity.  Does he tell his sophisticated audience a sophisticated story?  No!  He tells them the easiest, most obvious parable ever.  “There were two brothers, got it?  One did the will of his father and the other didn’t, ok?  So which one did the will of his father?”

Listen to him!  This is the best teaching of all! He confronts these priests, and us, with the poverty of their own speaking. He shows up all our fearful “I don’t know” answers to tough questions.  Our hypocritical “Yes, sir” when we have no intention of laboring in the vineyard.  “What do you think?” he asks them, and us.  “If I make it clear as day for you, will you rise to the occasion?”

“What do you think about the situation you are in?  What do you think about your position in the world?  Where are you really?  Where within you is your authentic commitment to God? Do you have ears to hear and eyes to see?  Can you speak?  Do you have the humility,” Jesus asks, “to drop what holds you back, and step out with me into a new creation?”

It could be that Jesus is trying to embarrass the priests with this obvious story, but I think he is trying to reach them, trying to call them back to themselves.  Commentators have pointed out that this parable is a stripped-down version of one of the central stories of the Hebrew scriptures.  Time and again in those writings we hear about an older son and a younger son: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers.  Time and again we hear about Israel as a vineyard that is cultivated by God.  This simple story is the simple truth of Israel.  You are God’s children, and God has work for you to do, a harvest for you to share in.  That’s all you need to figure out.  Drop your fear and the sophistication you use to cover it up.  You don’t need to look good.  You just need to be willing to go to the vineyard.  Even reluctantly.  You don’t need to be a highly respected religious authority.  Just be God’s child.

Even now, it’s not too late for us to become free as Jesus is free.  No matter what holds us in bondage, no matter who we think we have to be, no matter whose permission we are waiting for, or whose opinion we fear, it’s not too late for us.

It’s not too late for us to drop our defensiveness.  It’s not too late for us to pour out our sins and be converted and be baptized in the Jordan River.  We can hear the words of the gospel and walk through this world as free people, no matter what we are mired in.

We could be free as Jesus is free.  We could be free to respond when God challenges us as he challenged those frightened priests.  We could have the hope and the vitality and the joy to reimagine the world we are in.  Even this world, mired in sin, the 2017 edition.  We could be free.

We would be free to drop everything and respond when storms crush the people of Puerto Rico.  Even now, after so much bad history, we could be free to rethink the bonds of debt and exploitation that have punished the people of that island for so many decades.  We could be free to address the environmental damage that is wreaking such havoc there and throughout the world. Our bad past could be the prologue to repentance and a new world.  We could decide that our own prosperity should not be bought at the price of other people’s lives.

Those of us who are white could be so free that when African Americans report that they are routinely taken for violent criminals instead of law-abiding citizens, the rest of us could listen without defensiveness instead of telling them to be quiet and grateful. Imagine a world in which inequality was automatically everybody’s problem!  We could stop asking the police and the activists to fight this out for us, and acknowledge instead that “our” criminal justice system reflects our biases. That world is still available to us, if we are willing to go to the vineyard.

We are the body of Christ.  We could have the mind of Christ. That same Christ who took Jerusalem by storm, armed only with truth and healing.  He wants us to get it. We could be free and fearless like him. We could have the same mind in us, Saint Paul says this morning, as Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

We are made for that freedom. That kind of freedom is our rightful heritage as children of God.  We could be free. Not haunted by the fear of losing some position of privilege that was never secure in the first place.  Not hostage to the powers of this world.  We could hear and respond and speak and act and love and change.

What do you think? 

Goodness Has Nothing To Do With It

Some of the most insightful and helpful words I ever heard spoken about God in a church were pronounced from this very pulpit years ago by a monk visiting from the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Britain[I].  Only some of the words were his.  The opening words of his sermon had been borrowed, in turn, from Mae West, who also used them as the title for her autobiography.  They come from a scene in the 1932 film, Night After Night[ii].  In the scene, Mae West has just made an entrance into a swanky club, wrapped in a white coat with an extravagant white fur collar.  She approaches the coat-check girl, removes the coat, and hands it to the girl.  Underneath, she’s dressed in a sparkly, white, sleeveless dress with a V-neckline, and as she hands the coat to the girl at the counter, her wrists glisten with diamond bracelets.  The coat-check girl can’t help but notice the bracelets, and comments, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!”  To which Mae West responds, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”

The burden of the sermon that day was to make a theological virtue of Mae West’s quip, and it’s an enterprise that is worth taking up again and again.  I trust I shall repeat some version of this sermon over and over more than a few times in the course of my ministry.

