Unto the End of the Present Age (Matthew 28:16-20; 2nd Sunday of Easter; April 12, 2015)

Unto the End of the Present Age

Matthew 28:16-20
2nd Sunday of Easter
April 12, 2015

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

“Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” We know these workds as the Great Commission. If I’ve said them right. you were able to hear the capital letters. The Great Commission.

If you were like me you’ve had this drummed into your head since your Sunday School days: “…go and make disciples.” I heard that a lot, especially every time a missionary visited. I remember hearing it, but I didn’t really see much actual going. We collected money or used clothing or other stuff. We sent money, but someone else went. We didn’t go. We stayed. But still in some sense we saw ourselves as fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Great Commission for us was as central to what Jesus taught and who he was as the Lord’s Prayer and the Golden Rule. “Our Father who art in heaven…” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” I got the impression that, if you got those three things right, you pretty much had being a Christian handled.

It’s strange, then, that the Great Commission is only given once in the four gospels. John’s Jesus’ last earthly act is to settle a dispute between Peter and John, or perhaps better, among their disciples. Luke’s Jesus sent the apostles to preach the forgiveness of sins to all nations, but says nothing about whether anyone will be persuaded to be Jesus’ disciple. In Mark, no one even finds out that Jesus has been raised since the women who say him “said nothing to nobody, because there were afraid.” Why, then, did we latch onto this set of instructions for how to be the Church, especdially since most of us have no intention of going anywhere?

Would it surprise you to learn that using these verses as the basis for our mission is relatively recent? This text hardly ever got mentioned when peo[ple in the ancient church talked about mission. They didn think that their mission was to make Christian disciples of everyone; they thought it was enough to have some disciples everywhere, so that God’s praise could be spoken and heard to the ends of the earth.

It wasn’t until the middle of the 1800s that the idea that everyone should be converted to Christianity became popular and these verses became the basis and slogan for the modern missionary movement. We could say that we were just really slow to catch on to the obvious, that it took us eighteen hundred years to notice Jesus’ instructions. Maybe so.

I’m always a little suspicious though when a text that has languished for centuries is suddenly in vogue, suddenly becoming the foundation on which the Church builds its whole notion of what it means to be followers of Jesus. When I see that happen, I look around to see what else was going on at the time and if they are perhaps connected. When I ask why there verses because so popular in the middle of nineteenth century and what else was happening in our country at the time, I can’t hape but notice that we were in the middle of building an empire. We were finishing the centuries-long work of expelling the original inhabitants of our country, shoving them beyond the our frontiers, enclosing them in reservations, or just simply killing them. Local militias and the Army had the major roles in the effort, but the churches had their part to play, too. In reservations and scattered through the country were Iindians from various nations who had had their cultures smashed to bits and who were demoralized. Others were angry to their core, looking for some way, any way, to strike back at those who had destroyed their lives. (Let me assure that it was not because they hated our freedoms.)

Making these defeated nations in disciples of Christ not only seemed like obedience to these newly-discovered verses. It was also part of the project of “pacifying” the Indians so that we could enjoy in peace in places like Decorah the land we had taken.

Then, the continent fully under white control, we turned our eyes abroad to places like Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, and the rest of Central America. The Army, Navy, and Marines imposed our will around the world to make it safe for our companies. And everywhere they went, missionaries followed, making disciples out of heathens and “real” Christians out of the Catholics of the former Spanish colonies. It was the golden age of imperialism and the Great Commission supplied the slogans for a cheerleading Church.

When we read a text from the Bible, what it means is not the only important question. It’s also important to ask how a text has been used. This text has been used to oppress the weak, to shatter cultures, and to secure power and possessions on “our” continent and around the world.

In spite of all that, though, I think there is something here that calls us to sanity, health, and even holiness. And it hjas to do with the direction of the movement in the text. It’s in that one word, “Go!”

We used to talk a great deal about “Go and make disciples” but we never actually went. The work of securing and empire and the work of the missionary movement–and, really, they were always two sides of the same coin–were the job of specialists: sailors, soldier, and marines on the one hand, and missionanries on the other. A few people were “called” to go, but most of us were not. Instead, we stayed hojme and supported their efforts with our taxes and our offerings. The frontier–the boundary between the Christian and developed capitalist world and the un- or under-developed and non-Christian world–was far away.

In the churches we worked on getting people to come to help us support those souls brave enough–braver that we were–to actually “go and make disicples.” The rest of the time we tried to be good citizens who paid our taxes so that the frontiers could be held or maybe even pushed back.

But all of that has come unraveled. We still send our military overseas, but they only seem to make us enemies faster that we can kill them. We try to secure our borders, at least the one between us and the countries with brown-skinned people, but the frontiers feel more porous than ever. Now Christians in Korea and Africa send missionaries to us.

Maybe we had only fooled ourselves before, but our country no longer seems all that Christian. Even our little newspaper here in Decorah tell the story. On Tuesday we learned that someone who thinks about these things has rated Luther Collegew as the best of its kind in the state. How did they do that? They compared the costs of attending with the income of its graduates. Then on Tuesday we read about the unhappiness over the later start of the school year, a change mandated by the governor, not for its educational benefit but for the good of the tourism industry that needs teh cheap labor of high school students for its profitability. It’s hard to square either of these stories with the man who taught us that “you cannot serve God and money.”

The frontiers have shifted. We live in the midst of a culture that talks a great deal about God, but that has apparently never heard of the God of Jesus. The missionary frontier begins at the doors our church. Our main concern thirty years ago was how to get people to come to church. We’re still thinking that way. We worry about empty pews, last Sunday not withstanding. A parents tells me, his vboivce breaking with anxiety, that we have to entice you to come.

Mattthew’s Jesus turns our notions upside down. The point of church is not to get people to come. The point of church is for us to go. We gather so we can be formed so we can be scattered into our community and world. Matthew’s Jesus turns our attention from the struggles involved in running any church in the early twentieth-first century toward the broken world around us.

Make no mistake. It’s not a matter of taking up these verses with the pride and arrogance of the imperial age. We may find that we listen more than preach. We may find that we are the ones who are converted to Christ. We may find that far from having all the answers and taking charge, that someone else may already know what needs to be done. And all they need is one more set of hands, hands that could be ours.

Jesus turns us outward, humbler and–it is devoutly to be hoped–a little wiser. He turns us outward and gives us a promise. If we follow our path of discipleship out the doors, into the missionary frontier that is American culture in our age, Jessu promises “I myself will be with you every day until the end of the present age.”

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A Change of Plans (Matthew 28:1-10; Easter; April 5, 2015)

A Change of Plans

Matthew 28:1-10
Easter
April 5, 2015

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

Our daughter, Beth, has written the shortest Easter sermon. She was visiting us at Easter time once when she was still in college and knew everything. I was working away on the Saturday before Easter and she advocating putting my sermon away and preaching what everyone had come to hear: a sermon in four sentences.

Here it is: Jesus was dead. Now he is alive. Hooray! Now go eat ham.

Short, sweet, and, I have to admit, the essence of every Easter sermon I have either heard or preached.

“Believe me, Dad,” she said, “people will thank you for it.”

Maybe she’s right. At the same time, I can’t help but feeling that there is something more that needs to be said. After all, at its heart, the Easter proclamation is about vindication; it’s about recognizing the winner; it’s about derailed plans suddenly re-railed. As humans we all tend to read into this that it’s a vindication of us, recognizingourselves as winners, and re-railing our plans. Then it is not so much Jesus who is risen from the dead; it’s us. Easter then becomes an affirmation of us and of the arrangements we have made for our lives. We move on with a will to whatever is waiting for us after church: ham, or (in our case) lamb, or (if you are a vegan or vegetarian) yams.

I can’t help the feeling that there is something else at work here, something more than the good feelings brought on by a promising spring after a long and hard winter, when we get to put away our sun lamps and can go to work and come home in daylight. I can’t help the feeling that there is news here that is so good it goes beyond our imagination. I can’t help the feeling that there is news here that is so good it has to be true.

That’s what Mary Magdalene and the “other Mary” thought. If we settle for less than that we will render their testimony false. If we settle for less than the fear and joy that they experienced we might just as well save ourselves the bother and go straight for the ham, lamb or yams.

The women, of course, did not go to the cemetary expecting Easter. Though we are not told what they planned to do once they got there, they went to see the tomb. Jesus was dead; they expected his body to be in the tomb.

Jesus had forced a showdown with the powers of Roman Jerusalem and he had lost. The rich and powerful won. Violence won. Injustice won. Hatred won. Death won. That came at no surprise, really, although they had perhaps hoped for more. Jesus had come preaching and teaching God’s care for the poor, the sick, the outcast, the sinners, in short, the losers of his world. He had stood with them and for them. He had even claimed that God favored them with special love. He had claimed that God was at work in them and among them, bringing the Kingdom of God into this world through them.

The rich, the strong, the insiders, the righteous, the winners didn’t take Jesus’ preaching very well. They felt threatened. That is, of course, because they were in fact threatened by Jesus. They reacted to him as to any one else who proclaimed God’s judgment on their comfortable arrangements of things. They killed him. All the rules were followed. Jesus was properly accused, properly convicted, properly sentenced. This is how the powers-that-be murder those who threaten their power.

Winners win and losers lose. There was nothing new about that and the women knew it. The women knew that Jesus was dead. The guards at his tomb knew he was dead. Pontius Pilate and the High Priest knew that Jesus was dead. They could all get on with their lives, whether lives of poverty or lives of privilege.

But that’s where they were wrong, all of them. That’s when there was an angel of the Lord, dazzling white and brilliant. That’s when there was an earthquake and the guards–tough Roman guards, veterans of multiple deployments–the guards fainted from fear. The women, frightened but bravely holding on to consciousness, received the message from the angel and instructions to gather the disciples and head for Galilee. And then Jesus himself met them as they ran to carry out their instructions. They touched the dead man, now alive, and heard his words.

Everyone’s plans changed in just a few moments. The Mary Magdalen and the “other Mary”, who until very recently in Matthew’s gospel had not even been mentioned, became the key figures the story. The authorities suddenly found themselves doing damage control, trying in vain to contain and control the story.

Soon the disciples did go to Galilee; they did meet Jesus there; they did receive their instructions to make disciples. “Make disciples everywhere,” Jesus told them, “even in Decorah.” Soon they found their voices; they went everywhere, even Decorah, and proclaimed that “Jesus is Lord.”

This was the outcast Jesus, the ex-peasant from Galilee, the criminal who died a shameful death, the loser, the gadfly, the one who mocked the rulers and punctured bloated egos, the lover of tax-collectors, prostitutes and other notorious persons, this Jesus is Lord.

We know that this is imperial language. Of only one other person was it said that he “is Lord” and that was the emperor. When the disciples found their voices they announced that Caesar is not Lord. All the so-called authorities are overthrown. All of them. Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.

I’m not sure that a lot of Christians get this. A lot of Christians seem to think that being a Christian should get them some power and special considerations. Their version of Christian faith should have a privileged place in public life. They should get to treat people they don’t like badly as long as they claim that Jesus doesn’t like them either.

What we don’t understand is that Jesus has dethroned every authority, even ours. Caesar is not Lord. Barack Obama is not Lord; neither is Joe Biden. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner–they’re not Lord. Neither are Rachel Maddow, nor Rush Limbaugh, nor Jon Stewart, nor Bill O’Reilly. They are all dethroned. The United States is dismissed, and so it the United Nations. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Charge are not Lord; they are unseated. Monsanto and Exxon are not sovereign. We owe no final allegiance to anyone’s Commander-in-Chief. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are dethroned. The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are put down.

Now we are free to imagine a new world. We are free to dream a world where black lives matter, where the hungry eat their fill, where the earth sighs in relief from its long suffering, where love between equals is celebrated no matter who is loving whom, where the poor have all that they need to live good lives and the rich will no longer be burdened with more than they need. We are free to dream God’s dream.

Feel free to add to that list if you didn’t find something there to fill you with fear and joy. As for me, I found plenty. The news this morning is enough to unmake us all. The news this morning is enough to remake us all. The news this morning goes beyond what we have thought or felt or imagined. The news this morning is too good not to be true. And here is the news: Jesus was dead. Now he is alive! Hallelujah!! Now all we have to do is to live into this new life that has come to us. We can chew on that while we’re eating our ham, or lamb, or yams.

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The Only Thing That Makes Sense (Matthew 26:17-30; Maundy Thursday; April 2, 2015)

The Only Thing That Makes Sense

Matthew 26:17-30
Maundy Thursday
April 2, 2015

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

It had been a tough few days. Even though Jesus had never suggested that he was planning a coup of some kind, we can’t blame the disciples for hoping. Their hopes might have been buoyed by the enthusiastic response of the crowd when Jesus staged that little bit of street theater when he came into Jerusalem.

The powerful of Jerusalem–the Romans first, but also the priests and religious authorities–pushed back, of course. People who have power often like to keep it. People who carry the power of a system often believe that the system needs for them to hold on to their power. So of course the Jerusalem powerful pushed back against the threat that Jesus posed.

If Jesus had wanted to take Jerusalem, he could have used the success of Palm Sunday and moved immediately to seize the Temple, expel the Romans and set himself up as king. But he didn’t do any of that. He preached in the Temple. He healed the sick. He gave the powerful plenty of time to figure out how to get rid of him.

Without the drama of a messianic announcement, people got bored. They wandered off in search of new excitement. The sense of a storm about to break grew and the crowds dwindled. The disciples of Jesus watched as the moment passed and the clouds gathered.

Jesus, in the meantime, had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. He knew that people who challenged Rome had short life expectancies. He had done more than challeng Rome. He wasn’t out simply to shove Rome aside and rule in its place. Instead, he aimed to overthrow the system of violent power itself. He knew his own end was coming and soon.

He had tried to tell his followers, but it was hard for them to hear. It meant that they would have to become like Jesus, to take up their own crosses, to run the same risk that Jesus was running. The crowd of his followers shrank. It was smaller that it had been when Jesus entered Jerusalem and smaller than it had been when Jesus fed the folks in the wilderness–a crowd of twelve thousand or so, remembering that he fed five thousand men–with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

The crowd was down to the inner circle. Matthew tells us that it was just “the Twelve,” but I think that’s not the whole story. We know there were women traveling with Jesus. He would not have shooed them off so he and the boys could have Passover by themselves. The women were there, too. And if the women were there, children were also. Even so, it was just the inner circle now. They gathered with Jesus in an upper room–thirty or so of them, maybe–to eat a meal that was a Passover meal and something else at the same time.

They might not have caught all that was in the air, the subtexts, the overtones, but at least the meal itself made sense. It wasn’t just bread and wine. There were the ritual foods that went with the Passover: wine (four glasses of it apiece–Passover is a not a somber celebration), matzo (unleavened bread), moror (horseradish or other bitter herb), charoses (a mixture of apples, nuts, wine and cinnamon), beitzah (a roasted egg), karpas (parsely with salted water), and, of course, roasted lamb.

Eating and drinking: these are good things. Remembering former times of deliverance in the face of a deadly threat: this is good, too.

Much of Jesus’ mission didn’t make any sense. Why not continue to teach? Why stick his finger in the eye of the lion in its own den? Why pick a fight, a fight he must surely lose? Those things didn’t make any sense. But eating and drinking and telling stories–those things made sense. And that’s what Jesus did on his last night among us.

We still don’t understand it all. But we have our own gathering clouds. When we stop to listen we can hear the groaning of Creation. We can hear the cries of mothers and babies, weeping for the sons and fathers who die at the hands of other sons and fathers in decaying urban neighborhoods and in faraway mountain villages. And in the midst of all of that and more, there are many of us whose worlds have come apart from grief or pain or fear.

We live in a world that has gone astray. We are part of a church that has gone astray. We ourselves have gone astray. We have our sound-bite explanations and our talking-point evasions, but when we are honest with ourselves we realize that we are talking mostly to avoid the accusatory silence. Nothing in our world makes much sense.

But this meal still makes sense. We eat and drink. We tell stories about other meals from our past and the distant past and we draw comfort from the meal, from the stories and from each other–like Jesus did–to face what must be faced, to pick up our own crosses, and to follow in his footsteps.

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Jesus vs the Chamber of Commerce (Matthew 21:1-13; Palm Sunday; March 29, 2015)

Jesus vs the Chamber of Commerce

Matthew 21:1-13
Palm Sunday
March 29, 2015

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

Everyone loves a parade. People gather with their lawn chairs along the parade route. Some people stake out space long before the parade begins. In Decorah we don’t even have to stay with our chairs; we know they’ll still be there when we get back from wandering around and saying hi to our friends. I don’t know whether the kids or the grownups enjoy a parade more. Kids chase after candy that is thrown to them from passing trucks, floats and tractors.

No one throws candy to grownups, but we get to watch the kids. We all get to wave to our friends who are actually in the parade. Our friends in the parade try to pretend that they don’t really want to be center of attention, but we don’t believe them.

In Decorah we don’t need much of a reason to have a parade. I remember in our first six months in Decorah there were four parades: Fourth of July, Nordic Fest, Homecoming, and Christmas. The day of the Christmas parade was so cold I was afraid that there would be parades right through January and February, but good sense prevails in Decorah. Maybe at the last minute, but it prevails.

Everyone loves a parade, but this parade, this entrance into Jerusalem with a donkey, coats on the road, waving palm branches and shouts of Hosanna! is something different.

Some folks loved this parade. The crowd loved it. The blind and the lame loved it. They followed Jesus right into the Temple and Jesus cured them. The children loved this parade. No one threw any candy but they loved it anyway. They really got into shouting Hosanna! and they also followed Jesus into the Temple. They kept shouting Hosanna!–an Aramaic word that means “Save!” or “Help!” They shouted “Hosanna to the Son of David!” They kept it up long after the parade was over. They were having a good time.

But not everyone loved this parade. Jesus had no permit for the parade. He hadn’t talked to law enforcement or City Hall or anyone else to ask permission to have a parade. The whole city was in turmoil. Then as now there were folks who didn’t like turmoil, especially turmoil of the unauthorized kind. They asked, “Who is this?” (Well, at least that’s the gist of what they asked. There might have been some editing.) “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee,” was their answer.

Uh oh. “The prophet Jesus,” is it? That could mean trouble. Prophets are unpredictable. No, that’s not exactly true. No, prophets predictably speak in ways that make people uncomfortable. They have little sense of propriety. They crash parties. They make scenes. They stir up crowds. They annoy the people who like things the way they are.

Prophets act like Jesus acted. This is why I never took seriously the fad of a few years ago of wearing bracelets and necklaces with the letters “WWJD,” (What would Jesus do?). That’s because the people who most wanted people to wear these bracelets seemed to me to be the people least likely to have approved of what Jesus actually did, and still less likely to approve of other people doing what he did.

Here’s what he did: He led the crowd into the outer court of the Temple and he disrupted the smooth flow of the business of religion. You probably know the drill. The Torah required sacrificial animals that were perfect specimens, animals with no deformities, scars or sores. It wasn’t right to fulfill your obligations to God with animals that you didn’t want and couldn’t sell anyway; no a sacrifice, if it’s really a sacrifice, needs to be of your best. And it was hard to travel from, say, Nazareth in Galilee with an animal, a yearling lamb, say and arrive in Jerusalem with the lamb still unblemished.

So, in the court of the Temple you could buy unblemished animals right on the spot. It was a service to pilgrims and a source of revenue to the Temple, especially during the major festivals, like Passover.

Now, to buy these animals you couldn’t use ordinary currency. The ordinary currency was Roman and Roman currency had images of the emperor stamped into them; Roman money was widely believed to be idolatrous in and of itself, no matter the intention of the one who used it. It might be okay for daily buying and selling, but it simply wouldn’t do for use even in the outer court of the Temple. So, in the court of the Temple you could exchange ordinary money for the shekels that you needed to buy the animals you needed for your sacrifice. It was another service that the Temple provided for pilgrims and tourists and, again, a source of revenue.

These businessmen were doing a brisk business. After all, it was just days before Passover. The city was packed with pilgrims, each one of whom would want to make offer a sacrifice for the things that everyone, of whatever religion, prays for: good crops, fertile marriages, healthy children, and freedom from disease.

So Jesus, “the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee,” came into the Temple with the parts of the crowd that wanted to see what would happen next. He marched up to the tables of the money changers and overturned them, scattering coins of all sorts on the ground. He knocked over the chairs that the sellers of animals were sitting on. (I don’t even know whether he did this while the sellers were still sitting on them.) He let the pigeons loose; he drove out the lambs and goats. You can imagine the scene: tables overturned, merchants shouting and shaking their fists, pigeons flying around trying avoid recapture, lambs and goats bleating and looking for a way through the crowd, and children shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

If the turmoil in the city outside the outer court of the Temple was bad, this was far worse. This was turmoil at the very center of the ideological world of Roman Judea. If God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, as the one percent always seems to believe, it was because God lived in the Temple and the Temple functioned smoothly. It functioned smoothly, that is, until Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee showed up.

This parade, Jesus’s actions in the Temple court, indeed, everything that Jesus did during this time in Jerusalem had two effects. It caused sparks of hope to burst into flame in the hearts of some so that they shouted Hosanna. Among these were the blind, the lame and the children.

It caused the ones who liked things just fine they way they were to become angry so that they wanted Jesus dead. Among these were the Romans, their collaborators among the Jewish people, and, of course, the Chamber of Commerce.

None of this was a surprise to Jesus, not because his divinity gave him perfect knowledge of the future, but because this is what he had come to Jerusalem to do. He came to pick a fight, to draw a line between cynicism and hope, between poverty and privilege, between oppression and justice. He knew that people would make choices. Some would welcome a new hope for justice; others would cynically cling to their privilege. This is the work of a prophet. And that’s what he was.

Jesus has found the sweet spot and preachers, when we step into the pulpit and we ask “What would Jesus do?” look for that sweet spot, too. We hope when they hear what we say, that outsiders, the oppressed, the blind, the lame and children will rediscover hope and be moved to shout Hosanna! We also expect that some will get angry and want to string us up. When both of those things happen, we know we have found the sweet spot.

It’s true for the whole church. If our good news doesn’t cause some–the ones you’d least expect–to shout Hosanna and wave palm branches, our good news isn’t good enough. If our good news doesn’t cause others to wish for our destruction, our good news isn’t good enough. When there are some folks shouting Hosanna and others muttering under their breath, then we know we’re on to something that Jesus would have recognized, something that Jesus would have done, something that might be a place where new life might be found. It could happen today, perhaps, next week or sometime next year; but, whenever and wherever it happens, it will be Easter.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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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