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.

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

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

The Kingdom of Heaven Is Like What?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2Common English Bible, Nashville (2011).

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

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

Can't We All Just Get Along?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This made potluck suppers awkward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God,” they mumbled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast Food for a Long Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crossings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Say what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 21, 2011, Proper 16A, Romans 12:1-8, Confessions of a Reformed Non-Conformist

Proper 16A
Romans 12:1-8
August 21, 2011

Confessions of a Reformed Non-Conformist

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

When I was eighth grade, or perhaps ninth, I was rummaging through the boxes in our basement, boxes still not unpacked from our move four or five years before, when I discovered my father's stash of science fiction books. Among them was Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury began the book with this epigraph from the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."¹

Henry David Thoreau couldn't have agreed more: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

This was the middle of the 1960's. It would have been hard to find a more fitting description of my generation's relationship to the status quo, the authority of our elders or the traditions that we had received from previous generations. We were the members of that generation of children born after World War II in the giddy years of a rising economic tide which, thanks to strong unions and a progressive income tax, did indeed lift all boats.We set out to chart our own course, to step to the music which we heard, keeping time to the beat of a different drummer.

We set out to change the world. The first thing to do was to get rid of war. For only the second time in the history of our nation, large numbers of young people refused to fight the war that their elders had decided they should fight.

My generation is a generation of idealists, raised in a time of economic expansion and increasing freedoms. In our bones we believed that things should get better and better, world without end, Amen. Idealists make lousy soldiers.

The story of my generation is littered with ironies. We rejected the wars of our elders and then, when it came our turn to lead, we cheerfully sent our nation's sons and daughters to fight our wars. We wore tie-dyed t-shirts with slogans that proclaimed our rejection of "the system," while "the system" geared up to supply us with those t-shirts and the other necessary equipment of non-conformity. We rejected tradition and cited as the authority for our rebellion writers like Thoreau and poets like Jiménez who were very much a part of the very tradition we were rejecting.

It's not that we didn't have a good idea or two. It's not that we did not cherish values that were and are deserving of our full devotion. As ideals go, seeking a world that is free of war is pretty good. Seeking a society that is open to all its members, regardless of race, is pretty good one, too. Seeking a world in which the wealth that we enjoy is more fairly shared among all its people isn't bad either.

Seeking that world is a good thing. Getting there is something else.It is easy enough to say, if I may paraphrase Paul, that we should not be "conformed to 'the system'". But rejecting "the system" was not particularly helpful in moving toward an inclusive, peaceful and just world. Jiménez failed to notice that writing "the other way" when given lined paper makes non-conformity pretty safe for the status quo. Thoreau did not grasp that the beat of a different drummer could be copyrighted and mass-marketed. This particular system, the one that we live in and with, has some special problems for us to work through.

We live in a consumer society. We value freedom and choice. As consumers we expect that, if we have the money, we should be able to have what we want. When we go to the grocery store we expect to find an array of choices in the frozen foods, another array of choices in the beverage aisle, yet another array in the cereal aisle and so on. I'm not sure that I find this terribly freeing. Many times I have confronted a shelf with hundreds of breakfast cereals and been paralyzed. And I know what I want. It's there. Somewhere. I just can't find it.

The food industry—to stick to the food aisle—has discovered that there isn't much money to be made in supplying me with what I need. The real money is in processing, turning corn into corn syrup and adding it to processed wheat that has been shaped into miniature superheroes of different colors. Ever more combinations of ever more processed stuff.

Now as a consumer I might, as I do, go for something simple: shredded wheat. It is processed, but it's made of wheat. No corn syrup. No sugar. No food coloring. No salt. No ingredients that can't be pronounced. Nothing my grandparents wouldn't have recognized as food. Yes, it has some preservative added to the packaging. But other than that, it's wheat. Not much money in that. I'm a food industry nightmare.

Enter advertizing. Food manufacturers discovered a long time ago that, if they waited for us to want what they have to sell, they wouldn't make much money. So, after World War I, they hired out-of-work war propagandists to figure out how to make us want stuff we don't need and to think we want stuff we don't really want, so we'll buy something more profitable for them than shredded wheat. Consumer society was born.

Of course, a consumer society needs consumers. It needs, not just people who buy the stuff they need, but people who are defined as consumers. It needs people who believe that all these different kinds of cereal are about their choices and their freedom, rather than about profits for the food industry. In our culture that's what it means to be "conformed to the system."

I have come to believe that this system presents some real problems for us and the world that we call home. It presents special problems when we approach our relationships with each other and with God as consumers.

For lots of folks a church is a retailer of religious goods and services. When people find themselves in need of religious goods or services, they go looking for a retailer who can supply them. They go "church shopping." They are looking for "a good fit." I understand. It is possible to find yourself in a church that just feels all wrong, one that would never work. I've been there. I've even been the pastor of one like that. But I tell people that while they are exercising their freedom to choose—a cherished right in this country—to be careful how they choose. If "a good fit" means a church that's comfortable, then "a good fit" is a bad thing. We're not here for our comfort. If finding a church that "meets our needs" means a church that's gives me what I want, then meeting our needs is a bad thing. We're not here to get what we want.

What we need in a church is a community that will help us to grow and change, that will help us to be "transformed by the renewing of our minds" in Paul's phrase. To be that a congregation needs to provide two things. The first is safety. If we are not safe we cannot risk change. The second thing is a challenge. If we are not challenged we will not change. A good fit is a congregation that doesn't quite fit.

To choose a church well we have to chose for reasons other than what a consumer culture values. And for a congregation to do its work on us, we have to move even further away from consumer values. A congregation is a spiritual rock tumbler. We start out as dull stones with sharp edges and rough all over. We get tossed into the church with a bunch of other rocks and we bump up against each other. We rub each other the wrong way sometimes. But if we hang in there long enough, some of our sharp edges get blunted. In a few places here and there we lose some of our surface roughness and we start to shine. A good congregation will do this if we resist the consumerist temptation to bail when we become uncomfortable or bored or dissatisfied.

To avoid being conformed to the system, we have to be transformed. God has a number of strategies for doing this. We call them "means of grace." There is the sacrament of our shared meal. There is baptism, which we will celebrate in a few minutes. There is the collection of sometimes awesome, sometimes awful writings we call the Bible. There are the many practices of prayer. There is that least-used discipline in our consumer culture: fasting. But the most vital of God's strategies for our transformation is the flesh and blood reality of our congregation. We are just ordinary people, prone to all sorts of faults. I don't really have to number them. We know. We're just ordinary people and yet we are bigger than the sum of our parts. Our congregation, quite aside from our very real failings, can also be good and wise and holy. If we hang in there for the long haul, there is a very real possibility that we will become good and wise and holy as well. Or, as Paul puts it, we will prove what is good and pleasing and mature.

©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.

1Bradbury attributed the saying to Juan Ramón Jiménez. The Yale Book of Quotations, p396, agrees, citing the Spanish original, "Si te dan papel rayado, escribe de través" (from España, November 20, 1920).

August 13, 2011, Proper 15A, Matthew 15:21-28, Wider Yet

Proper 15A
Matthew 15:21-28
August 13, 2011

Wider Yet: The Limits of Human Imagination

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

It's going to be a long fifteen months until the elections of 2012. For some time I have found our national political conversation wearisome. Perhaps because it has ceased to be conversation in any real sense of the word. We no longer actually listen to those with whom we disagree. Instead we make up some distorted version of their position and tear that apart. The give and take that used to happen in spite of ideological differences so that things could get done is now so rare as to become a heroic achievement. There are, I guess, a lot of reasons for this.

What concerns me this morning is that the way that public debate takes place fails to check a very natural human tendency, that, left unchecked, destroys our sense of community and a shared life. Like everyone else I tend to view the world from where I stand. I see and understand the world and the people, places and things in it from a particular place.

I know that each of you does the same. Mostly this works okay without disturbing me too much because, after all, we are mostly more alike than different. The proof of that is that you get most of my jokes, or at least you are very politely pretending to and laughing at the right places and that's nearly as good.

When we disturb each other it's because of a tendency that I have (and perhaps you have it, too): I tend to normalize my perspective. That is, because I stand in a certain place and see the world in a certain way and because from where I stand that way looks natural and right, I assume that my way of looking at things is normal. It's not just a geographical place I'm talking about. I take my place in the world as a white, middle-aged, middle-class, over-educated, ordained and appointed, straight man who occupies a place of power and privilege. My view of the world seems normal and right. When I bump into others who don't share that view, I tend to see their view as abnormal, unnatural and wrong.

In short I am the product of my experiences, the product of my times and of the culture that nurtured me. I can, of course, choose some of other experiences, but those choices themselves are shaped and limited by my experiences, my times and my culture. This doesn't sound very hopeful, does it?

Before we give up on our chances for real change, though, let's take a look at the story from Matthew and see if it has anything to add.

It's not an easy story, mostly because in it Jesus is not very nice. He says some rather nasty things to a woman who—from our point of view at least—doesn't seem to deserve it. Many readers of the Bible have been scandalized by this story and have tried in various ways to make it sound nicer than it is. Unlike these readers who try to get around a problem text, I'm just stubborn enough to plot a course through it and inconsiderate enough of your feelings to drag you with me. So let's see.

As Matthew's gospel has laid it out, Jesus has been working without any time off for some time. This isn't good. There is a rhythm to human life of work and rest. We are supposed to work hard. We are also supposed to rest not just when we get our daily sleep. We are supposed to take a day off now and then. For some reason—though I can't quite put my finger on where I might have heard this—a ratio of six days of work to one day of rest comes to mind.

