I Was a Stranger (Reign of Christ - A, Matthew 25:31-46, November 20, 2011)

Reign of Christ - A
Matthew 25:31-46
November 20, 2011

I Was a Stranger

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

How many of you have heard this passage before? That’s what I was afraid of. This text is easier to preach if it’s unfamiliar. But you already know the story. The scene is the judgment of the nations. A figure, we presume it’s Christ, called unhelpfully the “Son of Man” in our translation—unhelpfully because even in English we still have no idea what that might mean—or “the king” sits in judgment on the nations. They are judged according to how they have treated him only—here’s the catch—he has only appeared to them in disguise. He has come to the nations as a starving man, as a thirsty woman, as a poorly clothed child, as an imprisoned criminal, as a stranger, as someone on their sick bed. Not knowing who it was who had come to them, some responded with compassion to what the person they saw. They fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, clothed those dressed in rags, welcomed the stranger, visited the prisoner and cared for the sick. Others, also not knowing who it was who had come to them, ignored the suffering they saw.

Both groups are surprised to discover that it was the Son of Man or the king who had come to them in need. If they had known, of course they would have done everything they could to meet the need. Who wouldn’t? But neither group saw past the disguises, so their true characters were revealed in how they acted.

Now, if you hadn’t heard this story before, I could simply retell it and the element of surprise would do all the work. But you’ve heard the story and you know how it turns out. We are not reading this for the first time. We are not first readers. We are second readers. And for second readers there have to be rewards in the text besides a surprise ending that has been spoiled.

What sort of rewards are there, then, for us second readers? Why do we read anything a second time if we already know how the story turns out?

One answer to that question is that when we read something the second time, we notice things that we missed the first time.

Reading this text a second time, we might notice that it is “the nations,” or as the NRSV has it “the peoples,” that appear before “the king.” It is “the nations” or “the peoples” who are separated from each other. This is not a judgment of individuals. It’s collective and falls on nations or ethnic groups. Noticing that we could wonder how nations should provide for the care of needy persons and not rely solely on private efforts.

Or we might notice the phrase “the least of these who are members of my family.” Does this mean that Jesus only adopts the guise of the hungry, thirsty, badly dressed, stranger, prisoner, or patient who is also a Christian? that we won’t be held responsible for our treatment of non-Christians? Then we would have to think about how that fits in with what we know about Jesus from other stories. Didn’t Jesus teach us not to draw firm lines between “them” and “us” by telling us the story of the Good Samaritan? Can we let ourselves off the hook by taking the “who are members of my family” part with strict literalness when it was the legal expert’s question about who his neighbor was and the implied attempt to let himself off the hook that caused Jesus to tell the story in the first place? Probably not.

And so we are left with a story that on first reading thrills and terrifies us but on second reading is reduced to a rather tedious moralism: Feed the hungry because one of them might be Jesus in disguise. Or, put in another way, Expect the unexpected, which we all know is impossible by definition.

In any event, the sheep in the story did not set out to care for Jesus/the Son of Man/the king, but rather to care for the hungry, the thirsty and so forth. They didn’t know that he identifies so completely with the destitute that he counts care for them as care for him. It was their ignorance in caring and their lack of self-serving that obtained their reward.

But since Jesus has spilled the beans, we can’t be ignorant in our caring. We know how Jesus counts a visit to jail, caring for the sick, and welcoming the stranger. If we already know how this works, then there can be no surprise, no news. And without news there can be no good news.

And anyway, even if we’re hearing this version for the first time, this story is not new. In fact the event at the center of the story is quite common in fairy tales and folk stories. For example, the hero or heroine starts on a journey and meets an old peasant woman. She asks for help of some kind, like drawing water from a well or some such. Or a wandering beggar comes to the door of a palace during a blizzard. He asks for shelter. The response of the hero or heroine determines the rest of the plot, for the peasant or beggar turns out to be someone powerful—usually magical—who gives a blessing or a curse. The rest of the story is about how that blessing or curse plays out.

This theme is found in the biblical story, too. Think of Abraham who entertained three angels without knowing it and was blessed with the promise of a son to be born in his and Sarah’s old age. The rest of the story of Abraham, the entire story of the Bible, and even our story as the people of God are about how this blessing plays out.

So, the story that we have before us today is not so much about how we ought to feed the hungry, how we ought to give the thirsty something to drink, how we ought to clothe those who need good clothing, how we ought to welcome strangers, how we ought to visit prisoners and how we ought to care for the sick. Our story shows us the pattern of God’s way with us and holds before us the possibility that our lives will matter to the degree that this pattern becomes ours. We can become a part of a story that is so much bigger than the stories of our individual lives.

This is good news already, but I think we can go deeper yet. We see in the story that Christ never comes to us as we expect him to come. We expect God as a king, but Jesus comes to us begging bread and water. We are awed by military power, but Jesus comes to us as a prisoner. We find talk show hosts persuasive, but Jesus comes to us as a despised foreigner. We are envious of great wealth, but Jesus comes to us in rags and tatters. We celebrate the young and beautiful, but Jesus comes to us in the body that is ravaged by age and disease.

We are looking for something to value, something that matters. We are hoping to find the truly important, the divine. We are seeking God. In Neil Young’s words we “keep searching for a heart of gold.” But we are looking in the wrong places and not just a little wrong, either, but 180 degrees wrong!

The story suggests that we might find all of this by ceasing to search for it. If we quit looking for God, and especially if we quit looking for something that God can give us, if we simply go about the work that Christ left for us to do: to care for the destitute, to speak out on behalf of the marginalized, to share our lives with each other, to tell our stories, and to sing with grateful hearts, God will come to us. Somewhere and sometime, in an unlikely place and at an un-looked-for time, God will come to us. We may not know it when in happens, but it will be true nonetheless. And, living in this way, we will be changed and our world with us.

©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.

Time for Truth-Telling, Matthew 25:14-30, Proper 28A, November 13, 2011

Proper 28A
Matthew 25:14-30
November 13, 2011

Time for Truth-Telling

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

One of my favorite teachers of the art of preaching is Anna Carter Florence. I heard Prof. Florence lecture and preach a number of years ago at a national preaching conference. She said something that rang like a bell when I first heard it and has greatly influenced my reading and preaching of the Bible ever since. She said, “The truth of a text depends on where you are willing to stand and what you are willing to see.”

If that is so, then the decision about where to stand as we read a text is the most important decision we can make. She also implies that this decision can be made with degrees of courage or cowardice. Reading the Bible is an ethical act that reveals as much about the reader as it does about the text of the Bible.

This may be why so few of us actually read the Bible. Unless, that is, we come fortified with a reading tradition. A reading tradition is the collection of habits of reading and deciding what things are supposed to mean that is passed to us by our community. A reading tradition automatically gives us a place to stand and things to see in the text without exposing us to the risk of being unpleasantly surprised.

A reading tradition works something like pearl-making in an oyster. A pearl, we know, starts as a grain of sand, an irritant, inside the oyster shell. The oyster responds to the presence of this irritating speck of foreign matter by secreting a substance to cover the grain and to make it smooth and less irritating. A reading tradition takes a passage from the Bible that makes us uncomfortable and does something very similar. Layers of tradition cover over the passage until it’s not so irritating.

This parable is a case in point. We know the story. A rich man was going on a journey and entrusted his property or at least his money to three of his slaves. He had a diversified portfolio. Each of three slaves was put in charge of some of his money. Each had a substantial amount to manage, but he made his assignments based on how clever he thought each of those slaves was.

So, the man left and the slaves went about their business. The first took his five talents and doubled the investment. The second took his two talents and doubled the investment. The third hid his one talent for safe-keeping.

Then, when the man returned after a “long time” he called a shareholders’ meeting. The shareholder called for a report from each of his slaves. The first reported that five talents had become ten. The master commended him. The second reported that two talents had become four. The master commended him also. The third began his report by observing that the master was a “harsh man, reaping where [he] did not sow, gathering where [he] did not scatter.” He presented the master with one talent, that is, what belonged to his master. No less, certainly, but no more, either. The master was furious, upbraided him for not having at least deposited the money with the bankers so that he would get his money with interest. He ended his tirade by sacking the slave.

We can easily see that, whatever else this parable is about, it is about judgment. Judgment is not a very comfortable topic. Worse yet, it’s about money and no one wants to talk about money in church. So the tradition has gone to work to help us to read this parable so that at least it isn’t as uncomfortable as it might be. It changed a story about money into a story about “talents.” In fact, our word “talent” comes from the this text. The very idea of a talent was invented because of this text. The idea that we have certain abilities or might have them if we developed them got invented by the reading tradition around this very parable. The thrust of the story then becomes something like this: Each of us has certain potential, we have gifts, or native abilities, or whatever you want to call them. These come to us from God. We’re born with them. And, suggests the story, God expects something from us. God expects that we will make good use of these gifts. We are supposed to identify and train and use our hidden potential so that it becomes a set of abilities. Woe be to us who “bury our talent.”

The irritant piece of sand is on its way to becoming a pearl. It’s still uncomfortable, but not nearly so much so. The message that results fits pretty easily alongside our ideas about self-development and self-cultivation, elements of what I will simply call the cult of the self that so dominates our culture. And there is even the observation that goes along with taking the one talent away from the “wicked and lazy” slave: “to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those whom have nothing, even they have will be taken away.”

This reading is tenacious. It’s very hard to break through the layers of comfort that surround an irritating text. For all that I admire her, Anna Carter Florence is not able to do it. But in spite of how hard it is I’m asking you to do it. I’m asking you to be willing to see the irritating grain of sand at the center of this parable. It’s not going to be easy. But I think you’re good and wise and brave enough to try. So let’s try.

The first problem with the way the tradition has handled this parable is in explaining how the talent will be taken from the man who buried it and given to the man who had turned five talents into ten. A musical gift, for example, can be neglected. But how can it be transferred to someone else?

A bigger problem comes from the assumptions that the tradition asks us to make about God. One of the tradition’s little reading tricks is to assume that any powerful man in the story—a king, master, judge, or landowner—is to be read as God. Weaker characters in the story—widows, slaves, day laborers, or beggars—are supposed to be read as us. What frequently happens when this trick is used is that God emerges as a bully. And we are supposed to put up with it. This is very convenient for the real bullies in the world, since we are conditioned by the way we read these stories to put up with being bullied. We can see that the tradition doesn’t make these stories more comfortable for everyone equally. The richer or more powerful are comforted quite a bit more than the poorer and weaker.

What if we stand in a different place and look at something else? What then? What if we read this story about a rich man and his slaves and his money and assume that it is a story about a rich man and his slaves and his money? What if we read this story as Jesus’ way of showing his listeners something true about the relationship between a wealthy man and his very high-level flunkies? What if Jesus is telling his listeners (and us) something true about the way the world works, so that we can make our choices with a clear head? Well, let’s try it, anyway, and see what happens.

There was a rich man. He entrusted three servants with investment accounts totaling nine talents. It is notoriously hard to translate ancient money into modern purchasing power, but just for the sake of scale, let’s give it a try. A talent was a gold coin that was worth about 5,000 denarii. And a denarius was the standard wage of the day laborer. A rough equivalent to a denarius today would be about $60, eight hours at minimum wage. That would make a talent worth about $300,000 and the nine talents together worth about $2,700,000. This was cash, mind you, the rich man’s liquid assets (less, of course, what he was going to take on his trip with him—no ATM’s, remember!).

To say that this was a wealthy man would be a gross understatement. His wealth in the ancient world would have been stratospheric. Forget one percent—he would have been among the one percent of the one percent.

People like this in the ancient world were insulated from the real world by layers of lackeys. They had people. Their people had people. At the very top of a vast system of slaves, employees, and clients were these three slaves.

Entrusted with this kind of wealth, the slaves responded differently. Two of them took the usual and expected route: they invested it. How, we don’t know. All we know is that after “a long time” they had each doubled the amount they started with. If they had simply handed it over to the bankers their investment would have taken about seven years to double. Of course, any investment carried a lot of risk. The banker could simply run away with the money. Or he could go bankrupt by making bad loans. There was no FDIC and there was no derivatives market so that a banker could pawn off his risk onto someone else. No wonder the Roman goddess Fortuna was so popular among the merchant class!

After “a long time” the wealthy man returned and called his slaves settle their accounts. The first two reported that the master’s investment had been doubled. The master instantly praised them for the profit they had turned for him. No questions were asked about how they might have made the money. Ethics was not at issue, only profits. The first two slaves had done what they were supposed to do, what their master wanted them to do. Who might have been harmed or exploited in the process didn’t matter. They weren’t going to rock the boat. They did what they were expected to do.

The third slave did the unexpected. It started with his burying the gold in his backyard. On the face of it, this is good strategy. The master’s investments were in a diversified portfolio and one ninth was in a rock-solid safe place.

But we really see what’s going on here when he reported to his master. “Master,” he said, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed.” In others words his master was someone who lived off the toil of others. Others worked, bore the hot sun during the day, sweat off pounds of fluid every day, and nursed aching muscles at night while his master enjoyed the life of ease. The master told himself that he had a right to this life, but the truth, his slave knew, was different. And in spite of the life of privilege that he led, the master was harsh, or, literally, hard.

We can only speculate about his motives, but the third slave refused to participate in the systematic exploitation of his neighbors any longer. Was he tired of being caught between the master’s insatiable desire for more and more money and the anguish of peasants being dispossessed of their legacies, of families being split up and sold into slavery, of people sentenced to slow deaths because a denarius a day just wasn’t quite enough to live on. Maybe for once he decided that he had more in common with his master’s victims than with his master. Maybe the moral cost of the life that he led was just too high. We don’t know. All we know is that he was no longer willing to play along, no longer willing to do what was expected.

Halfway measures were not enough. If he turned the money over to the money-lenders he knew what that money would do. It would be loaned to peasants to pay their taxes or their rents, until they were overwhelmed by debts, and forced off their land. No, he would preserve the $300,000 and his master would get it back, but he would not extract his neighbors’ meager wealth to enrich his master. He would not do it. He had had enough.

He faced a great risk, far greater than his two colleagues. As a slave he was completely without rights. His master could kill him on the spot, or have him flogged to death, or sold to work in the mines or on a slave galley. Whatever happened to him he would go with his humanity intact. He had made his decision. He would stand for telling truth to power at whatever cost.

There is a story told of two servants to a king, one named Robert and the other William. In theory they were advisors, but in fact their job was to tell the king what he wanted to hear. This service was valuable to the king and they were paid well.

William had been having more and more trouble looking himself in the mirror, and one day he snapped. When the king asked his opinion he actually gave it, knowing full well that the king would not like to hear it. Sure enough, he was fired and escorted from the palace with only the clothes on his back. Robert felt badly for his friend and colleague, but knew better than to say anything about it to the king.

Months went by and he wondered what had become of his friend, so he went in search of him. He followed the rumors and eventually found him living in a single room in a tenement in the worst part of town. He knocked at the door and was greeted and welcomed by his friend. “William,” he said, “I have been worried about you, so I came to see how you were.”

“Robert, it’s good to see you. Won’t you come in? I was just about sit down to my dinner,” William replied. So Robert joined William at his table. William placed two bowls of the thinnest soup that Robert had ever seen on the table and sat down.

Robert looked at the soup and then at his friend who had lost a good deal of weight and he said, “William, my friend, if you would learn to please the king, you wouldn’t have to eat thin soup.”

William looked up and with a smile replied, “Robert, my friend, if you would learn to eat thin soup, you wouldn’t have to please the king.”

©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.

"We Didn't Start the Fire", All Saints' Sunday, Psalm 78:1-7, November 6, 2011

All Saints' Sunday - A
Psalm 78:1-7
November 6, 2011

“We Didn’t Start the Fire (with apologies to Billy Joel)”

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

We have an odd thing today. It is All Saints’ Sunday, still an odd thing to many of us in mainline Protestant churches who grew up with the idea that saints are pretty weird. But the oddness doesn’t stop there. The primary lesson for today as chosen by our curriculum isn’t even one of the lessons appointed for All Saints’ Sunday. It’s from the lessons that would have been read today if we had celebrated All Saints’ on its traditional day, November 1^st. Plus, it’s a psalm. I love the psalms, but I don’t usually preach from them. I’m not sure why, but I don’t usually do it. Still, I’m glad we have our psalm as the primary lesson. The further I got into it, the more right it seemed for us and for the day.

Psalm 78 is a very long psalm, seventy-two verses in all, making it the second longest in the Bible. Psalm 78 rehearses many of the important episodes of the life of the people of God from its experience of liberation from slavery in Egypt, its desert wanderings, its possession of the “land of promise,” its troubling experience as first one and then two kingdoms, ending at the disappearance of the North Kingdom when it was conquered by the Assyrian empire.

It isn’t just a history lesson, though. It is history with a difference, history as the story of God and God’s people, a holy history which is more than history as one thing after another, a history with meaning and purpose that comes from the relationship of this people and their God.

From the point of view of the psalmist there had been many, many changes: Slavery, freedom, confusion, triumph, controversy, estrangement, terror, relief and hope. Each of these were part of the story. Each new stage of their journey brought them new challenges and new problems to solve. But no matter what they went through, the psalmist could not tell the story except as the story of the people and their God. It was that relationship that gave meaning to the whole.

The people of God had to adapt to new realities, not just once or twice, but constantly. We know this well. It’s our experience, too. Things have changed since this church was built. When this church was built, our town had its share of middle-aged men who had seen the horrors of the Civil War. Some of them showed it, too, as they went about their lives missing a leg or an arm. The first telegraph line across the country had only been laid twelve years earlier. The first successful airplane was twenty-nine years in the future. The Lakota and other Native American nations of the plains still freely followed the herds of buffalo. It would be nearly half a century before women had the right to vote in national elections.