So often we convince ourselves, or perhaps others convince us, that if we can be good enough, God will love us.  We often consider this the most fundamental religious equation: that the Good will be rewarded by God and the Bad will suffer eternal torment.  And it’s true that there is a sufficient body of scriptural material with which to spin this particular theological yarn.  And sometimes Jesus himself seems to be spinning it.  But not too much.  And if threads of it run through the New Testament, the fabric of which they’re a part is a more complex and nuanced weave.

Take the parable we heard today about the laborers in the vineyard.  Some laborers were there all day, but others were there for only part of the day.  When the time came to be paid, and those who worked a shorter day got a full day’s pay, the laborers who’d worked a full day were irked that their pay was exactly the same as the others, who’d worked so much less.  They were annoyed because, in the terms of the story, they were the good ones who’d worked all day.  Whatever merits the other laborers might have had, they had not worked as long, hadn’t sweated as much, weren’t quite as good.  How could they possibly be paid as much?  Why weren’t all the laborers rewarded in kind – the Good with greater blessings, and the Less Good with a lesser bounty?

The landowner asks them, “Are you envious because I am generous?”  To which the obvious but unspoken reply is, “Yes!  Of course!”

But those good laborers had not figured out that the parable was not about them.  In fact the parable was not about the other laborers either, who had worked only part of the day.  It is not a parable about work ethics, labor relations, or fair-pay practices.

The parable is a parable about God, and it is meant, I think, to address the issue of how good God thinks we need to be in order to love us.

Like the good laborers, we generally suspect that the better you are, the more God loves you.  The implication is that there is a sliding scale of God’s love, and that you can improve your position on the scale with your diligence, your hard work, your attentiveness to some law, your adherence to some orthodoxy, or the sheer number of hours you clock in church.  If only you can be good enough, you can be assured that God loves you and that you will be taken care of come pay time, rewarded richly at the end of the day.

More to the point, the laborers who were late to work share this same suspicion, and like them, we also expect that they will very likely receive a lesser blessing because of their late arrival.  And this outlook would be a very sensible way of seeing things if God loved us because we are good.  But Jesus seems to be telling us that goodness has nothing to do with it.

And here’s where the words of wisdom from that monastic preacher in this pulpit come in.  It wasn’t just that he could quote Mae West effectively from the pulpit – an admittedly impressive feat for a British monk – it was also that he knew what to say next.  And what he said next were words that I find myself returning to over and over again as the years go by.

No, God does not love us because we are good.  Goodness has nothing to do with it.  God loves us because we are weak and stupid.

God loves us because we are weak and stupid.

True though it is that we are made in the image and likeness of God, there is more still to be said about us.  Correct though the Psalmist was when he sang that we are marvelously made, he was not singing the whole truth.

And sometimes it has to be said about us that we are weak and stupid.  God knows it could be said about me on any given day of the week.  Maybe you know this about yourself as well.

The problem with the idea that God will only love us if we are good enough, is that it will never sound like good news to those of us who know our own weakness and stupidity.  And, sinners that we are, it will never sound like good news to those who are honest with themselves.

If God loves those who get there first, then what need have the rest of us for God?

If God’s generosity is reserved for the finest and the best, then what will be left for the broken and the lost?

But the kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us, is not like that.  Maybe the kingdom of heaven is more like this:

Years ago, the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver opened up a restaurant in London that provides training for working-aged kids with troubled backgrounds.  He intended it to be a place where disadvantaged young people could come to get experience and support as they try to put their lives together and make it in the world.

The early days of the project were filmed and made into a TV series[iii].  And one poignant episode featured a girl – maybe 18 years old – who kept missing work, kept showing up late, kept doing everything worng.  She may have had a child to care for already, I can’t remember.  Her life was a mess, that’s for sure.  And in this one episode, when she shows up to work late again, for the umpteenth time, we find her crumpled up in tears, her head sunk into her folded arms, at the bottom of the stairs at the back of the kitchen.

Jamie Oliver arrives on the scene and crouches beside her.  Maybe his arm is around her, I can’t remember.  But I remember the substance of the short discussion that followed because it is such a succinct version of today’s parable.  It went something like this:

- Why are you crying, he asks.  What’s the matter?

- Because I’m late again, and I keep doing things wrong, and I know I’m going to get fired, she says through her sobs.

