Proper 26A
Matthew 23:1-12
October 30, 2011

Not the Walk They Talk

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

We’re nearly to the end of our annual stewardship campaign. We’ve heard some wonderful stories of the ways that people’s lives have been touched because for one hundred sixty years there has been a First United Methodist Church in Decorah. I hope that these stories have helped you to consider the ways that your lives have been touched, too.

I can tell you that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. There are some things that seem so ordinary and so common that we’re likely to overlook them. But remember that, because we’re here, children are growing up hearing the Bible stories. Some of those stories have been around for four thousand years. They’ve made us who we are and they continue to shape us.

Because we are here, mourners are comforted. Because we are here the sick are visited and cared for, the poor are helped, and strangers are welcomed. Because we are here community groups have a place to meet. Because we are here the community can gather and feast on Thanksgiving Day without marking as different those who are lonely or poor.

We are engaged here in the adventure of learning how to follow Jesus and of learning how to make a difference in our world. Where people are in pain—anywhere in the world—we are there with them, relieving suffering and bringing a word of hope. Where people are downtrodden, we are there proclaiming the God who hears the oppressed and sets them free. When a hurricane or a flood or a tsunami strikes, whether it’s on the other side of the world, or right here in Iowa, we are there, among the first on the scene and among the last to leave.

All of this happens because we are here. If you were wondering whether First United Methodist Church is worth your support, I tell you without apology, Yes, it is! If you were wondering whether it makes any difference whether you support First United Methodist Church, I can tell you without hesitation, Yes, it does!

Yes, it’s the annual stewardship campaign, but I also think we should think of it as an annual celebration campaign during which we give remember and celebrate some of our ministries and the difference they make. It’s almost over. Next week we will gather once again. It happens to fall on All Saints’ Sunday, so we’ll celebrate this connection we have with the saints who have come before us in the last two thousand years and the saints who will come after us in the next two thousand years. We’ll take our place among them and offer our continuing support for the work of ministry. We didn’t start it. We won’t see it through to the end. But we’ll do our part in our time with whatever we can contribute.

For such a grand theme as this, there should be a really great text, so I’d be able to preach a barn-burner. But once again the lectionary committee has let me down. Do I have the story of God’s creative power that fashioned the universe? Do I have the story of God’s willingness to live right along side of us as one of us? Do I have even something as appropriate as the widow’s mite or Paul’s call to cheerful giving?

Nope. None of the above. I have instead a vignette from Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, last days that were filled with controversy and the sense of an approaching crisis. Our text comes right after another of Jesus’ run-ins with the religious experts in Jerusalem. They had tried to arrest him at the end of chapter twenty-one. In chapter twenty-two Jesus told the Parable of the Wedding Party in which the A-list guests were replaced by ordinary people. Then there was the attempt to trap Jesus with a question about paying taxes to Caesar, followed by a fun question from the Sadducees about how things will work when the resurrection comes. Then there was the question about the greatest commandment. Last of all, Jesus brushed aside their expectations about the Messiah being a descendant of David.

After these exchanges, Jesus stopped talking to the religious authorities and started talking about them. Our reading comes at that point, but Jesus is just getting warmed up. Right after our reading Jesus launches into a series of seven curses thrown at the authorities, the leaders who should have helped the people but who instead spent their time protecting their power. The chapter concludes with Jesus weeping over Jerusalem for all that it will suffer in the coming disaster.

This is perhaps not exactly what the doctor ordered as the stuff for a stewardship sermon. But we’ll see. After all, if it is true as someone has said, that stewardship is everything that we do after we say “yes” to God, then stewardship in that broad sense includes every attempt to live faithfully as God’s people. As the record of the struggles of God’s people to do just that, every text of the Bible is about stewardship. But that connection is more obvious in some places than in others and this story is surely a good test case.

On the one hand we understand Jesus’ point all too well. We don’t trust people who say one thing and do another. We have an ugly word for someone who does this: hypocrite. Americans are a famously forgiving people, but one thing we will not forgive is hypocrisy. Those who who hold up moral standards, those who decide how people should behave, those who offer themselves as ethical guides had better do as they say.

That in a nutshell is Jesus’ complaint about the Pharisees and the legal experts. They are the interpreters of the Torah—Genesis through Deuteronomy in our Bibles. That’s what it means to say that they “sit on Moses’ seat.” In those days teachers and preachers sat while their hearers stood as a sign of respect—I’ve always thought that might be nice, but I’ve never managed to get anyone else to see it that way. (I hesitate to mention this, of course, after the fiasco that followed my mentioning that congregations used to applaud the sermon.) This understanding of the importance of a chair is still bound up with notions about thrones. And, remembering that the Greek for seat or chair is kathedra, we are not surprised to learn that what makes a church a “cathedral” is not size or elegant architecture but simply that a bishop’s chair is there.

The Pharisees and the legal experts sit in Moses’ seat and they have (or at least pretend to have) the authority of Moses himself. But they do not do as they say. The do not walk the walk they talk. In short, they are hypocrites, a word that means literally “under judgment.”

Hypocrisy always seems worse when we find it in the church. Whenever I hear fresh-breaking news of scandal—a drug or prostitution ring is broken up and some “customers” arrested along with everyone else—I pray, “Please, God, let none of them be a pastor!” That is a prayer, of course, which it is too late to answer and therefore too late to pray, but I pray it anyway. Or, if the headline reads, “Pastor indicted in relief fund theft,” my prayer is, “Please, God, let it not be a United Methodist pastor!”

When someone is caught doing something criminally nasty, it seems to hit just a little harder if the one with the red hands is ordained. Whenever that happens I feel a sense of shame. It’s worse if it is a United Methodist colleague. Hence the fervor of my prayers. Imagine what Catholic priests are going through these days, the good ones, I mean, who work hard, who move through their daily struggles with grace and who are carefully ethical.

We understand Jesus’ concern with hypocrisy and we understand his anger toward those religious authorities who used their authority for their own benefit, who defended a widow against the greed of her in-laws, say, but only at a price that used up her precious resources. Or they constructed elaborate codes around keeping the Torah which only the well-off would ever have the time or resources to follow. And then they blamed the poor, not only for their poverty, but for not keeping the rules that they had made, like if we complain when someone who must work the hours they are assigned at a low-wage job and so they are not able to come to church.

It’s bad enough for the well-off and the respectable to make rules that they expect others to live by, but when they don’t bother to live by them themselves, well, that’s hypocrisy. I know what Jesus means. I understand his outrage.

And yet. And yet there is another side to this. Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make because it’s so universally true. Of course I am unable or—let me be honest here—even sometimes unwilling to do as I have said. I have standards that I don’t always live up to. If there is someone here who entirely lives up to their own standards, I would like to know. I’d like to shake their hand, but I’d also like to suggest as gently as can be that it might just be possible that they have set their standards a little too low.

What are ideals for, anyway, if not to call us beyond who we are toward who we might become? Isn’t failure of this kind a requirement for moral and spiritual progress? We are not yet, after all, all that God dreams for us to be. If I am to be accused of hypocrisy for that, well, I’ll have to admit my guilt, because I am not fully (because we work pretty hard not to know myself fully) but I am pretty aware of just how far short of the mark I fall.

It seems that there was a monastery that was cloistered, that is to say, that the monks spent the great majority of their time in part of the monastery that were not open to the public. The monks had little direct contact with people outside although they never failed to remember them in their prayers. But every year the monastery had a open house and invited all their neighbors to come and visit. One year at their open house a neighbor of theirs approached one of the brothers and asked, “What do you do here, anyway?” The monk replied, “We work and eat and sleep, we pray, we listen and we talk, we read and write.” The neighbor was not satisfied and pressed his question, “What do you do here?” “Ah,” replied the monk, “We fall down and we get up. We fall down and we get up. We fall down and we get up.” And that, it has seemed to me, is what the church is about.

In the computer world they call it a “beta release.” When a new computer program is developed it goes through several stages. After the program is completed, it goes through several rounds of testing to make sure that it will do what it is supposed to do and that it will not crash. After it has passed those basic tests, the program is made available to a wider group of people who put the program through its paces. That’s a beta release.

Beta releases tend to be “buggy.” No amount of testing will find the flaws that real world users will discover. The beta release tests the program in the real world. Then the problems that arise in real world use are fixed. At least they’re supposed to be. One complaint about a certain software giant that shall remain nameless except that you know who they are is that it sells its beta releases at full price!

Anyway, friends, we are beta releases, all of us. We are buggy. We look like we should be able to do what we’re supposed to do, but in the real world we discover that there are still lots of glitches. We beta release Christians need a safe place for those glitches to appear and sometimes even for us to crash.

Between Jesus’ outrage at hypocrisy and our need to have the room to fail so that we can move on from where we are toward we are going, is the church, itself a beta release, a place where we can fall down and get up, fall down and get up, fall down and get up, as we stumble toward God’s vision of humanity.

I would never suggest that you hold up the church as the place where we’ve got it all figured out. That, I suspect, would be the hypocrisy that Jesus so rightly condemned. Nor would I say that, if we’re not living up to our ideals, that we don’t deserve to be supported. No, we are the place where it’s okay to be a beta release, in fact, it’s expected. We need the place where it’s okay to fall down, where we know that when we do that (and it’s when, not if) we will be helped to our feet so that we can try again. That’s worth our support, our investment of time and energy and love and devotion and, yes, our investment of money.

©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.

Proper 25A
Matthew 22:34-46
October 23, 2011

Our Closest Neighbors

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

A friend of mine, a United Methodist pastor named Herb Schaefer, is restoring an old house in Bentonsport in southeast Iowa. It was built in the Federalist style in the early part of the 1800s. When Herb bought it, it was a mess. The beams that rest on the foundation had rotted and needed to be replaced. Beyond that it needed a new roof and had a long list of repairs that needed to be made to it.

The house has passed through a number of hands. Each of its owners, it seems, added something. Late in the 1800s an attached kitchen was built onto the rear of the building. Fireplaces were bricked up and covered over with walls. The ceilings were lowered. Someone—may God have mercy on their soul—actually knocked out one of the front first floor windows and installed a bay window!

I’m enough of a historian that I can appreciate Herb’s pain about the suffering that his poor house has been through. Fortunately for both Herb and house, there were detailed architectural drawings of the house as it was in the 1930s. It seems that a Depression Era federal projects employed architects to find and record unique especially representative buildings all across the country. One of the buildings so recorded was Herb’s house. In fact, the seventy year old drawings were how he found the fireplaces!

I’m sure that each of the modifications to the original structure was made by someone who thought they were making an improvement. The end result, though, was so mixed up that you could no longer tell what it was by looking at it. It had lost its integrity.

After jacking the house up and installing new beams, the next phase of Herb’s work was to strip away the “improvements.” Soon the Federalist house began to reappear, shabby and in need of many repairs to be sure, but it made sense again.

I’m afraid that the text from Matthew is more than a little like that wonderful old Federalist house in Bentonsport. “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” Jesus said. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” Jesus said. And people have been hanging stuff on those two commandments ever since.

So the first step in reading this text is to strip away the accumulation of the centuries. To see what these words ever were we’ll have to knock out the bay window (what were they thinking?). We’ll have to take a wrecker bar to the dry wall and bricks that cover the fireplaces. Then we can see what we have.

The fireplace comes from theologians. In the middle of the last century a Swede named Anders Nygren published a book that noticed that there are three different words for “love” found in the New Testament.ⁱ His theory was that each of these three words stood for a different kind of love and that the different kinds of love are categorically different, especially the two kinds called êros and agapê. Êros is physical love, maybe better translated “desire” than love and it is love that seeks its own satisfaction, so it is inherently selfish or at least self-seeking. Agapê on the other hand is a spiritual love that seeks the benefit of the other. It is disinterested, not that it doesn’t care, but that it doesn’t seek to gain anything for itself.

Some readers grabbed this distinction as if it were one of those combination tools with pliers, screwdrivers, wire cutter, knife blades, saw blades,corkscrew,and a tire pump,all in one. Convinced that they could use this tool to solve every problem they quickly noticed that the word for love in this text is agapê. Ah, they said, this means that we are supposed to love God and our neighbors with this disinterested, spiritual love. Desire and physicality are not supposed to be a part of the love that is the subject of the Great Commandment.

It is understandable that Nygren came up with this. On this side of the Atlantic we read him in English translation. Who, after all, reads Swedish? But he wrote the book in the late 1930s having witnessed the devastation of the Great War and while listening to the beating of the war drums leading up to the Great War, Take Two. Perhaps he and his fellow Europeans had had enough of physicality and desire—it didn’t seem to go anywhere good.

But that’s no excuse for making distinctions that aren’t in the language. Yes, Greek has more than one word for love. So does English. Like our English words for love, Greek words have shades of meaning. But also as in English, the various words are used in ways that slide into each other. I love ice cream, Carol and God (not necessarily in that order). We could say that love and adore are two different words with two different meanings and we can trace some differences, but they slide into each other. It’s not nonsense for me to say that I adore ice cream, Carol and God (not necessarily in that order). No one will make a whole theology out of the shades of those two words.

Besides, the Christian mystics who have spent their whole lives focusing their whole being on loving God, who have pursued most directly the commandment to love God with their whole heart, these mystics will tell us that loving God has everything to do with desire and it is not in the least disinterested.

And how could it be otherwise? We human beings are embodied creatures. The only life that we know is life in a physical body. We might pretend that our minds (or souls or spirits) on the one hand and our bodies on the other are two different things. But this is a notion we have made up. We find this idea helpful when we’re thinking about some things, but your preacher and your doctor will both tell you that our minds and our bodies are bound up together.

So tempting as it might be sometimes to think that we can in this life leave our bodies behind and love with only our minds, it’s just not how we do it. We love in the only way we humans can love,but the fact is we already love. Everyone loves something, the early Christian monks, said. Commanding us to love is redundant. It is not the kind of love but whom we love and for whose sake we love, according to the monks. To do that right we need wisdom and the virtue they called discernment.

So much, then, for the fireplaces. We can see them now in the midst of bits of plaster and broken bricks.

Now for the bay window. It comes from the pastoral counselors. Again, in the middle of the last century, they came up with this idea that the two commands—the commandment to love God with everything we have and the commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves—teach three loves. They seized upon the part about loving others as we love ourselves and decided that this meant that we are commanded to love ourselves and that we cannot love others until we have mastered the art of self-love.

I do notice many people treat themselves rather badly. Some people seem to punish themselves for no good reason that I can see.

And then there are those who treat other people badly. I suspect that some of them at least are acting out of self-loathing that they live with by turning it outward onto the people around them.

I could certainly be wrong about this, but I don’t believe that either of these kinds of people are suffering from a lack of self-love. They are suffer from a lack of wisdom. They do love themselves, but the self that they love is a false self. They cannot discern the difference between their false and real selves.

Like I say, I could be wrong about this, but right or wrong, Jesus did not teach that we are supposed to love ourselves. Jesus, not having lived in the last fifty years or so, was not afflicted with the strange and novel idea that what is wrong with the world can be fixed if only we love ourselves enough. Jesus assumed that everyone already loves themselves. We seek what we need. When we’re hungry, we look for food. When we’re tired we try to find some rest. When we itch we scratch. We don’t have to be taught this love. What the commandment commands is that we direct our caring toward meeting other’s needs as well as our own. That’s what Jesus believed that the Torah taught. That’s what Jesus taught in turn. We may disagree with him, but let’s let the man speak for himself.

So, with the bay window gone, let’s see what we have. We have Jesus’ summary of the Torah, that is, the law of Moses. We have all 613 mitzvôt, or commandments, that every ordinary Jewish man is obliged to observe boiled down to one. Well, okay, two. But the second, as Jesus observes, is “like” the first.

One of the greatest of the Christian mystics was a monk and reformer named Bernard who was the leader of the Benedictine abbey at Clairvaux in France. We know Bernard as the person for whom the dog breed was named. He talked and wrote a lot about love.

Bernard said love is a journey that moves through four stages. Each of the stages is distinguished by whom we love and for whose sake we love. We begin, Bernard says, by loving ourselves for our own sake. Then, aware that God has a claim on us and afraid of judgment, we love God. But we love God for own sake. Then we come to love God for God’s sake. The last stage is a surprise: In it we love ourselves once again. But we love ourselves for God’s sake.

If we love ourselves for God’s sake we will love our neighbors in the same way as we love ourselves. When I know that I am God’s beloved simply because God has made me and it is in God’s nature to love what God has made, then I know that you are God’s beloved, too, and I recognize that you are just as deserving of the things that you need as I am.

But, of course, that’s where we hope to end our journey. There are not many whose lives shine with that truth. Alas! I am not one of them.

But, with the “improvements” stripped away from this text, we begin to see it for what it is. And it has some integrity. It makes some sense without having to be novel or original. It wasn’t even original with Jesus. When Jesus lifted up these two mitzvôt as a summary for all of them, he stood in good company. Many Jewish teachers of his day said the same, especially among the Pharisees. Jesus is reminding his conversation partners (and us) of what they (and we) already know: Living in covenant with God is first and foremost about love. It’s about loving God and it’s about loving each other.

There’s nothing new there and nothing fancy. But that doesn’t mean that we get it. The Danish philosopher (We seem to be in Scandinavia this morning!) Søren Kierkegaard wrote somewhere that we didn’t have seminaries because the Bible was hard to understand and we needed to have places to learn what it means. We have seminaries because the Bible is easy to understand and we needed to have place to learn how to confuse things. I’m not sure I agree completely and I’m not even sure he meant it completely, but I see his point.

The Christian life is about love. It’s about loving God. It’s about loving the people whose lives touch and are touched by ours. Anything and everything else is secondary.

Karsten Snitker (an American musician of Norwegian extraction) reminded me a couple of weeks ago that October is a month that has been set aside for awareness of the prevalence of domestic violence. Domestic violence, whether it is perpetrated against children or adults, is a species of the larger category of bullying. We are slowly coming to recognize these things, to name them accurately and to understand the damage that they do to victims and, to be sure, to perpetrators as well. Looking back I’m pretty sure we’ll wonder what took us so long, but that’s the way people are. It’s the way I am, at least.

There is good literature about domestic violence and there are resources to help those who are caught in it. But let’s speak from the perspective of our faith tradition. For too long perpetrators have used the Bible as an excuse. They will find a verse here or there that seems to condone violence used by parents against children or by husbands against wives. For too long the Church has let this misuse of sacred Scripture go unanswered. We have even added to the burden of victims by requiring submission and forgiveness as the price of God’s love.

When we look at this through the lens of the text we have been wrestling with today, we find that the Christian life is about loving God and loving those whose lives touch and are touched by ours. Anything and everything else is secondary. If we read something somewhere in the Bible that seems to justify acting in ways that are not loving, we know that it’s either wrong or we got it wrong. Love comes first. Always. Period. So says the Torah. So says Jesus.

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are in a relationship marked by violence or threats of violence, know that this is not what love is about. If you have been or are being victimized, know that God holds hurting you to be deeply offensive. God loves you. You do not deserve to be a victim. Period.

If you are victimizing someone else, know that God holds hurting someone else to be deeply offensive. Just as God loves the victim of violence, so God loves you. Just as your victim does not deserve it, you do not deserve to be a perpetrator. God has a better dream than that for both of you. If the Christian life is about loving God and loving our neighbor, then our nearest neighbors deserve to live lives without fear of their nearest neighbors in their own home.

And those of us who observe violence or the threat of violence in a relationship need to know that God finds this violence deeply offensive. It’s not happening so that someone can learn or grow or develop patience or practice forgiveness. Violence is not redemptive. It is an offense against God and against God’s dream for us. If the Christian life is about loving God and loving our neighbor, then domestic violence presents us with one of those times that require a choice: we can either love God and our neighboror we can be silent, but we cannot do both.

©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.

• iAnders Nygren, Eros and Agape, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953).

Proper 23A
Exodus 32:1-14
Matthew 22:1-14
October 9, 2011

A Tale of Two Parties

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

We are in the midst of our annual stewardship campaign. We are “Telling the Story” of our congregation and the work that God is doing in and through it.

I usually get at least one assignment from the stewardship campaign committee: “Pastor,” the committee says, “we’d like you to preach the stewardship sermon.”

I will do this, but only on the condition that, since stewardship is an all-the-time spiritual issue, not a once-in-a-year for the campaign sermon topic,I can preach more than one. And maybe even at times other than the annual campaign.

But now is a good time to begin and with that in mind I turn to the texts for the day. And what do I find but a story about the very first capital fund campaign. This looks promising!

Here’s what happened. Moses went up the mountain and disappeared into a cloud. The Israelites waited at the bottom. And waited. And waited. And waited. Israel waited but Moses never showed. So they went to Aaron and told him they had given up on Moses and would he please make them some gods.

And that’s when Aaron preached his stewardship sermon. “Bring your bling!” The world’s shortest stewardship sermon, but wildly successful. The text tells us, “So all the people took off their bling and brought it to Aaron.” I don’t imagine anyone was more surprised than Aaron. Yes! The church budget is entirely underwritten.

Aaron took the bling, cast an image of a calf and presented this calf to the Israelites. Then it was time for a celebration—party time! Life is good!

But as it turns out, things were not as good as they seemed. Yahweh was not at all pleased about this whole campaign. In fact Yahweh flew into a royal snit. It turns out that a bold summons—“Bring your bling!”—and an equally bold response—“Here it is!”—are not all that there is to the stewardship story. The cause of the campaign was not worthy of the campaign itself. Extravagant generosity can turn out to be idolatry, as in this story.

Well, that’s kind of disappointing. Maybe there’s something in the gospel lesson I can use. I turn to it and it’s a story about a wedding reception. Hmm...weddings—gifts—that might turn out to be a stewardship sermon. Let’s see.

We are told right away at the beginning that this will be a parable, so somewhere along the way we can expect to get whupped upside the head. That’s just the way parables are.

This one is about a king. At first he behaves the way we expect kings to act. The king is throwing a feast to celebrate the marriage of his son. His guests are strictly A-list. These are the people who will be able to do him a favor sometime in the future. One guest sits on the zoning board and can be counted on to approve certain waivers to the building code. Another is a highly place customs official who will look the other way when certain shipments come through port.

So far, it resembles the social reality of Jesus’ day, but from here it starts to get weird. First, when the feast is ready and the king sends out his slaves to summon the invited guests, they all snub him. They don’t want to come. Another wave of slaves gets the same result.

Some of the invitees seized the slaves. Our translation says that they “mistreated them,” but the Greek is far stronger, something more like “committed outrages against them.” And then they killed them. This seems excessive. If they didn’t want to go, why didn’t they just say, “No, thank you!”

The king is angry but he, in turn, engages in extreme behavior. He sends his soldiers. They kill “those murderers” and burn their city. Well, that’ll teach ’em!

But this still leaves a problem—the feast is prepared and there are no guests and the king was raised to believe that you don’t waster perfectly good food. Here, the king does something very strange. He decides to invite anyone and everyone—hoi polloi or, as we say in English, the hoi polloi, “the (probably unwashed) many.” Who needs the stuffy rich and powerful anyway, when real people are just so, well, real?

We’re feeling pretty good at this point, since this is just the sort of warm fuzzy story that we like, the sort of story that might serve as a plot for a Hallmark Special. We are, after all, United Methodists, and we’re all about inclusive. “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” Absolutely. Open seating, too. So come on in, grab a plate and head for the serving line.

But, then more weirdness. The king decides to visit the banquet hall to see his guests. While there he spies a man who is not wearing a “wedding garment.” Wait a minute! There’s a dress code?! Apparently so. The king says to the man, “Friend (never trust a really powerful person in a parable who calls you “friend”), friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” The man replies, “Huh?” “Bind him hand and foot,” the king orders, “and throw him into the outer darkness where there is wailing and the grinding of teeth.” Apparently the king has suffered a psychotic break.

The part about the outer darkness is weird, but weirder still is that, as far as I have been able to determine there was no such thing as a “wedding garment.” Unless you were very wealthy you had one set of clothes and you wore it everywhere. Nobody at the feast had “wedding clothes.” But here’s this poor schmuck and the psycho king walks up to him and says, “How did you get in here without a reezenmizen?” No wonder he couldn’t say anything in reply. “Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness where there is wailing and the grinding of teeth.”

This is all rather unnerving. And the “moral” at the end doesn’t help. “Many are called, but few are chosen.” How do you get chosen, anyway? And do you want to be? As far as I can tell, there is only one person chosen in this story and he’s chosen to get thrown out of the party for breaking a rule he didn’t know existed.

What this man needs is some reliable, first-century version of Emily Post. Where was Miss Manners when he really needed her? We sympathize. We want to know what the rules are. We want to know that if we do “A,” we can count on “B” and if we do “C” instead, we can count on “D.” We want to know what’s expected of us. Imagine if you got grades in school but no one ever told you why you got the grades you got. Imagine if you got an annual evaluation at work, but you never had a job description. Imagine if every paycheck were different, but you had no idea why.

We want to know. We want some predictability. We want to know what we have to do to make our spouse happy, to get our parents off our backs, to satisfy God. We want, for instance and in case you thought I had forgotten that this is a stewardship sermon, to know how big a pledge is “enough.” We want a rule. How much is enough? And the story won’t tell us. In fact, nothing in the Bible will tell us.

So we figure it out on our own. Let’s see I’ll give ten percent. Now is that after or before taxes?

Or we figure, Let’s see: the total budget is about $247,000 and there are about 560 members of the church so that means, hmm, 560 times 4, carry the 2...$441 a year, divided by 52 weeks, that comes to $8.48 a week, but I know most of the members have more money than I do, so I’ll round off $8.48 to the nearest ten dollars and make that $5 a week.

Or we say, Well, it’s a pretty good show. It’s not as good as what I see on Pay Per View, but I’ll give five dollars a week. I’m only here about half the time, maybe less, but I’ll be generous and pledge $200 a year.

O, we say, Well, we’ve been giving $12 a week. Maybe we can squeeze out three more and make it fifteen.

O, we say, I’ve been giving a dollar week since the Great Depression and it’s not my fault if that doesn’t buy as much as it used to.

O, we say, five or even ten dollars a week, okay, but twenty starts to feel like real money.

We come up with our rules and make our decision. But when we get to the party in the story, we’re just as liable as the next guy to hear, just when we thought we were in the clear, the voice of the psycho king, “Bind her hand and foot and throw her into the outer darkness where there is wailing and the grinding of teeth!”

We want some predictability. That’s what’s offended in our reading of the parable. The parable has an entirely arbitrary outcome, so it can’t be unraveled, made applicable, solved. Instead it just whups us upside the head. If that’s the way it’s going to be, what good are the rules? And if it’s not about rules, what’s the alternative?

The alternative might be trust in and maybe even the imitation of the goodness of a generous and gracious God who, as we all know, is nothing, nothing at all like the psycho king in the parable. When God invites us to a wedding feast, it is a come-as-you-are party. God’s not going to summon the fashion police. And maybe the alternative is that as we trust in and imitate the God whose joy it is to give us what we need, we discover that it is our joy to give as well. We discover that we don’t need a rule. Like everything else in the life of the Jesus follower,giving isn’t about rules. It’s about joy, wedding joy. And we’ve been invited.

©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.

Proper 22A
Matthew 21:33-46
October 2, 2011

How's That Workin' For Ya So Far?

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

Once again we have a parable of Jesus and, once again, I have some serious reservations about its traditional interpretation. We have a long-standing habit of reading parables as allegories, reading them with the assumption that the people and things in the story refer to other things. The most common habit is to assume that a figure with a great deal of power, especially a male figure with a great deal of power, must symbolize God.

So when we come to the parable that is often called the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, we assume that the landowner in the story stands for God. And we read the rest of the story with that idea in mind. Our curriculum, for example, reads the landowner as God, the vineyard as God’s people Israel, and the tenants as religious leaders—the Pharisees and priests—who prevent the landowner (God) from receiving a full harvest.

There are some gaps in this reading. What or who, for example, are the grapes? What are the fence, the wine press, and the watchtower that the landowner had built? What is the wine that is produced from the grapes? Of course, we can make up what is lacking in this reading and supply answers to my questions. I’ll leave that as an exercise in the imagination.

As I have done before and will do again, I offer a different way of reading this parable. Maybe you’ll find it persuasive. Maybe you’ll find it unconvincing and prefer some version of the traditional reading. Maybe you’ll be confused and find yourself trying to decide. Whatever happens, you’ll be wrestling with the text and trying to decide what it means and that, as far as I’m concerned, is a good thing. Besides, it’s fun. So let’s have some fun with this story.

Let’s start by setting aside the traditional reading and seeing what we can see that the traditional reading hides. What do we see? We see the landowner, the vineyard he has created, his tenant farmers and their troubled relationship. In other words we see something real that Jesus’ hearers could actually have seen in their own social world.

We know this landowner. He’s a frequent flyer in Jesus’ parables. He is an oikodespotês, the absolute master of a household. This was not a household like we might imagine—a single-family dwelling where a nuclear family lives. A household was made up of a man, his wife, (or occasionally a widow), their children, their domestic slaves, the clients for whom the master was the patron, their servants, and their agricultural slaves. A household was a very large enterprise, and the oikodespotês was its master. He was its master in rather absolute terms. He had enormous power over his wife, even more over his children and unlimited power over his slaves. The oikodespotês was a wealthy man who controlled a great deal of property and held enormous power over many people. We might call him a landlord, if we took seriously enough the fact that he was a landlord.

The “lord of the land” plants the vineyard. He places a wall around it for its protection. He digs a trough for pressing the grapes. He builds a watchtower. He is clearly going into the wine business and he’s starting from scratch. Well, not actually from scratch. The land wasn’t sitting idle when he began. There were crops being grown, livestock being raised. And there were people living on the land, peasants who owned small plots that produced most of what they needed for their families.

In Jesus’ day, in Roman Palestine, the way that land was being used was changing. Small-scale peasant agricultural was giving way to large farms. Subsistence crops like barley and wheat and animal husbandry in sheep or goats were giving way to cash crops produced for export to the cities of the Roman Empire. The economy of Roman Palestine was becoming monetized—payments for taxes and fees that before would have been made with a share of what was produced now had to be made in cash. And there was not enough cash. Peasants found themselves owing more than they could produce. Loans that could not be repaid resulted in the small plots of peasant farmers being bought up by wealthy landowners like the one in the story.

He was not about to waste his time and investment raising something so unprofitable as food. He wanted a cash crop. So he built a vineyard on land that had been growing barley or wheat. He wasn’t like some of the folks near here who decide they’d like to go into the wine business. He cared nothing for the land, for the vines, for the grapes or even for the wine. What mattered was the money.

So, the small plots have been put together. The vines have been planted. The wall or fence around the vineyard has been installed, the wine press dug, and the watchtower built. The landlord had no interest in actually living on his land. He wanted to be in a city and there were none of any real consequence around. What he needed were some people who could manage his vineyard, people who knew a little something at least about farming. Where would he get some people like that? and how would he motivate them? The obvious answer is to lease the vineyard for a share of the harvest to ex-peasants. They may even have been the very same peasants whose land it used to be. So the arrangement is: loan the peasants money so they can pay their taxes and fees, foreclose on them when they can’t repay the loans, change the land over to a cash crop, and lease the land back to its former owners.

Now, in some ways we can see how this would have been better for the peasants than simply being thrown off their land.

In the story of my ancestral people there is a very dark episode, when the Scottish highland lairds discovered that more money could be squeezed out of the hills raising sheep for their wool than by raising cattle for their beef. Common grazing lands were seized by the lairds. Clansfolk who by long-standing custom had been under their laird’s protection were instead evicted by him from their blackhouses and their little farm plots. At bayonet point they were turned out to fend for themselves, their houses burned, their livestock killed. Some were killed outright. Thousands died from exposure or starvation. Tens of thousands fled to the cities of the south or to the British colonies in the New World. The episode is called the Highland Clearances and the highlands have never recovered.

The peasants of Roman Palestine fared a little better than that. Some of them became tenants on land their families had owned. But we can also understand their shame and their anger. We can understand if, just below the surface, there was a deep-seated resentment and simmering rage. We can understand, too, if the resentment and rage gave birth to dreams of recovery and of revenge. We can imagine that those dreams might have connected with the dream of a messiah, an anointed one, who would come to deliver God’s people from Roman rule and all that it had come to mean.

When this kind of ideas are in the air, it begins to feel as if the whole world is dry tinder, just waiting for any spark to set off the fire that destroys an old world and opens the way for a new. It begins to feel as if all it would take is one act of rebellion and revolution would blossom everywhere, that if one person would dare to strike, God would intervene and God’s salvation would be revealed.

There were people who were preaching this, but Jesus was not one of them. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that non-violence was a core part of Jesus’ message. That didn’t mean non-resistance to oppression, but it did mean that resistance would have to be non-violent resistance.

I think that Jesus told this parable as part of his message of non-violent resistance. It goes something like this: granted that the experience of peasants in Roman Palestine was awful. They were being treated unjustly; their oppression was an insult to the glory of God, as oppression always is. Salvation in any meaningful sense of the word would have to include a change in how the economy worked. It would have to include political changes, too. Of that, for Jesus and for his hearers, there was no question. That’s what I think.

The question was, “How?” Maybe the natural reaction was violence. Rage tends to move toward violence. But that raised questions. It is permitted to use violence to end oppression? Doesn’t violence end up making victims of the innocent? And even if you could avoid shedding innocent blood, does it really bring the change that we’re looking for if the weak and the powerful change places? Can vengeance ever be justice? That’s one set of questions, a set that questions the ethics of violence.

But there is another question, a question that is seldom asked, let alone answered: Does violence work?

I remember listening to an interview with a man who was supposed to know a lot about how to fight insurgents. The interviewer was asking him whether it was worthwhile to seek some kind of negotiated peace with some elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The man answered that you could try negotiations but history had shown that sooner or later you would have to use military force. I do have an opinion about the merits of that answer, but I’m certainly no expert either about counter-insurgency or about Afghanistan, so I’ll keep it to myself. What struck me first of all was the structure of the answer and the fact that you could move the terms around and it would make equal sense. He said that you could try negotiations but sooner or later you were going to have to use military force. He could just as easily have said that you could try military force but sooner or later you were going to have to negotiate. The second thing that struck me was that military force was the default position. Anything else would be considered risky, untried and dangerous.

Now it’s obvious to me that people have a wide range of opinions on the use of violence as a problem solving strategy. I respect that and I find that there almost always a story behind the stance that each person has decided to take. If you’d like to talk about your stance, I promise to respect your story and I hope for the same from you. I’m not out to change your mind, at least not by a frontal assault.

What I’d like to do is to direct our attention back to the parable that Jesus is telling. Jesus’ parables work by throwing a story alongside the social reality that people know. Somewhere along the line the story and the reality collide and that collision is the point of using parables to teach. This is a story about people who are under the heel of an oppressive regime. In the story they decide to respond with violence to their situation and specifically to the agents of their absentee landlord who come for his share of the harvest. This is understandable, if not acceptable.

But then things get really weird. The landlord comes up with the idea that these tenants who have killed his agents will respect his son. Does he not understand that they don’t like him?

Our descent into the bizarre continues in the next move when the tenants get the harebrained notion that, if they kill the landlord’s son, somehow the vineyard will become theirs by legal right. “Hey, that’s the heir. Let’s kill him and we’ll get the inheritance!” How stupid could they be? Don’t they watch any TV at all? Have they never seen a courtroom drama?

Their strategy won’t work. Not just killing the heir to get the inheritance, but the strategy of violent resistance itself. The violence doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because the landlord and especially the empire that stands behind the landlord know violence. It’s their strategy. It’s their game. And they are masters at it.

The Romans in their time had the most effective ways of applying violence in the world. They had a system of transportation and communication that was so efficient that they could get a message from anywhere in the empire to Rome in a big hurry. They had legions garrisoned at vital points around the empire. If a subject people rebelled, there would be an entire Roman legion on the ground at the hot spot in less than three months. In contemporary terms that would be like our being able to get a division anywhere in the world in twenty-four hours—something the Pentagon can only dream about.

Jesus intended for his followers to transform their world. He intended for them to set the oppressed free. He intended for them to see that justice was done. But he knew that none of this could be achieved by violence, for the simple reason that violence was the Roman’s game, played on their home field, and according to their rules. If they played the game, they would lose. No other possible outcome. Period. And he told this story to make this clear to his followers.

Unfortunately for us today, he didn’t go on in the story to tell us what sort of a strategy would work. I do think he offers us a workable strategy, one that has achieve remarkable success when it has been tried but which, for reasons not quite clear to me, isn’t tried very often. He offers us a workable strategy, but not in today’s text. But if we can get clear what won’t work, we might be ready to hear what does when it comes around.

©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.

Proper 21A
Matthew 21:23-32
September 25, 2011

Ouch

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

“Just where does Jesus get off doing ‘these things’?” the Jerusalem Pastors’ Association wants to know. These are my colleagues, you know, these chief priests and elders of the people. I like some of them. Others I tolerate. They are clergy, respected leaders of the community. And they are all my colleagues.

And the ‘these things’ they are talking about? Well, let’s see: the chapter begins with Jesus coming into Jerusalem in a parade that imitated the ancient Jewish kings as they came into Jerusalem and up to the temple in an enthronement processional. It was also an echo of the Roman-style “triumph,” an honor sometimes granted by the Roman Senate to a victorious general—the right to have a parade and to bring a legion into Rome itself. The crowd recognized what Jesus was doing and they took up the ancient shout of “Hosanna!” This was a prayer that God would be with Jesus to deliver him from his enemies. It was a prayer that God would deliver the people through Jesus. “Just where does Jesus get off doing this?”

The next thing that happened was that Jesus went into the temple complex and smashed all the ATM machines. The machines were charging outrageous transaction fees that were going straight into the temple treasury. Authorities can overlook a lot, but don’t you dare disrupt business. “Just where does Jesus get off doing this?”

Even the children were calling him the “Son of David” and Jesus accepted this royal title. “Just where does Jesus get off doing this?”

The Jerusalem Pastors’ Association made a list.

The next day when Jesus and his disciples came to the temple to pick up where they had left off the day before, my colleagues were waiting. They had their list. There were ready for him. They wanted an explanation. They wanted a justification. They wanted him to stop disrupting their plans. They wanted him to go away. They wanted him dead. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

So they asked him the question, “What kind of authority do you have for doing these things?”

There is something we have to understand about life in Jesus’ day. The historian Peter Brown called this a “face-to-face” society. People interacted directly with each other under intense public scrutiny. We don’t really get this because instead of a face-to-face society we live in an interface-to-interface society. We email. We text. We telephone. We twitter. We instant message. We blog. We post on Facebook. When two people relate in our society, there is often some machine between them, some technology, some interface. (By the way using all this stuff is what we call “connecting!”)

The ancients didn’t use any of this. If they wanted to communicate, they talked face-to-face. Mostly they did it in public. If they had a conflict with someone, they confronted each other out loud and in sight and sound of a crowd. Naturally, they were good at the art of verbal jousting. The crowds knew the game and they appreciated it. Jesus’ right to do the things he did rested in part on his being able to out-talk the chief priests and the elders.

So this is an important episode in Jesus’ story. My colleagues hoped to shut Jesus up by asking a question he couldn’t answer. “Stump the preacher” played for keeps.

Jesus turned the question around and asked them about the baptism that John did and whether he did it by human authority or by God’s. They wouldn’t answer the question. It isn’t that they didn’t know the answer: John acted on his own authority, of course. He wasn’t part of any priestly family, like the chief priests were. He wasn’t part of any school of thought, like the rabbis. He had not sat at the feet of any master. These were the ways in which God fashioned the clergy. My colleagues have been through this process. And so have I. I’ve been vetted. I’ve been educated. I’ve been trained. I’ve been enculturated into the fraternity of clergy (and when I started out, it was pretty much a fraternity.). I’m part of the club. I have credentials—the approvals and authorizations and pieces of paper that show that I can be trusted in this role.

John went through none of this. He simply put on a feed sack, made a show of eating grasshoppers and honey, and started dunking people in the Jordan, all while claiming to be acting at God’s direction.

My colleagues knew this. But they couldn’t say it on account of the crowd. The crowd thought John was a prophet. Any suggestion that he was a crazy, if sincere, trouble-maker would have been met with what? With violence? Maybe. Which shows just how little authority we really have. Authority, you know, is different from power. Power is the ability to make things happen—good things, bad things, it doesn’t matter. Authority is the ability to be seen as having the right to make things happen. The education, the approvals, the pieces of paper—they may give some power, but mostly they are an attempt to gain authority.

And learned just how little authority we actually have. We can state an obvious truth, namely, that John is barking mad, crazy as a green kangaroo, completely bonkers. But if the crowd doesn’t want to hear it, no one will believe us.

And here’s a thing you can take away with you: whenever anyone demands to know by what authority you are doing something, it’s because they are very aware that it’s their authority that is in question. It’s an attempt to shift attention away from them and onto you. If you fall for it and start defending yourself, you lose and they win.

Since my colleagues refused to answer his question, Jesus refused to answer theirs. Game, set and match, as they say in tennis. Check and mate, as they say in chess.

Now the way that Matthew tells the story, Jesus refused to answer the question about the source of his right to do the things that he did. But then he went on and answered the question anyway, by telling a series of parables.

The first—and really one is enough—is about a man with two sons. And, sticking to my rule about interpreting parables, I’ll just say that this is not a story that seems to be about a man who had two sons but that is really about God and the Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus. No, this story about a man who had two sons is about a man who had two sons. He tells them both to go work in the vineyard. The first says, “I don’t want to,” but then he does. The second says, “Sure thing!” but then he never actually goes. “Which one,” Jesus asks, “did the will of the father?”

Now this story as I see it could be about obedience. It could be, “Which son obeyed his father?”

Or this story could be about resistance. After all, the father is “the man.” He owns a vineyard. Wine was a luxury item. The father is a wealthy landowner, so he is “the man.” In this case it’s, “Which son successfully resisted the man?”

But it really doesn’t matter which of those alternatives it is. In either case, the question is about action, not words. If it’s about obedience, then it doesn’t matter who is more agreeable. The only one who obeyed was the son who actually did what he was told. If the story is about resistance then it doesn’t matter how well you trash-talk the man, the only thing that matters is not doing what the man tells you to do.

It’s deeds that count, not words. It’s actions that count, not rhetoric. It praxis that counts, not discourse. It’s what we do that matters, not what we say.

Now, may I say, as a colleague of these pastors, and as someone who makes his living with his words, that this is for me not entirely good news? I put a lot of store in words, you know. I have logged many years as a student. I have been a scholar—not one who made any money, but a scholar all the same. I’m still pretty scholarly. I read serious stuff. I write some serious stuff, too. All of it adding up to many words. Many of them long words. When I was ordained, Bishop Job told me, “Take authority as an elder to preach the word of God.” He told me other things, too, but that was the first. One of the things that I am called is a preacher. Preachers string together words. To put it more formally, we generate discourse. We talk, to put it simply.

All my talking, all my clever reading strategies, all my working of generating discourse, all of it takes a back seat to what I do, says Jesus. In the end that’s what matters: not what I say, but what I do. And I know in my heart that I talk a much better game than I play. Ouch.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Sometimes, you know, good news doesn’t come candy-coated. Sometimes it’s a lot like medicine—good for you, but no particular fun. And after a game-changer like this, I’ve had about as much good news as I can handle.

©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.