Jesus had not been getting his days of rest. Every time we tried to slip away someone would see him and the word would spread and the first thing you know a quiet retreat had turned into a mob scene with multitudes asking him to fix their problems. We aren't told, but I'm imagining that Jesus realized that a preacher cannot take a vacation and stay at home. He needed to get out of town and turn off his cell phone.

So he left his parish—Galilee and Judea—and went to their version of the Jersey Shore, the neighborhood of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon. There he would be away from the Jewish population centers and hoped, if he wore sunglasses, to avoid having to meet any needs other than his need for rest.

It didn't work out that way. Perhaps Jesus hadn't reckoned with his spreading fame. Perhaps Jesus hadn't realized that the Jewish hope for a messiah was known and even shared outside of his people. In any event, even at the Jersey Shore and even when he was wearing sunglasses, there was at least one Canaanite woman who not only recognized him on sight but was able to address him by title: Son of David. "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David," she cried.

She was desperate in the way that only a parent with a sick child can be. She was desperate in a way that drove her to a Jewish messiah to ask for help for her daughter, even if he was on vacation.

Now we come to the difficult part. Like us, Jesus grew up in a particular place and time and within a particular culture. His way of looking at the world was shaped by time and place and culture. There were things that he knew because of this shaping. He knew, for example, that the earth was flat and that the sun journeyed across the sky during the day and returned under the earth to the east at night. He knew that disease was caused by the actions of evil spirits. He knew that his people, the Jewish people, had been chosen by God to live in covenant with God. They had obligations under this covenant. Jesus understood that his mission was to help his people to see these obligations clearly, to take up these obligations and make the fulfilling of them a part of their ordinary lives, and to enjoy as a result the power of God to heal and make whole. Jesus' work was to be done among Jews. This woman had no claim on him. He ignored her.

But the woman did not take the hint. Instead she kept on crying for him to help her daughter. Jesus kept ignoring her. The disciples started pestering him to send her away. The woman kept crying out. Some vacation.

So Jesus stopped and faced her. He had acknowledged her existence. He would have to deal with her. So he began by sharing his mission statement: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Mission statements are good. They give clarity about what we're supposed to do. More importantly they give clarity about what we're not supposed to do. Jesus' attempt to clarify things, however, failed to impress the desperate mother of a disturbed and troubled child. "Have mercy on me," she continued to cry.

Finally, his patience gone, he addressed her in a way that, if it was brutal, should have been effective in getting rid of her: "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." He called her a dog. There is to this day no worse insult in the Middle East than to call someone a dog. Jesus called her a dog. Some readers have tried to soften the insult by pointing out, correctly, that the word that is translated "dogs" is the diminutive form of the word for dog. It could mean puppy or it could mean household dog, so that's not so bad.... No, he called her a dog.

This is perfectly in line with how his culture regarded outsiders. It's perfectly in line with how any culture regards outsiders: beneath notice, not quite human, Other.

Now, if this Canaanite woman had been a little less courageous, if she'd been a little less desperate, if she had had a little less of that quintessentially Jewish character trait known in Yiddish as chutzpah, the story would have ended there.

But it didn't. She had finally gotten Jesus' attention. That was a victory in itself. He had put her down verbally, but could only do that by talking to her. All she had to do then was to win the verbal exchange. Verbal jousting was very popular in those days. Thrusting and parrying with words or watching others do it was what people did in place of watching ESPN. Those who were really good at it were taken as wise, even as God-favored. It was expected of philosophers and messiahs. But anyone could play. Even this Canaanite woman.

But she would only get one chance. So she took her best shot. "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table." Taking and accepting for the moment the terms that Jesus had used to define her and their relationship, she turned them inside out. She showed that even within those abusive terms, she had a claim that Jesus could not deny. All she was asking for was crumbs. He had to grant them to her.

She had won and Jesus knew it. In his encounter with this woman, Jesus heard clearly the inhumanity of his culture's view of things, a view that had seemed natural until that moment. It was awkward. Jesus wasn't used to losing these verbal jousts. I can count on the fingers of one finger the total number of times that Jesus lost. So he must have been uncomfortable. And how embarrassing to have it happen in front of his disciples! But there it was. The text doesn't say so, but I imagine that Jesus laughed. Sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself and surely this was one of those times. "Okay, you win! Go in peace, your daughter is made whole." And so she was.

Jesus' encounter with the Canaanite woman was surely a revelation to him. It didn't change his mission. He was right about that, at least as far as Matthew is concerned. He didn't suddenly revise his itinerary to tour the Roman Empire. He sought the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But he learned something about the heart of God that he had not known before: it encompasses everyone. Yes, Jesus learned a tough lesson that day. He who already knew God's heart so deeply and so well learned that he still more to learn. He received this lesson from a woman he had been taught to despise.

And this gives me hope. If Jesus needs this lesson, then how much more do I? And if Jesus can learn this lesson at this stage of his career and life, it's still possible for you and me. And that's about all the good news I can handle for today.

©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.