- Oh no, Jamie assures her.  Don’t you realize that anyplace else you’d have been fired long ago, you’d never have made it this far.  But it’s not like that here.  It’s not like that here.

What a remarkable and unexpected thing for an employer to say: Anyplace else you’d have been fired long ago, you’d never have made it this far, they’d have given up on you ages ago. You’d have been the last and the least, and your life would take shape accordingly.  But it’s not like that here.

If a celebrity chef can show such graceful compassion, how much more will God show compassion in the kingdom of heaven?

How easy it is to believe that God will only love us if we are good enough.

In this church we admit every day that we are not worthy to come under God’s roof, but we know that at his word our souls will be healed.  Can we also then admit that God loves us because we are weak and stupid, albeit marvelously made?

We can and we should try to be good, for somewhere along the way it will matter, no doubt, that we have chosen to be good, tried to be good, and sometimes even succeeded at being good.  And I am sure that Jesus wants us to be as good as we can be.  It’s good to be good. 

But Jesus’ salvation is not founded on your goodness or mine.  When he teaches us what God’s love is like – the love that ushers in his kingdom – he does not tell us about our selves, or how good we have to be, for the kingdom of heaven is not measured in our goodness.

The kingdom of heaven is measured in the boundlessness of God’s merciful loving kindness.  Which is immense good news to those of us who know ourselves to be weak and stupid. 

Christ died once, and for all.  He shed his blood to open the gates of the kingdom for all.  His love knows no bounds.  And for us, goodness has nothing to do with it.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

24 September 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

[i] The monk in question was Br. Nicolas Stebbing, CR

[ii] Paramount Pictures, directed by Archie Mayo

[iii] Jamie’s Kitchen, 2002, produced by Peter Moore for Talkback Productions

A Forgiveness Story

There is a story in the Bible that goes like this. A man is sitting with a group of his friends in a town that some of them call home. There are thirteen of them – the man and twelve companions, let’s call them twelve disc…erning followers. They have been traveling together, hiking up mountains and passing through new towns, healing the sick and talking about taxes, and they have stopped here for a moment to rest and catch their breaths. Inexplicably, the followers choose this moment to ask their guide questions about status and prestige. Who is the greatest in this kingdom he talks so much about? They aren’t quite jockeying for position – at least not yet – but you can see that the question of “…and which one of us is most like that person who is the greatest?’ isn’t too far off.

Except, in our story, that question never gets asked. Because the leader, as he often does, redirects the conversation. You want to talk about who is the greatest? Okay, let’s talk about that. The greatest in my kingdom is like – he looks around – her. He points to a little girl romping up the hill towards them with her mother. This is what the greatest in my kingdom looks like, and woe to anyone who puts a stumbling-block in front of any children such as these.

Suddenly the twelve followers aren’t so interested in asking their follow-up question, which now seems to be, “…and which one of us is most like this little girl.” And anyway, their guide is still talking. He tells them that they should be on the lookout for those who are weak, those who are powerless and dependent, the one lost sheep amongst a hundred. These are the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, where the humble players are given pride of place.

And if you’re looking for a place to start practicing finding these little lost ones, he goes on, why don’t you begin in your own community? Rather than letting people simply fall away from this movement, he tells them, you should follow after them and find them. If someone has sinned against you and the Church, go find them. Go find them and offer them a chance to repent. Go find them, even if it takes three tries. Go find them so that you can forgive them, mend that relationship, and bring a lost sheep home.

One of the followers, who has recently been a bit of a stumbling-block himself, asks what he thinks should be a simple follow-up question. And how many times should we forgive this lost sheep? He searches in his mind for a number that seems appropriate, a number that’s generous, even overly-generous, without seeming preposterous. 7? 7 times? 7 times I should slog around looking for the same lost sheep before deciding that he just really wants to be lost? 7 sounds good. I mean, 7 is a lot. Let’s say my brother here, oh, I don’t know, abandons and betrays me. I go to him, we talk it out, he realizes the error of his ways, asks for forgiveness, I say okay. Then, two days later, he abandons and betrays me again. I go to him, we talk it out, he realizes the error of his ways, asks for forgiveness, I say okay. He does it again, I forgive him again. He does it again, I forgive him again.  He does it again, I forgive him again.  He does it again, I forgive him again. He does it again, I forgive him again. That’s 7. Seems fair. Seems like a goodly, biblical number.

