Not What We Were Expecting (Matthew 25:31-46 5th Sunday in Lent March 22, 2015

Not What We Were Expecting

Matthew 25:31-46
5th Sunday in Lent
March 22, 2015

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

There are at least two reasons to dislike this text, to want to put some distance between us and it.

First, and maybe hardest for us is that this is a judgmental text. It’s set at the the last judgment, a time when the text imagines that there will be a great sorting out. A king sits on his throne. The whole world faces him. He pronounces his doom: reward for the righteous and woe for the wicked.

At one time Methodist preaching was filled with the theme of the last judgment and would-be Methodists were urged to “flee from the wrath to come.”

We don’t talk like that anymore. We don’t think like that. Or, if we do, it’s a thought that comes to us out of our distant past–with a parent’s or grandparent’s voice perhaps–bringing up images of a wrathful God, a pit that reeks of sulfur, and the souls of the wicked writhing in agony. For many of us, our spiritual journey has been precisely a journey away from images and notions of God like this.

Judgmentalism is repugnant to us. We sense God as one whose love is boundless and whose mercy excludes no one. We expressly invite all to join us at the table and we believe we do that at God’s own urging.

And here we are, a compassionate, open-hearted people, forced to come to terms with a text about judgment, last judgment, ever-lasting judgment. So that’s one reason to avoid this text.

The second reason is the text’s “nationalism.” At this judgment scene, all the world is gathered, but not as a single mass of humanity. When “the Human One,” who is described as “the king,” sits on his throne, “all the nations will be gathered in front of him. He will separate them from each other, just as shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” The nations will be gathered. The nations will be separated. The nations described as sheep will be on the king’s right and the nations described as goats will be on the king’s left. This is a text, not about the judgment of individuals, but about the judgment of nations. That’s why I say this text is nationalistic; it comes at human beings through their membership in nations, not through the content of their character as individuals.

Of course, when I say “nations,” I don’t mean nations in the modern sense of the word, that is, more or less, a people who have their own government, their own political identity. The word being translated as “nations” is ethnoi. That’s where we got our word “ethnic.”

In modern times we have more or less held to the rule that each ethnicity should be its own nation. The French have France. The Italians have Italy.

But in the ancient world it was different. Being a nation–or perhaps a better phrase would be “a people”–had little to do with being a state. The Greeks–before they were conquered by that backwoods upstart who could barely speak the language (I’m speaking of course of Alexander the Great)–were a single people, but each city was its own state. The Roman Empire, on the other hand, was a single political unit, but contained many different peoples, ethnicities, or nations as our text calls them.

It is these nations, ethnicities, or peoples who are gathered in front of the king for judgment. There is no sign that individuals are being judged, only the nations, ethnicities or peoples. The Scots will have to answer for their inability to get along with others, including each other. The Norse will have to answer for the deplorable manners they so often displayed when they came in their boats to visit the Scots. And so forth.

These things will be weighed against the other side. The Norse looked at maps whose borders bore the legend “Here be dragons” and far from being scared off said to each other, “Let’s go dragon hunting!” They were beyond brave. And the Scots for all they distrusted outsiders were fiercely loyal to chieftain and clan. These are the sort of things we expect to be measured in a judgment of the peoples, but that raises the question: What is it that makes a people great?

The Romans certainly had their idea, and it’s Rome’s ideas that lie in the background. Our text has Jesus and his followers in Jerusalem where, as he had said, he had to go in order to suffer many things and be killed. That prediction had been made in the shadow of the walls of Caesarea Philippi, the city built by Herod’s son Philip II as a tribute to Caesar and the glory of Rome.

Since then Jesus and his followers had worked their way steadily south and now they were standing in the center of Rome’s power in Judea. It’s been about Rome all along.

