Perpetrators of Peace

Let us begin today with the parts of the parable that make sense. There is a man who finds himself in possession of a piece of property that seems well-suited to growing grapes. The man, in order to maximize his profits, plants new vines, builds a fence around them for protection, hews out an on-site wine press for efficiency of production, and even builds his own watchtower. In other words, he builds the Rolls-Royce of vineyards, complete with every possible resource to insure a healthy yield of wine. This makes sense.

The man, the parable tells us, then takes his fabulous vineyard, all shiny and brand-new, leases it out and leaves. He hires tenants to tend and harvest the vines and to make him a good profit. This, too, makes sense. Remember, the man is not a vintner. He’s a landowner, and he, like many of the rich, landowning men of his day, had little interest in actually getting his hands dirty. Why be forced to live on a farm in a Podunk little Palestinian town? Why not let someone else deal with the wolves and the thieves and the water shortages while he lives the high life in the big city? So, while his are maybe not the most inspiring actions ever, they do make sense.

But then things in our story begin to go rapidly and radically awry. When the landowner sends agents back to the vineyard to collect his portion of the profits, as was surely agreed to in the renter’s agreement, the tenants lose their minds. Why should we pay him anything, they say to themselves. Contract be damned, let’s keep it all. And so they seize the landowner’s slaves and assault them. They literally kill the messenger. This makes no sense. Why the tenants decide to lash out in this way is beyond us, and well beyond the scope of this parable. The story itself gives us no clues as to why the tenants are so hostile – there are no tales of abuses by the landowner, no pitiable saga of the tenant’s son who needs an expensive operation or of the tenant’s father who lost the land to the landowner in a card game gone wrong. There is no explanation, no earthly reason for the tenants’ sudden, destructive change of heart. It makes no sense.

Just as it makes no sense that when the landowner hears what has happened and that his profits are still sitting bottled up in Podunk, Palestine, he decides to try the same exact tactic again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on the man who casts more dear slaves unto the breech. And, when the tenants do to these slaves exactly what they did to the first three, the man makes another senseless decision. He sends his son down the deadly vineyard path, foolishly confident that the tenants will surely change their behavior when it comes to his son. What is he thinking, throwing more men, throwing his own son into this melee? And what are the tenants thinking when they take his son outside the walls and slaughter him like an animal? Do they honestly expect that the landowner will say to himself, well, these tenants really mean business; I guess I’ll just let them keep my land and my wall and my vines and my watch tower and my wine and my money. None of this makes any sense. The only thing that might make sense is how the landowner responds to the death of his son – he rides in on the waves of revenge, kills the tenants in a brutal way, rids his land of any traces of them, and starts all over again. As horrible as it is, as avoidable as it might have been, this vengeance, this retribution, makes some sort of sense.

Or does it? The truth is that the landowner’s decision to murder his own tenants only makes sense within the context of their own brutality. And the landowner’s actions only make sense to us because we live in the same context, because we, too, live in a world of overwhelming violence. Our story, too, is shaped by the exponential growth of senseless brutality, by the tragic reality that violence begets violence begets violence. The only reason that you and I are not shocked by the systematic killing of the tenants is because you and I are soaked through with the same violence that bloodies this story. We have been tossed to and fro by every wave of violence, and these days, the waves are coming so fast and furious that we find ourselves beaten and bruised and gasping for air.

For we live in a world that is drowning in violence. There is the violence of war, of genocide, of terrorism and abuse and systematic oppression. There are all types of wicked violence perpetrated against women and children. There is cruel, sweeping violence against people like the Rohingya in Myanmar, people we may have never heard of before until tales of that violence bring them into our living rooms. There can be, of course, violence even in our living rooms. There is constant violence against Creation, and then there is the violence of that same Creation, multiplied by our own hand. There is violence on our screens constantly, scenes of horrific rapes, vicious combat, and shootings of every possible variety – stylized shootings, historically-accurate shootings, serious shootings, noble shootings, graphic shootings, supernatural shootings, funny shootings – thousands upon thousands of shootings. There is violence on our streets constantly – hundreds of shootings in this city alone. There is violence that is born of greed or revenge or hatred, and then there is violence that seems to have no motivation at all except to see how many innocent people can be shot from a high-rise hotel room at one time.

And there is the violence in our speech, the daggers that are thrown with such constancy and volume that everyone is sure to get hit at one point or another. There is violence in every single aspect of our public discourse – insults, name-calling, threats, virtual slaps across the face – violence all the way from the tweets that come out of the White House down to the tweets with which we respond from our own houses. There is new violence of misogyny and prejudice, and old violence that bleeds afresh when the perpetrators of such violence make claims that “it was just a different time back then.” And there is violence in the Church, with abuse and cover-ups and cut-offs and schism and slaps on the wrist and just this week, slashing criticism from ultra-conservatives when our Presiding Bishop was asked to offer a prayer at the primates’ conference on the day after the Las Vegas shooting. There is so much violence running rampant in the world; most certainly, if we are honest with ourselves, there is violence in our own hearts. There is really no need for God to destroy this vineyard; we are doing a fine job of it ourselves.

The problem of this isn’t that we can’t live this way – we obviously can, and, as a society, choose to live this way year after year, at least those of us who do not become victims of violence ourselves. The problem is when we start to live as if this violence makes sense, as if this is just the way things work in our story. This cannot be. Violence cannot be at the heart of our story, because violence is incompatible with the kingdom of God. Violence shuts down the work of the vineyard. Violence tears through our world, leaving no time, no energy, no safety to plant and nurture and harvest the fruits of the kingdom. Violence never grows anything; it always rips out at the root. Violence destroys our sense of compassion and ability to care for our neighbor, because violence is about needing to win and never about those in need. It distracts and destroys and then opens the floodgates for all of its dark, devastating cousins – fear, blame, hatred, protectionism, and hardness of heart.

But fear not, my brothers and sisters. We are not doomed to live the life of a tenant, perpetuating the cycle of violence until kingdom come. We are not cursed; we are called, and we are commanded. Love one another as I have loved you. Take up your cross and follow me. Proclaim the Gospel. It is impossible to do any of this and perpetrate violence at the same time. It is impossible to lash out in violence when you are carrying your cross. It is impossible to hurl verbal daggers when you are proclaiming the Gospel. It is impossible to harvest hatred, discord, doubt and despair when you are sowing love, union, faith, and hope. No, you and I are far from cursed. We are commanded, and we are called. We are called to be instruments of peace, conduits of God’s own Grace, bringing violence to its knees in this world with each small act of self-giving love. We are called to plant and tend the seeds of peace, to grow the peace that is already here, the peace of God, which passes all understanding but is the only thing that makes sense. So go, you beloved children of God, go into all the world as perpetrators of peace. Go into your corner of the vineyard and change the story. And may the peace of Christ be always with you.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

8 October 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

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