But the leader, once again, redirects the conversation. He isn’t interested in the lowest-common denominator, the reasonable, or the limited. Not 7, he says, but 77 times. He sins, you forgive him. And again and again and again and again and again and again…and we, who are listening to this story, begin to get the point. This story is about not just forgiveness, but extreme forgiveness. This story is about forgiveness that is truly massive, the fatberg of forgiveness. And if we’re going to forgive this way, we need to get ready, to start training for this Iron Man seventy-septathon of Forgiveness.

We’ve seen examples of this kind of extreme forgiveness before. The Amish community that reached out to the family of the man who had walked into their schoolhouse and killed three of their children. The families of those killed at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston who prayed for the killer. The grieving father who publically forgave the shooter at Sandy Hook, the mother who reached out to the man who had killed her daughter in a drunk driving incident, the child at Our Little Roses whose mother had abandoned her who wrote in a poem that her time without her family felt like “a knife trying to get inside a rock” but then told God “when I am finally somebody in this world…I will go straight to Mexico where my mother lives and I will stare at her like I stare at the stars and with a voice that cracks like thunder I will say: i forgive you.”*

We’ve heard of examples of this kind of extreme, Iron Man forgiveness in the world, and it seems that our story is telling us to prepare ourselves for just this kind of forgiveness. Let’s go, the leader seems to say, get out your cross-trainers, set your alarm for oh-dark-hundred, and get ready to work. Get ready to forgive even if it’s through gritted teeth, get ready to sweat as you welcome someone back into the flock, get ready to wake up morning after morning aching from the grind of your extreme forgiveness.

Except that our story does not end there. In our story, the guide decides to tell his twelve disc…erning followers a story of his own. There once was a man who owed his master a great debt. Not just a great debt, but like, a million-bagillion dollars. And when he could not pay his master back the million-bagillion dollars, and his master was threatening to ruin his life, the man fell on his knees and begged his master to forgive what he owed. Which, unbelievably, his master did. The man, chuffed with this new development, immediately walked over to his nearest companion and asked for the hundred bucks he owed him. When his companion couldn’t fork over the money, the man had him arrested and locked up without bail. The master, getting wind of this, changed his mind about the million-bagillion dollars and had the man tortured until he could pay every single cent back. And so – the leader tells his followers – so will happen to you if you do not forgive your sisters and brothers from your heart.

Now the first story is true. It is, of course, the story of Jesus of Nazareth teaching his disciples about forgiveness. The second story is, of course, also true. It may not be factual, but it is certainly true. Because in this parable, Jesus reminds his disciples and us of the great truth that in order to forgive others, we must first know ourselves to be so forgiven. And to begin to know ourselves as those who are forgiven, we must take that one additional, challenging step deep into truth: we must first acknowledge that we ourselves have sinned. We are sinners, we sin: we abandon and betray, we deny Christ three times thirty times, we lie and gossip and hate and steal and misuse our bodies and neglect our prayers and forget the poor and blame the victim and make bad choices again and again and again. We are part of systems that have spent centuries setting up stumbling blocks before people of color, women, the gay, lesbian, and trans community, and countless other least of these. We have sinned, O Lord, we have sinned, and we know our wickedness only too well.  

All this is true. Also true is that God will forgive us. If we confess our sins, repent and return to the Lord, the Lord forgives us, forgives all, every cent of sin that we have misspent during our lifetimes. This, finally, is the point of our story – not that we need to buckle down and forgive 77 times, but that God freely forgives us a million-bagillion times. This is the true extreme forgiveness – not that we must become Iron Men of Forgiveness but that this man stretched out his arms upon a cross of wood and iron and offered himself in obedience for the sins of the whole world. We have sinned, O Lord, we have sinned, and we need to know our forgiveness too, and well.   

As followers ourselves of this Jesus of Nazareth, we must learn to forgive. But in order to do this, we must first learn the whole story. We must read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the truth of God’s forgiveness. We must recognize ourselves as broken and humble, as those who are as weak and helpless and dependent as a little child, so that we can move into our world with mercy and love, looking for the connection of our mutual brokenness so that we can first speak truth with love, work for justice with kindness, empathy, and compassion, and finally forgive others in the radical, life-changing way that we have been forgiven. "For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is his mercy great upon those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us. And as a father cares for his children, so does the Lord care for those who fear him." This is forgiveness; this is our own true story.

*This poem may be found in Voices Beyond the Wall: Twelve Love Poems from the Murder Capital of the World

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

17 September 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia