The Kingdom of Heaven Is Like What? (Matthew 20:1-16, Proper 20A, September 18, 2011)

Proper 20A
Matthew 20:1-16
September 18, 2011

The Kingdom of Heaven Is Like What?!

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

There is more than one way to skin a cat, the old saying goes. That may be true, but if it is,it is a truth that as far as I am concerned will remain untested. But I do know that there is more than one way to read a text. And never more so than when the text is one of the parables of Jesus.

A landowner goes to the market place to hire workers to work in his vineyard. He hires some very early in the morning at the rate of one denarius for a day’s work. He discovers that he needs more workers and so returns to the market and hires more at mid-morning, at noon and at mid-afternoon. He still needs workers and hires more an hour before quitting time. He promises to pay them a fair wage.

Then he has the workers paid, beginning with the last ones hired. He pays them all one denarius. The first workers hired complain of unfairness. He dismisses their complaints on the grounds that he has the right to be as generous as he wants with his own money.

That’s the story, but how do we read the story? What do we make of it?

The first person to make something of the story is the writer of Matthew. He (or she) concludes that “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” That is, that God has a way of turning things around or upside down. For Matthew’s community, a community that had both Jewish and non-Jewish Jesus followers in it, this meant that Jewish people—who were God’s covenant people and by rights should have had pride of place in the world—had lost their place because they mostly dismissed the claims of Jesus to be messiah. In their place God had promoted non-Jewish people who had embraced Jesus as messiah.

The assumption is that the parable is actually an allegory, a story in which each of the elements of the story stands for something else. Very early in the Christian tradition of reading this parable then, we have the idea that the landowner is a figure for God. The workers hired early are the Jewish people. The workers hired late are the non-Jewish followers of Jesus. The payment is the heavenly reward given to them equally.

With small changes here and there this becomes the traditional way of reading this parable. The biblical theme material from our new curriculum, The Whole People of God, suggests that the story is a picture of God’s love that is equally available for everyone:

The landowner was such a generous person that he had given all of the workers a full day’s wage—daily bread for their families. Those who had come in the morning felt they deserved more and would not celebrate the landowner’s generosity.

Because the traditional reading sees the landowner as a figure for God, the landowner comes off as the hero of the story. The others in the story end up looking bad. In our curriculum the workers who complain are labeled as those who “would not celebrate the landowner’s generosity.” Other readers are even less kind. The great German scholar of the last century, Joachim Jeremias, sees the later workers as lazy:

Even if, in the case of the last labourers to be hired, it is their own fault that, in a time when the vineyard needs workers, they sit about in the marketplace gossiping till late afternoon; even if their excuse that no one has hired them (v. 7) is an idle evasion...a cover for their typical oriental indifference, yet they touch the owner’s heart.¹

Not only does Jeremias call the last workers lazy gossipers he throws in a racist stereotype just for good measure. Nonetheless the landowner’s (God’s) heart is touched. God loves even the worthless.

Even a reader who has a lot of sympathy for the workers assumes that the landowner is a God figure. Pablo Jiménez, a latino theologian, recognizes that the workers have much in common with the day laborers who gather on street corners of our major cities looking for work. His fellow congregation members may hear in this story that God loves them and will provide what they need.

Now, as you may have guessed, I have some issues with this way of reading this parable. It’s not that I don’t believe that God loves and cares for all, even the Kardashian sisters. Nor is it even that I don’t appreciate the irony of the fact that this Jewish movement got so much traction among non-Jews.

It’s just that I’d like to try something before I simply assume that there is only one way of reading the parable. Instead of assuming that this story that only seems to be about a “landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard”² and instead is actually about God’s generosity poured out on all alike, let’s try something different. Let’s start by assuming that this story about a “landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard” is actually a story about...a “ landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard.”

So there was a landowner. Jesus and his hearers recognized this figure. The economy in Galilee in Jesus’ day was changing. Peasants who had been subsistance farmers were being shoved off their land. Wealthy landowners combined their small plots into large farms that grew luxury crops for export. Many peasants were forced into the life of the day laborer.

I say “life,” but in fact it was a slow death. A denarius was supposed to be enough to feed an adult for a day,though it wasn’t quite. Day laborers didn’t work every day, nor necessarily all day when they did work. No work meant no pay. No pay meant no food. No food meant weakness and vulnerability to disease. Day laborers were not able to support a family, any more than a minimum wage worker is able to support one today.

This landowner had a vineyard. Wine was one of the luxury goods being produced on land that had been seized from peasants. There are times in the year when maintaining a vineyard requires extra labor. So, the story says, the landowner went to the market to hire some workers.

This is did not happen. A landowner did not hire day laborer sany more than the president of General Motors personally hires casual labor to sweep the floors. A landowner did not even manage a vineyard directly. A landowner lived in a city. He had people to manage his properties. Even his property managers would not have gone to the market to hire workers. A property manager had people to hire workers. The landowner was insulated from all that messy stuff. The landowner could devote his time to politics, culture and drinking with his friends. His minions did the heavy lifting and the dirty work.

This parable of Jesus stripped bare the layers of pretense that normally disguised the relationship between the elites at the top and the day workers at the bottom,day workers who held on to life by their fingernails. It does this by collapsing the vast social distance between them. In the parable Jesus’ listeners were able to see the true relationship between the very wealthy and the very poor.

This landowner went to the market where the day laborers were gathered, hoping to eat that day. He hired some for the usual wage, a denarius, and sent them to the vineyard. But they weren’t enough, so he went back. There were still workers available so he hired and sent more. He would pay them “whatever would be just.” Again and again this landowner went to the market and secured more workers. An hour before sunset he was still at it. Not, of course, without insulting the workers he was hiring: “Why have you been standing here idle all day?” The rich are always convinced that the poor are lazy, that the unemployed are to blame for their unemployment. But there was a simple explanation. They were still in marketplace because no one had hired them. All day they had been there waiting. Even an hour before sunset, when the chances of being hired were nearly zero, they were still waiting. The landowner implied that they were lazy. They let the insult roll off them. What choice did they have?

Then it came time to settle up. The landowner gave these workers a show of his power. He paid the last ones hired in the presence of those who had “borne the burden of the day and the heat” so they would know what the others had been paid.

A man who had become a day laborer had lost his land. He had no trade to practice. He didn’t have enough capital to start fishing. The only thing he had was his labor. He could sell his labor for his daily bread. It was a precarious existence, but it was better than the abject begging that would come next as he slid along the path of downward mobility. At least he still had the little dignity that remained to a man who still had something that was worth a denarius. The landowner stripped away the last shreds of this dignity by turning payment into charity, and justice into alms-giving. Little wonder the workers grumbled.

The landowner singled out one of the grumblers and made an example of him. “Friend,” he began. “Friend” is what he would have called his drinking buddies. Addressed to a day laborer “friend” was a warning that he was about to be destroyed. “I have done no injustice,” he purred. “We agreed on a denarius. Take your denarius and go. The money is mine; I can do anything I want to with it. Or are you giving me the evil eye because I am good?”

The landowner certainly is acting like he can do anything he wants to with his money, but we know that’s not true, not for those who live in the biblical covenant. He promised to pay a just wage. He could have started by paying a living wage. He could have recognized that the poor are not to be blamed for their poverty. He could have given his workers some respect instead of implying their laziness. He could have respected his workers’ work.

Instead he mistook power for innocence and singled out one of his workers for “special treatment.” With no National Labor Relations Board, even one as underfunded and toothless as we have, the worker had no recourse. And, given that rich people talk to each other, it is unlikely that he would ever work again.

I think that’s the story that Jesus’ hearers would have heard. Now, where to from here? I suggest we go back to the beginning of the parable: “The reign of God is like...” it began. What is the reign of God like? Is it like the powerful landowner whose money and power allow him to do whatever he wants, to represent his tight-fistedness as justice and charity and to pass himself off as a “job creator”? Or is the reign of God like the day laborers who see and name aloud the injustice that is destroying their humanity and their very lives? who name it even at great risk to the little resources they have left? Which is the reign of God like? I know which makes more sense to me, but you’ll have to decide for yourselves.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (Scribner, 1972), 26. (Cited in Pablo A. Jiménez, “The Laborers of the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) : A Hispanic Homiletical Reading.” Journal for Preachers 21, no. 1 (Advent 1997): 36-37.

2Common English Bible, Nashville (2011).

Can't We All Just Get Along (Romans 14:1-12, Proper 19A, September 11, 2011)

Proper 19A
Romans 14:1-12
September 11, 2011

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, Ph.D.
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Nearly twenty years ago, the police officers who had been filmed beating Rodney King, a Los Angeles taxi cab driver, were acquitted. The city exploded in rage. Fifty-three people died in the ensuing riots. Over 4,000 were injured. The city suffered a billion dollars in property damage. Two days after the rioting began, Rodney King uttered the sentence which will be forever linked with his name: “Can we all just get along?”¹

The short answer to Mr. King's question is, “No.”

At least, we haven't figured it out yet. We have this tendency to view with suspicion people who are not like us. Maybe this gave us some sort of evolutionary advantage at one time. After all, when we meet people who are not like us, we're not really sure of the rules. The risk of doing something provocative or of failing to recognize that they have done something provocative is high. We could get killed for behavior that looked to us to be perfectly innocent.

Getting along with people who are not like us is like getting along with bees. My father always told me that they wouldn't bother me if I didn't bother them. The trouble is, I never bothered them on purpose, but I got stung anyway.

So maybe there used to be good reason for us to distrust “people who are not like us.” The trouble is, our world has gotten a lot smaller than it used to be and there are all kinds of people rubbing right up against us. The consequences now for our failure to learn how to “just get along” are a lot higher than they used to be. But that doesn't mean that it's gotten any easier.

A smaller world has made it even harder in some ways. It was easy for us Anglos to get along with Latinos when they all lived in somewhere else. Now, there are Latinos right here in Decorah. They are our neighbors and not just in some metaphorical sense. They bring a cultural richness to our community but their presence also poses a challenge to all of us. We may not trust our new neighbors and they may not trust us, but we have to figure it out.

Christians and Muslims bump into each othermore and more often.Some of that bumping is the natural result of a shrinking world.Some of that bumping is a result of falling into the trap of centuries old ways of relating to each other,so that we can write the story of our military engagement in the Middle Eastas just the latest installment of a history that includes(counting backwards):the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century,five or so centuries of sporadic crusades,the destruction of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchreby Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amir Allah in 1009,and even back to the centuries of conflict along the borderof the Roman and Parthian Empires.

If the last ten years have taught us anything—and the jury is most definitely still out on that question—they have taught us that there has never been a greater need for all the children of Abraham and Sarah—Jewish, Christian and Muslim—to understand each other, learn to live alongside of each other, and—who knows?—even to come to appreciate each other.

So a more complex answer to Mr. King's question, “Can we all just get along?” is this: “No. But we have to learn how.” Our world no longer affords us the luxury of pretending that we don't have to.

In some ways, at least, Rome in Paul's day resembled the world in our day. It was the center of a large empire, one of the largest the world had ever seen. From all over the world people made their way there. Gauls, Germans, Phrygians, Celts from Asia Minor, Egyptians and Jews, people of all ethnic backgrounds saw an opportunity in Rome, so they came. They worked hard to learn the language, which, oddly enough among the lower classes was Greek, and not Latin. They worked hard to fit in, to become Romans. But doing that wasn't simply a matter of changing clothes. At least at home they spoke their own languages. They worshiped their own gods, sometimes adding their gods to gods of the Roman and sometimes, as was the case with Jews, worshiping their own God alone.

Enculturation never happens overnight. An older of colleague of mine became an Episcopal priest just after I graduated from seminary. There was not even any talk of “full communion” then. He had to be ordained again. He gave up a lot for the sake of what he hoped to find in the Episcopal Church: a beautiful liturgy, an appreciation for Christian tradition, and a deep spirituality. He told me that when he had spoken with his new bishop, his Episcopal bishop, he told him that he hoped that there was no expectation that he leave his Methodist roots behind. His bishop replied that he had no such expectation. He might be ordained as an Episcopal priest, but he would always be a Methodist.

So it was in the small Christian community in Rome. Some of the members of the church had been pagans. They had embraced Christ and the new faith. They had forsaken their old gods and no longer worshiped as pagans, but they still dressed as they had before, still ate the foods that they had eaten before. Others were Jews who had embraced Christ and the new faith as a deep expression of the tradition that they had always observed. They, too, dressed as they had dressed before, ate the food they had eaten before, and observed the sabbath and the holy days that they had observed before.

Jewish Christians could not help but feeling that, since Christ only made sense in the context of the Jewish tradition, they had some superior standing in the community. The law was theirs, the prophets were theirs, ethnically Christ himself was theirs. Gentiles were welcome, God had made that clear, but just as clearly Gentiles had much to learn about the Jewish tradition and Jewish Christians felt they were in a position to teach them. For instance Jewish Christians recognized that the threat of idolatry was all around. There were idols everywhere. What pagans called gods, Jews called demons, so idols were a demonic deception calculated to ensnare idol worshipers. About the only meat that the vast majority of folk in Rome ever got came from the animals sacrificed during pagan festivals. It was usually paid for by the rich folks who sponsored these holidays. But how could Christians, Jewish or not possibly eat food that had been sacrificed to a demon? These Jewish Christians, like other Jews, solved the problem by avoiding all meat if they didn't know for certain where it had come from.A sort religiously-inspired "localism."

“Nonsense,” replied their pagan brothers and sisters in Christ. Idols were all a bit of play-acting. There was no reality to idolatry. There were no other gods. The sacrifices were meaningless. The meat, wherever it had come from, was not—could not be—tainted by some meaningless ceremony. These Gentile Christians knew that they were free from all of that. They had been freed by Christ himself. How could Christians cast doubt on that freedom and on Christ himself by pretending that this meat was anything else than a gift from the One God who had made everything? So these Gentile Christians ate the festival meat with thanksgiving.

This made potluck suppers awkward.

The church divided up into two parties. One looked down their noses at the other. The other looked back in disdain. “They aren't real Christians,” they both muttered under their breath.

We can picture Paul as a mediator in this dispute. But he wasn't a very satisfactory mediator. After all, he never did tell them how to lay out their food at potluck suppers. And that's important. A church without potluck suppers, well, I suppose it's possible, but it's certainly not Methodist.

What he did was to reframe the question. “The question,” he said, “was not, Who's right? Who's the real Christian? The question was, Whose are you? To whom do you belong?”

Neither side could meet his eye. They kind of shuffled and looked down at their feet.

“Come on,” Paul repeated, “Whose are you? To whom do you belong?”

It's like a children's message. If you don't know the answer, a good guess is always, “God.”

“God,” they mumbled.

“You belong to God,” Paul said, pointing at the Jewish Christians. “You belong to God,” he said, pointing to the Gentile Christians. “You both belong to God. You are both members of God's household and you will both have to answer to God for your conduct. Where do you get off passing judgment on servants who belong to someone else? Just who do you think you are?”

Like I said, he never did tell them how to solve the problem with the food at potluck suppers.

But that's just as well. If he had, it wouldn't help us much, because we don't have meat sacrificed to idols in our casserole dishes. Although, I suppose, this could be helpful to a congregation that contains both omnivores and vegans.

No, we have our own ways of splitting into parties. We have our own ways of deciding that those people aren't really Christians.

To us, too, Paul could say, “It isn't about you. Whatever you're doing, it's for God, right? Right? So what if some of you serve God and come out on the opposite sides of a question. It's still all about God, right? Right? So, where's the problem?”

“Can we all just get along?” No, not yet. But if we remember who we are and what it's about, it may just be possible.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1. 1Madison Gray, “RODNEY KING - The L.A. Riots: 15 Years After Rodney King - TIME,” http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/la_riot/article/0,28804,1614117_1614084,00.html.

Fast Food for a Long Journey (September 4, 2011, Proper 18A, Exodus 12:1-14)

Proper 18A
Exodus 12:1-14
September 4, 2011

Fast Food for a Long Journey

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

One of the greatest stories ever told continues in our Old Testament lesson for this morning. It is a story of great sorrow and of great joy. It is a story of slavery and freedom. It is the story of a long journey suddenly begun. It is one of the stories that grounds us in hope. It is a story that gives us a humane and liveable alternative to the inhuman and death-dealing stories that form the major narratives of our time.

It is a wonderful story. But it is also very strange. It’s strange for several reasons. It’s strange because it comes from a far away place and from a long time ago. It’s about a meal, a strange sort of barbeque. A yearling lamb or a goat is to be slaughtered. It is to be roasted whole over the fire: head, legs, “innards” and all. It’s strange to us, but maybe not to them. Maybe this is the sort of thing people did in that time and place.

It’s also strange because the way we have it it’s not just a story about what happened the night they were set free. It’s also a story that explains how Pesach or the Passover meal came to be. As such part of its purpose is not only to say why God’s people celebrate the Passover, but to tell them how they are to celebrate it. It’s a set of instructions as well as a story.

Some of the strangeness of this story we can dispel by a better understanding of the time in which it was told and written down and the purposes for which it was preserved. But only some.

Some of the strangeness is just there, no matter how well we understand. We have the story of a God who is often a stickler for detail, a God who knows and cares about whether a lamb or goat is a year old or a two year old, a God who can tell a first-born human being or animal from a second- or third-born. This same God, however, cannot seem to tell the difference between an Egyptian and a Hebrew household. This same God tells the Hebrews to splash blood on the doorposts and the beams above their doorways so that it will look like God has already been there so that God will pass over that house while engaged in this killing rampage.

And this may be the strangest thing of all: that the liberation of the Hebrews should require the deaths of countless other innocents. Our moral sensibilities are offended by the deaths of all the first-born sons, all the first-born cattle, all the first-born dogs and cats, very few of whom had anything directly to do with oppressing the Israelites. The story doesn’t say why. The violence is just there, scandalous perhaps, but unapologetic.

But this story is also strange because it is alien to our ways of seeing the world, of thinking about it and living in it. If offends because it contradicts us and makes us uncomfortable.

God promises not only to kill the first-born, but also to “impose judgments” on the gods of Egypt. The contests between Moses and the Egyptian magicians and the confrontation at the Sea of Reeds between the escaped Hebrews and Pharaoh’s cavalry are more than they seem to be. Behind the scenes it is Yahweh who is engaged in the most important contest of all: a contest with the gods of Egypt.

Yahweh would take on Atum, Isis, Nut, Osiris, Seth, Tefnut and dozens of others. It would be one against a hundred or more, an unknown storm God from the desert against the gods of empire. It wouldn’t simply be a contest of strength against strength in which Yahweh would show that these gods who pretended to be strong were in fact weak, too weak to keep a few slaves from escaping from their masters. Instead it would be a judgment. Yahweh would show that the gods of Egypt had failed in their legal responsibility; they had failed to uphold justice. Yahweh would show that they didn’t deserve to rule.

While God would be “imposing judgments” the people of Israel would be eating! They would eat lamb, but wouldn’t take the time to dress it out; they would simply roast it whole. They would eat bread, but they wouldn’t take the time let the yeast in the dough do its work; they would bake matzoh, wafer-thin bread that wouldn’t need to rise. They would eat dressed for travel. They would eat it with their shoes on. They would eat it with their walking sticks in hand. They would eat it in a hurry. History’s first fast food!

While they ate, they became God’s covenant people. We tend to think that we belong to God because of what we believe, but it was not so for them (and maybe it isn’t so for us, either). They became God’s people by eating. The meal marked them. It was a meal that sacramental theologians call a “sign act” and it was something they would do ever after.

They began their shared life as God’s people with fast food, but the pace slowed a lot after that. The business beside the Sea of Reeds was pretty exciting, but after that, their life was pretty dull. They would walk to an oasis and set up camp. They would stay there for a time and then they would move on. They gathered the manna that God gave to them. Same stuff every day.

—What’s for breakfast?
—Manna.
—Manna again?
—Yeah, but I rolled it into little balls and boiled it.
—Well, okay, then—something different. No, wait! It still tastes just the same. Manna again!

(Later that day)
—What’s for supper?
—Fried manna.

Children were born and grew and had children of their own and grew old and died and still they seemed no closer to their goal. After a while the only life they knew was walking from one oasis to another. That and eating manna.

The sheer dailiness of their lives must have been overwhelming. They couldn’t even look forward to getting a new Android. One day, one year, one decade, was like another. Fast food for a long journey.

And this is where it comes a little too close for comfort, because this pattern of life as God’s people runs against the grain. One of the gods of our regime, it seems, is Novelty, the god of new things. Novelty is an active god, doing all sorts of important things that keep our way of life going. Novelty makes sure that we are never happy with what we have, unless it’s brand new, and then only until something newer comes along. Novelty offers itself as the cure for what we have come to believe is a fatal condition: boredom. Serving the god Novelty we will spend our money, risk our health and our bodies. We’ll do anything to escape boredom.

In our churches we look for ways to repackage and re-present what is essentially the same stuff as if it were different stuff. We expect constant creativity in our worship. We demand the glossy and new in our educational curriculum. We expect new pleasures in our fellowship. We don’t like doing the same thing twice. We especially don’t want to do the same thing enough times that it gets under our skin and soaks into our bones and becomes a part of us.

But the long journey is the pattern of our life with God, the long journey that is often, well, boring. The word journey in fact comes from the French for “day.” A journey is a succession of days, days that are mostly like each other. Our life with God and our life with each other is mostly made of dailiness. Sometimes something happens, but mostly it doesn’t. And even when something happens it often turns out to be not as important as it looked at the time. The work—God’s work—of shaping and fashioning us as individuals and as a congregation is a work that takes a long time. We are in a hurry. But God is not.

So it often happens that we come to some decision point in our faith journey. We commit ourselves to being Jesus followers. Or we decide to attend to our own life with God more carefully. The decision is made in a moment. And we expect, somehow, that we’ll see results right away. We’d like to be saints by the end of the year. But it will take a lifetime and more. It will take a lifetime of mostly doing it wrong and only occasionally getting it right, a lifetime of beginning again, a lifetime of shaping our lives while—unseen—God is shaping us. The journey of God’s people may begin with fast food eaten in a hurry, but it is made of days, many days, one after another, mostly alike.

Fortunately, there is food for the journey and like manna it comes from God’s hand and like manna there is nothing much remarkable about it, especially after we’ve had it week in and week out for a lifetime. And yet, like manna, it will nourish us, strengthen us and get us there. We have set a table and spread out a meager meal that we call, ironically, a feast. It isn’t much, but everyone is welcome. If you’ve decided to come on the journey, you’d probably better join us at the table. You’ll be hungry if you don’t.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Crossings (August 28, 2011, Proper 17A, Matthew 16:21-28)

Proper 17A
Matthew 16:21-28
August 28, 2011

Crossings

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Here we are, in the middle of that long stretch of Sundays that the tradition of the church calls “ordinary time.” It’s not called that because the Sundays get a “ho hum” reaction, although it’s certainly not as exciting—if that’s the right word for it—as Advent and Christmas, say. It’s called ordinary time because it’s not a time with lots of high holy days, so we simply number the Sundays and count them with “ordinal” numbers. Do your remember? Numbers come in two kinds, cardinals and ordinals. “One, two, three” are cardinal numbers. Ordinal numbers are “first, second, third.” Today is the 11^th Sunday after Pentecost. Ordinary time.

Having said that, there is something rather nice about “ordinary” time in the other sense. It is rather nice to have nothing much going on. Our friends and relatives on the east coast are wishing that nothing much was going on. Last week it was an earthquake. This weekend it’s a hurricane. What next—a plague of locusts? Ordinary is good.

We’re home from vacations. Sure, it was good to get away, to see something new, or to see family and old friends. But it’s called “away” for a reason. Away is somewhere else, not here, not home. Now we’re home.

Kids are back to school. They are settling into routines and so are we. The routines may be demanding, but there is more predictability from week to week and month to month. Unless, of course, the school authorities decide to send everyone home because the weather is unbearably nice. They said it was because it was too hot, but come on! And how civilized. “The weather is too nice. Let’s send everyone home.” I wish I had had school authorities like that when I was in school. Instead, we suffered through boring classes yearning to be outside.

In ordinary time, news is not a good thing. It means something has changed, and it’s hardly ever because something better is coming along. People say change is good. I think we keep saying that hoping to convince ourselves that it’s true when we know in our hearts that change is at best a mixed bag.

So, anyway, hooray for ordinary time. Hooray for life going on. Hooray for ho hum. It’s something to celebrate.

And then, in the middle of ordinary time, just when we thought everything was going along nicely, we are thrown this lesson from Matthew and we are plunged without warning into Lent.

This talk of crosses and dying and denying ourselves and losing our lives is not exactly what we had in mind. They are not what we want. We want the chance to work hard and make our way in the world. We don’t necessarily want to be famous or rich or powerful. But we want to make a comfortable living for ourselves and our families. We want to be able to retire and enjoy doing things we’ve put off while we still have the health and energy to do them. We want to spend time with our families. We want to see our children grow up. We want to see them happy. We’d like to see them with families of their own, although we promise not to nag them about it. Well, at least we promise to try not to nag them about it. We want to spend time with our grandchildren and, who knows, maybe even with our great grandchildren. We want to avoid painful medical conditions and we hope to die in our sleep without having been a burden to our families.

We don’t like trouble. Well, I don’t, anyway. Actually, let me clarify that just a little. I don’t like making trouble. I’d rather study trouble, think about trouble, theorize trouble, preferably trouble that is either a long time ago or far away. When I make trouble—and I have been known to do that—it’s come at the end of a hard internal struggle against my own preferences.

Bill Cosby is known as a comedian, but I think he’s really more of a sage. Talking about his children who complain that something is “unfair,” he says, “What children do not understand is that parents are not interested in justice; what they want is quiet.”

And here comes Jesus, history’s best-known disturber of the peace, to announce an end to quiet, an end to peace, an end to the blessings of ordinariness: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

These are hard words. And so, naturally, we want to soften them a little, but it’s like trying to fluff up a rock so we can use it as a pillow. It’s not that we haven’t tried, God knows. We try to chisel the words down into a smaller size. We say that self-denial is something like giving up chocolate for Lent or going out eat or to the movies less often. We turn self-denial into a mild asceticism undertaken for the sake of, well, for the sake of ourselves, substituting immediate gratification for meeting long-term goals. But our version of self-denial benefits the self, so that’s not so hard.

Or we say that the cross that we have to take up is some uncomfortable or even painful thing that life has thrown at us, a thing there is no way to avoid. If our parents are too strict, our children too unruly, if we hate our job, if our house is too small and we can’t afford to move, if any of a hundred things are not the way we’d like them and we don’t see how to change them, then we say, It’s my cross to bear.

But these strategies are doomed to failure. In our hearts we know that they are bad-faith efforts to get out from under Jesus’ words. We know that Jesus’ words mean something far more serious, far darker, far more threatening to our peace and quiet than we’ve made them out to be.

Jesus is going to Jerusalem. He “had to go” to Jerusalem. Why is that? Because Jesus cares less for quiet than he does for justice. He has declared God’s passionate commitment to justice in Galilee. He has preached and demonstrated a gospel of justice for the poor, for the sick, for the outcast, for the discarded lives that barely subsist at the margins of society. He has done it in Galilee, but he must also do it at the center of power. Jerusalem is where the elites are, who collaborate with the Empire in oppressing their fellow compatriots and co-religionists. From Jerusalem they govern the province. In Jerusalem they control the Temple, the center of symbolic power. They use it to make it appear that anyone who is against the Empire is against God.