So what did Rome think makes a people great? It’s no secret. Romans believed themselves destined by the gods to bring peace and its blessings to the world. Peace came from victory, whom Romans worshiped as a god. And victory came from the ruthless and brutal application of military power. The glory of Rome–at least in its own eyes–was the empire they had founded and upheld by their political shrewdness and the spears of the legions. But that, said Jesus, is not what makes a people great–not its success at empire-building, not its wealth, not its powerful army and navy. No, these things don’t make a people great. What makes a people great is that they feed the hungry, give the thirsty something to drink, welcome the stranger, clothe the poorly-clothed, and care for those who are sick or in prison.

The regime in Jerusalem will not act this way. They will not feed the hungry, quench the thirst of the thirsty, visit the sick, care for the prisoner and clothe the naked. Far from welcoming the stranger, they will murder him.

They do these things because they value glory, power and wealth. But in God’s eyes, the things that most people prize simply do not count. Rome had sunk its energy, wealth and will into the pursuit of the wrong things and so it was doomed to eternal shame not everlasting glory.

This is how “the people” are to be judged, at least if Jesus’ words are anything to do by.

So what about us? Early Christian writers were fond of describing Christians as a new people, a third ethnicity that was neither gentile nor Jew. How are we doing as a people?

Two stories from this week tell the story pretty well.

The first is from McMinnville, Oregon, where a congregation is facing a $500 per day fine because of an encampment of homeless people on their property. Homeless people began staying overnight and eventually setting up tents when the church’s Council “decided that telling people to move along once the doors were closed was inconsistent with the church’s commitment to love and serve all.”[1] The church is trying to work out a settlement with the city that sees to the need of the homeless.

The other story comes from San Francisco where a large downtown church had a number of homeless folk sleeping in its doorways overnight. So the church installed a sprinkler system that drenched the doorways every thirty minutes or so through the night. Said a spokesperson, “We are sorry that our intentions have been misunderstood.”2 But, you see, I think their intentions were perfectly understood. They had forgotten that the king is among those using their doorways as shelter.

So, how are we doing, we would-be followers of Jesus? I’d hate to have to give us a grade.

There is good news here, though. Jesus told his story and everyone in it was surprised. But we aren’t, at least not any more. This story is now partly false because Jesus told it. “Really, those are the standards?” they asked. “Who knew?” Well, now we do.

We know what God values. It will come as no surprise. We only have to live the sort of life as a people that God values. That’s all we have to do. That’s all.

[1]Hodges, Sam, “Church Threatened with Fines for Taking in Homeless”, The United Methodist Church, 2015 http://www.umc.org/news-and-media/church-threatened-with-fines-for-taking-in-homeless [accessed 21 March 2015].

[2]Jenkins, Jack, “Catholic Cathefral Installed Water System That Drenches Homeless People to Keep Them Away”, http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/03/19/3635964/what-would-Jesus-do-definitely-not-this/ [accessed 19 March 2015].

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The Gift of Truth (Lent 3a; Matthew 25:14-30; March 8, 2013)

The Gift of Truth

Lent 3a
Matthew 25:14-30
March 8, 2013

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

This is a great stewardship text. It’s mis-timed, of course. It should be happening in September or October when I’m suppose to have one of those, you know, for the fall stewardship campaign. This is a great stewardship text. It urges that each of us make careful use of what God has given us so that we can show our profits to God. There should be something to show for God’s investment in us. Great stewardship stuff.

It’s even better if it’s the stewardship of time and talents we’re talking about, because, in fact, our word “talent” comes from this very text. Talent is a Greek word, a unit of weight of about sixty pounds. It is an amount of money equivalent to sixty pounds of silver. Our use of the word talent extends the notion of value and worth into the arena of our native abilities. Then the parable means that we are obligated to make something of the abilities that God has given us. The person with a gift for teaching is not allowed not to teach. The person with musical talent is not allowed not to make music. That’s what the parable means. Everybody says so.

They say so because when we read the parable we assume that the rich man in the parable is a figure for God. We assume that the disposition of property is a figure for the distribution of gifts to each of us. We assume that the giving of an account is the last judgment when we shall have to justify our use of the gifts that we have been given. And we conclude therefore that the one thing we may not do with the talents that the master has placed in our hands is to bury them. Everybody says so.