We’ve been through a change or two since then: two world wars, the Great Depression, the McCarthy-inspired witch-hunts, the civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, Prohibition, second-wave feminism, the digital revolution, globalization, international terrorism, the sexual revolution, the Great Recession. Each of these has presented its challenges and its opportunities. To each of them First United Methodist Church has had to respond with new ways of being the church.

Wander through a Cokesbury store or their display at a church event and you will see dozens of titles that offer sure-fire ways to meet the challenges with innovative ministry. To be sure many of the ways of doing church that we regard as natural and normal and necessary no longer seem to work or make much sense. In our consumer-driven culture it should come as no surprise that there is a market for simple, easy to implement answers.

On the other hand, I’m old enough not to be taken in by claims that the latest thing will be the last thing. I’m old enough to have seen fads come and go. I’m not as easily fooled as I used to be. I’ve worked hard to become a curmudgeon and I’ve made a good deal of progress.

There is a flip side to change and innovation. Beneath the ocean’s surface that is crashing waves one day and calm the next, beneath the surge of tides that come in and go out with the sun and the moon, there are deep, deep currents that move slowly but nearly unstoppably. And beneath the surface noise of our news cycles, beneath the business cycles of boom and bust and fashion cycles of in and out, there are movements that are measured in millenia, not minutes.

So I point us toward the psalmist and the psalmist points us toward story-telling:

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
² I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
³ things that we have heard and known,
that our ancestors have told us.
⁴ We will not hide them from their children;
we will tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and God’s might,
and the wonders that God has done.

What the psalmist describes is called “tradition,” which refers to something that is handed over and received from one to another. Tradition is more than habit or custom. Tradition is habit or custom or story that is passed on. The psalmist knows that tradition is a technology for keeping us true to who we are in the midst of the great changes that we have to make and even champion. At the heart of tradition is story-telling. The psalmist has stories to tell, “dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard,” because they are things that psalmist’s ancestors (literally, parents) had told her. And she promises that she will not keep these things to herself: she will tell them to the next generation. In this psalm she keeps her promise. She tells some of the glorious deeds, the mighty acts, and the wonders that God has done.

And that’s what we do, too. We have stories to tell and we tell them, stories of the creation of the universe, stories of release from slavery, stories of speaking truth to power, stories of exile and return, stories of death and new life and, above all, stories of Jesus who lived among us and showed us what God’s love is really like, who taught us how to follow him and how to change the world, and who left us stories to tell. Many of the stories of Jesus that we have are meal stories. Some are Jesus’ parables: the wedding feast and the prodigal son, for example. Some are the stories of the meals that Jesus shared with us: like the time he fed a huge crowd with just five barley loaves and a couple of trout, or the time we ate with him on the night before he was killed, or the fish fry we ate with him after he been killed and raised again.

So when we gather around this table, we remember those meal stories and we remember the actions that go with the stories: how there is a place at this table for each of us and for anyone else no matter who we have been or what we have done. We can’t deserve it, so we just accept it, a gift we can’t repay, but that we can and must and do pay forward, so that those who have little to eat may rejoice as we gather and rejoice at this table. This is a story told in actions as much as words: of the world as it will be when God’s whole will is done, of how the ninety-nine percent can come and receive all that they need and of how the one percent can come, too, and be burdened with nothing more than they need and then that day will have come when all of Abraham and Sarah’s children will have gathered from north and south, from east and west, to feast at the same table together.

That’s the story we have to tell, the drama we enact, the sign we display. We didn’t start it. We received it from “of old.” We won’t finish it either. We’ll pass it on to the next generation. We’ll be faithful to tell the story. We will tell it as we have for a hundred and sixty years. We’ll tell the story in brick, a place for God’s people to gather, a place for hospitality to the whole community. We’ll tell the story in words that we speak from the pulpit, in Sunday School classrooms, from the choir loft, in newsletters and articles in the newspaper, in the words of loving and caring conversations we have with our families, our friends, our neighbors, and even with our enemies. And most importantly of all we’ll tell the story in bodies of flesh and blood that live and work to bring God’s love into our daily lives and the lives of those we meet.

We didn’t start the fire. We didn’t start it, but we’ll tend it during our time. We’ll ensure that it doesn’t go out. We’ll give our love and energy and money to make sure that it stays lit, to make sure that it will help light up our children’s world. And when our grandchildren tell the story to their grandchildren, when they tell our story, the story of a time so incredibly primitive that we still thought Facebook was a pretty neat idea, the story they tell will not be just one thing after another. It will be the story of a people and their God and the wonders, the mighty actions and glorious deeds that this God has done.

©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.