Jesus goes to Jerusalem to lay bare the schemes of the elite. Jesus goes to make it clear that it’s not the elites and God against the boat rockers. Jesus goes to make it clear that it’s the poor and God against the elites and the Empire. Jesus goes to pick a fight.

The elites won’t love him for rocking the boat. The nobles and chief priests won’t be grateful that he’s exposed their tidy arrangements. The bureaucrats that administer the apparatus of imperial and religious law won’t appreciate what Jesus will try to do. They will do what the Empire always does when it is confronted with the truth it tries to hide, when it is confronted with the demand for justice. Casually, without much thought and with no misgivings, the Empire will kill him. The elites imagine that that will be end of the matter.

Of course, says Jesus, the elites imagine wrong. That will not be the end of the matter. The elites imagine that God will stay out it, that God is on their side, even that they are doing God’s work, but they are wrong. The Empire does not have the last word. God has the last word. Death is not the end of the matter. Life is the end of the matter: Jesus will be raised from the dead.

Jesus goes to Jerusalem with his eyes open. He knows what sort of opposition his message will provoke. He knows what happens to people who tell the truth to Rome and to Rome’s minions. He knows how the elites will react when he demands justice for the poor in God’s name. And in spite of this he goes to pick a fight.

And this, Jesus says, is the pattern of discipleship. Anyone who wants to be a follower of Jesus will live in the same way, in the same way they will have to renounce themselves so that they will be able to demand the same justice, they will stir up the same rage, and they will call forth the same reaction.

There really isn’t any way to soften these words. We can’t blunt the demand that they make. So we do the sensible thing: we ignore Jesus. Can you imagine if we didn’t? Can you imagine a church that didn’t? Can you imagine what their mission statement would be? Wouldn’t it sound something like this:

“We will follow Jesus in laying bare the lies of injustice and oppression and in demanding justice and freedom. We will know that we have been successful when the Empire strikes back.”

Can you imagine what their charge conference would be like? Can you hear the district superintendent asking, “Well, now, tell me what this church is about.” And the members reply, “We pick fights.”

“Say what?”

“We pick fights. Oh, we try to pick them carefully. We try to make sure they are the right fights. But, yeah, that’s what we do. We pick fights.”

It would be hard to say that they weren’t “making disciples for the transformation of the world,” but I’m not sure that this is what the General Conference had in mind when it adopted this as our purpose. And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have to chase away prospective members with a stick, either. “We pick fights.” Sheesh!

It’s not that there haven’t been Christians willing to be Jesus’ followers. Oscar Romero, the bishop of San Salvador during the late 1970s, comes to mind. Like me, he was a bookish sort of fellow who preferred to avoid conflict. But by a strange and difficult path he became someone who laid bare the lies of his government (and of his church). He demanded justice. He was shot for his troubles. The death squads took care of him. While he was celebrating a mass. How’s that for irony. They thought that would be the end of the matter.

It’s a funny thing. In an interview two weeks before his death, Romero said these words:

“I have frequently been threatened with death. I must say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death but in the resurrection. If they kill me, I shall be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.”¹

As skeptical as I am about the sort of divine intervention in history that Jesus talks about, I have to say, I’ve seen the truth of Romero’s words. He is very much alive in the people of El Salvador. I would even say that from a strictly pragmatic point of view, killing Romero was about the stupidest thing the death squads ever did. He is more powerful now and his voice is more widely heard than it ever was during his lifetime. The Empire did not have the last word, nor did death.

So this peaceful, scholarly man, conservative by temperament as well by conviction, came to see that following Jesus meant picking a fight for the sake of justice.

I hate picking fights. I’d rather go along and get along. I’d rather compromise. I’d rather avoid conflict. I hate picking fights. But I love Jesus. And I know that he’s right. So, really, what choice do I have?

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Interview in March, 1980, given to Excelsior, a Mexican newspaper.