Like I say, it’s a stewardship text, useful for getting people to fill out those time and talent surveys. Where’s your talent. Buried in your back yard? Better volunteer for something. Otherwise it’s the outer darkness for you. Volunteer now or practice weeping and gnashing your teeth.

Far be it from me, of course, to dissuade anyone from making use of what God has given them in a faithful and diligent way. And if that should take the form of volunteering for church committees, so much the better.

But I’m not sure this parable is the best point of departure if we want to arrive at that conclusion. And I’m not sure, just because everybody says so, that this is most natural reading of the parable before us.

Jesus’ parables were scenes drawn from ordinary life, scenes that would have been familiar to anyone growing up in Roman Galilee. Parables also worked by mixing the ordinary and the absurd. A woman sweeping the floor is an ordinary scene, but a woman who has ten silver coins does not sweep floors. Day laborers being hired to work in a vineyard is an ordinary scene, but landowners did not do the hiring. And so on. None of this is obvious to us in the way that it would have been if we had grown up in Roman Galilee.

So we have to read with an eye to the out-of-place, the peculiar, the absurd. We also have to read with a suspicion of the received tradition, especially since the tradition has tended to side with powerful men, kings and landowners, for instance, in a way that Jesus clearly did not. So this my rule for reading parables: if the parable seems to be about a wealthy man who deputized his slaves to go on making money while he was gone, then I should suspect that the parable is actually about a wealthy man who deputized his slaves to go on making money while he was gone.

So we begin with a rather odd scene. A wealthy man plans to go on a journey and summons three slaves. He gives them three piles of silver, weighing a total of nine talents or about 540 pounds. That’s a lot of silver. Just how much it was worth is hard to say, but let’s just say it was a lot. This was the kind of money that none of Jesus’ hearers had ever seen. This was the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes grand prize.

We might ask where he got that kind of money. Most of our wealth nowadays is “on paper” but there was no paper wealth then. There was a certain amount of wealth. The pie was fixed in size. For one person to get a bigger slice meant someone else had to get a smaller piece. There was no way to make the pie bigger. So having a lot of money was morally suspect and more than a little anti-social.

So where did this wealthy man get his money? Not from any honest endeavor, we can rest assured. Not content with what he has, he wants the accumulation of money to continue even in his absence, so he assigns capital to three slaves.

When the rich man came back he wanted to know what his slaves had done with his money. The first two slaves, to whom he had given 300 and 180 pounds of silver respectively, had doubled the money that he had left to them. How had they done that. We don’t know, but I think we can safely assume that they made their money by whatever suspect means their master had used. Of course, he called them “good and trustworthy. They had behaved just as he would have. They had paid attention to their master and applied what they had learned. Shrewd, certainly, if morally suspect.

The last slave, though, had responded quite differently. He brought the original sixty pounds of silver. He had invested it in an ITM account—In the Mattress. Now everybody says that he was afraid to take the risks that investment naturally involves, so he hid the money to keep it safe. But that’s not what the parable says. No, the slave presented the money and made an incredible statement. Remember that a slave had no rights whatsoever. If an owner wanted to kill a slave, there was no law to prevent him. So what the slave said showed that he was either very foolish or very brave. “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; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.

Let’s just unpack that a little. The slave described his master as “reaping where [he] did not sow and gathering where [he] did not scatter seed.” That is to say his master is a parasite on the labor of others. A harsh man indeed. He was afraid, he said. Afraid of his master. Maybe, although a person driven by fear doesn’t usually speak the way the slave has spoken. I suggest that the slave was afraid of becoming like his master, by making money the same way his master has made it. The slave’s fear, then, was born of moral revulsion. He buried his master’s money to keep it from increasing, to make sure that the master got back what he had given and no more.

Incidentally, he did not invest the money with the bankers to earn his master interest because loaning money to fellow Jews at interest is a practice forbidden by the Torah. The profits from the investment would have broken the Law of Moses.

Now the master got no profit from this third slave. He reacted with rage against this impudence. He was not accustomed to being addressed in this way. No one spoke to him like that.

Too bad, really. He had money. He had slaves to make him more of it. But he had no one who would tell him the truth about his own life.

The ancient writer Cicero wrote a little book called On Friendship. An important feature of friendship according to him is that friends are truth tellers. They do not flatter each other, but instead offer each other the benefit of a kind of ethical mirror. How else can we become the people we should be without having someone who can call us to our best selves. Cicero observes that friends must be social equals. The reason is simple. If we have a friend who is our social superior, we won’t ever tell them the truth about themselves. If we have a friend who is our social inferior, they will never tell us the truth about ourselves.

But there are some truths that our social equals cannot tell us because they themselves are blind to them. This rich man will never hear the truth of his life from his social equals because his social equals are caught in the same lie that he is. The astonishing thing about this parable is that it is the man’s slave who tells him the truth. It is his slave who does the service of a true friend.

I wonder how many times I could have heard the truth of my life, but I wasn’t able or willing. Because it came from someone I didn’t like. Or because it was so far away from what I think of myself that I didn’t want to believe it. Or because I wasn’t listening for it that day. Or because I was too goal oriented to pay attention.

For whatever reason—force of habit, moral cowardice, sheer astonishment—the rich man could not or would not hear what his only truly faithful slave said to him. He valued the coin more than an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth. But that doesn’t mean that we have to. Certainly the kingdom of heaven is to be found in places we do not expect, in the uncomfortable truths that others tell us, in image of ourselves we see reflected in the eyes of others, and these others may not be the ones we had wanted as our teachers in these matters. But the kingdom of heaven is found in this, too, that the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

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Charity Is Not Justice (Matthew 20:1-6; 2nd Sunday in Lent; March 1, 2015)

Charity Is Not Justice

Matthew 20:1-6
2nd Sunday in Lent
March 1, 2015

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

Jesus taught in parables. Everybody knows that. Even people who don't know much about Jesus know that.

Most readers of the New Testament assume that these are what our English teachers call allegories--stories in which each element has a non-obvious meaning--so that the story ends up not being about what it seems to be about. Our story today, then, is not about a "landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard." It's about something else. Maybe it's about God. Maybe the the vineyard is really the world where God's work is being done. And the workers are not workers--they're the followers of Jesus who start out early or late to work in God's world, God's vineyard.

We're so accustomed to this way of reading--that the story isn't about what it's about so it must be about something else--that we can hardly imagine any other way of reading it. So I know that proposing a different way of reading this parable is going to meet with stiff resistance.

The resistance doesn't just come from our long habit of reading parables as allegories--stories that are not about what they're about. We read a story as an allegory when we find a story unacceptable but can't get rid of it. Ancient Greeks had stories about their gods in which the gods behaved immorally. They found this unacceptable, but they couldn't simply get rid of the stories. So, they changed the way they read the stories so that the stories were no longer about what they were about. Of course, simple uneducated folk still read the stories the old way, so those who knew what the stories were really about could smile condescendingly down on the uncultured and say, "No, no, my good man, that isn't the point at all!"

So let's see what's so offensive about this story that we have to pretend it isn't about what it's about, and pretend so hard that we forget we're pretending.

Let me propose that this story is about what it's about. It's about "a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard."

All these elements were familiar to Jesus' hearers. The rights of peasant families to keep their small farm plots and to pass them to their children was enshrined in Jewish law. The covenant people had a right to the land needed to support themselves.

But it had been centuries since these laws had force--if they ever had. And Romans were not inclined to respect Jewish law. Small holders were being forced off their land. The small plots were being joined together into large farms and given over to the production of luxury good--like wine--for export. These plantations existed to grow money, not food. The landowner was part of the elite, the very top of the social pyramid.

The day workers were at the very bottom. Peasants forced off their land had very few choices. Most had no skills that would let them support themselves as artisans. Most had no choice but to sell the labor of their bodies. When they worked, which was not every day, they earned a denarius, that could at least in theory but food to live for another day. A prayer to God to provide "daily bread" was not a pretty bit of pious poetry; it was the thread by which their lives hung. But, of course, they didn't work every day. Going without food, they were weakened. Weakened, they got sick. Sick, they couldn't work. It was a vicious circle.

To fall from the peasant class to the ranks of the day laborer was to lose any status and respect in the community. The only dignity that remained was the dignity of labor, the only value their lives had was the value of the physical work they could still do.

When they could no longer work, there would be nothing left to them but the life of the beggar as an object of charity.

Jesus' hearers knew all this. There was nothing strange here except that the landowners went out in person to hire laborers. Landowners did not hire workers; they did not have any dealings with people who had fallen off the social grid. They had their managers do that.

We know from the very beginnings of the story that the parable will collapse the huge social distance between the one percent of the one percent and no-status day laborers. Therefore, I suspect that the subject of this story is the social relation between the top and bottom members of the society.

Day laborers gathered in the town market at day break where they could be hired. The landowner went and hired workers for a denarius a day. Obviously this landowner was pretty careful with his denarii, since he under-estimated how much labor he needed, not once but four times. The last round of hiring took place nearly at sunset. The landowner hired the last of his workers, but not before insulting them. "Why are you just standing around here doing thing all day long?" This rich man imagines that the poor are lazy. But they are not lazy, just invisible. "Because nobody has hired us," they said aloud and no doubt added under their breath, "Jerk!" But they didn't say it out loud. The poor handle the rich very carefully.

The sun set and it was time to pay the workers. As exploitative as employers were then, they would not have dared to withhold their wages for a week, or two, or even three as employers routinely do today.

As we know the wages were given first to the last hired and they were paid a denarius each, the usual wage for an entire day. When the last were paid, those who had worked the longest, they expected more. And they grumbled about it. In reality, their grumbling would never have reached the landowner's ears, but the parable has put him in the scene and none too pleased.

"Friend," he began, speaking to one of the grumblers. He did not mean it. The worker is not his friend. No, the worker is being set up. He is about to be destroyed. "Friend," he said, "I did you no wrong. Didn't I agree to pay you a denarion? Take what belongs to you and go. I want to give to this one who was hired last the same as I give to you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with what belongs to me? Or are you resentful because I'm generous?"

The grumbling laborer has been dismissed. The word will get out. He'll not be hired again. His life has been shortened and made more miserable by this rich man who addressed him as "friend."

But he is wrong about why the laborer was grumbling. The landowner claims he is being generous. But that is the problem. He had made his relationship with his workers a matter of charity. But that makes beggars out of day laborers. A day laborer doesn't have much but he does have his bodily strength and energy. He has work that is of some value. He doesn't need charity.

Charity is the landowner's way of trying to cover up his responsibility for displacing these former peasants he has hired. No charity is going to fix that. It's not the landowner's generosity this day laborer needs; what he needs is justice. He needs his dignity restored, the dignity the rich man stripped from him by treating his work as a matter of charity. He needs his land restored, the land the rich man is using to produce wine to sell to other wealthy Romans to make himself even richer. The rich man is no job creator; he destroys lives to increase his own wealth.

And that is what the story is about, if we assume that the story is about what it is about. But Jesus says, this is what the kingdom of God is like. So where is the kingdom of God? Not in the demeaning so-called generosity of the landowner. Is it in the grumbling of the day laborers? Maybe. There is, after all, something quite remarkable in a worker's being able to sing, "Take this job and shove it," but that's not exactly what happened here. What happened is that a system masquerading as a system of generosity is unmasked as an arrangement that strips workers of decent lives and dignity. What was hidden is now uncovered. Truth has been spoken aloud. The first has become last and the last has become first. That's what the kingdom of God is like.

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