Reading Parables Otherwise: Tenant Farmers' Revolt (13th Sunday after Pentecost; Mark 12:1-9; September 3, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: Tenant Farmers' Revolt

13th Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 12:1-9
September 3, 2017

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

Roman Palestine was a powder keg with a fuse set. It featured an Empire determined to make the provinces there profitable. It featured a conquered people with a long memory of being the people of God's choice. The Romans were firmly convinced that it was the will of the gods that they rule the Mediterranean Sea basin and then some. Many of the conquered Jews were just as firmly convinced that it was the will of God that they rule themselves and that the rest of the world recognize their special status as those who bore the Torah--the way, the wisdom--of God. The Romans and their local collaborators were determined that the economy be converted to one based on the production of luxury goods. In pursuit of this goal they were forcing peasants off their small holdings and consolidating the little farming plots into plantations for the production of wine, olive oil, and dates, goods that fetched good prices in the major cities of the Empire. The ordinary folk were trying everything they could think of to stop this ancient version of neo-liberal globalization, with very little success.

The stage was set for a catastrophic collision, a slow-motion apocalypse, between the immovable object of a way of life that had persisted for centuries and the irresistible force of Roman military and economic might. The Jewish side of this confrontation was split among several parties.

On one end were the Herodians who had hitched their star to Herod's wagon and sought to be a part of the Romanization of Palestine. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" might have been their slogan.

More or less aligned with them were the Sadducees whose concerns revolved around the ritual life of the Jerusalem Temple. There was room for the Romans as long as the festivals could be kept and the sacrifices offered. And, of course, as long as they got a tenth of everything produced.

Toward the other end from the Herodians but toward the center were the Pharisees who put their emphasis on the assembly of the synagogue and on Jewish practice as the careful observance of the Torah to which they added the pursuit of justice as preached by the prophets. If there were an observant people among the remnant of Judah, God would safeguard them and eventually fulfill the promises of a land of their own and the restoration of David's kingdom.

I would say that Jesus' teaching suggests that he might have been found on the far end of the Pharisee movement.

Zealots were on the far end. They were convinced that God could be prompted to intervene if the people rose up and threw the Romans and their collaborators out of Judea. At least some of them could be compared to ISIS today. Far from fearing an apocalypse, they set out to provoke it.

Either as a part of the zealot movement or a separate movement were the sicarii, assassins who targeted collaborators and anyone else they didn't like.

Into this mix were stirred figures like John the Baptist and others who even styled themselves as messiahs, anointed by God to free God's people and lead them to new glory.

As the Romans built their empire they experienced a string of successes so complete that they had come to think of themselves as specially favored by the gods. Romans, after all, were the ones who had brought peace to the whole world. Who would not want to live under Roman governance?

When it turned out that many Jews did not want that, the Romans were confused and their attempts to pacify Palestine left them frustrated. They were frustrated and Jews were sullen and resentful. Every time Jews got agitated and unrest broke out, the Romans responded with military violence. Their use of clumsy violence based on their general ignorance of Judean culture and their invincible self-regard guaranteed that the people would continue to get agitated and restless more and more frequently.

Keeping a legion in Judea was expensive and the Romans were determined that Jews would pay for it. That meant higher taxes at precisely the time that ordinary people had fewer resources to pay those taxes.

It doesn't take much imagination to suppose that the people were ready to rebel. Add to that their conviction that God was on their side, and the many stories in their tradition of the weak overcoming the strong even in battle, and it is not hard to see that it would not take much to set off an explosive confrontation.

So Jesus told a story about a man who built a vineyard. Well, he didn't actually build it; his people built it. They built a fence around it, dug a wine pit to set up a press for the grapes, and constructed a tower. The landowner turned the management of the vineyard over to tenants and moved to Rome, Alexandria by Egypt, Antioch of Syria, Londinium, or maybe Chicago.

Here are familiar features: land that had been used for subsistence farming, to grow barley and wheat for peasant families, had been cleared of these less-profitable crops and consolidated into a vineyard to grow the strong, sweet wines the region was known for. Displaced peasants, no longer farming their own land, had become the care-takers for the land of a large land-owner, share-croppers. It was this sort of thing that made people's blood boil.

After the vines had been tended, the grapes picked and crushed, and the wine fermented, clarified, bottled, and sold--all by the tenants--the landowner sent a servant to collect his share. For whatever reason, the tenants decided that they could flout the landowner's demands. They roughed up the servant and sent him packing. The next servant they not only beat up, but insulted by striking him in the head. And so on until the landowner sent his own son. In reality I doubt it would have this far. The landowner would have written to the governor and the governor would have sent a detachment of legionaries and that would have been the end of the matter.

But the story says the landowner imagined that, while the tenants clearly despised and hated him, they would respect his son. Not so. They saw the son coming and they said to each other, "Here comes the heir. If we kill him, we'll be the heirs." These tenants were not too bright.

How will this work out for them? Will they end up with their own vineyard? Of course not! Will the landowner ignore this challenge to his power and authority? Of course not. He will either bring a legionary detachment or his own band of hired thugs. He will more than kill the tenants; he will "destroy" them. And he will make other arrangements for his vineyard. In other words, the violent resistance of the tenants will come to nothing.

And here, I think, is the point of the parable that Jesus told. However much we long for the fulfillment of God's dream, however much we can see the damage that is done when God's dream is delayed, however angry we can get when we see people and even the world hurt by those who oppose God's dream, violent resistance is not the solution.

Jesus, it seems was a pacifist. He may have been a pacifist on principle, but he was certainly what I'll call a strategic pacifist. He was a pacifist because violence doesn't work. It doesn't deliver what it promises.

When the tenants opt for violence, they play the Empire's game. The Romans knew all about violence. They reveled in it. They were good at it. They could deliver extraordinary, overwhelming amounts of applied violence anywhere in the Empire in a matter of days. To imagine that taking up arms against the Empire could lead to any end but defeat and death was as stupid as tenants imagining that they would inherit a vineyard if they killed the landowner's son.

As Jesus' followers our mission is to see God's dream as it emerges in the small places in our world and to open ample space in our own lives for its eruption in our hearts, minds, and actions. When it comes to nudging it along in our world, from this parable we learn that violence will not make it happen. "What will nudge God dream along?" you ask. I'm glad you asked that question. Next Sunday one of Jesus' parables will answer it as we consider the Parable of the Merciless Widow.

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Reading Parables Otherwise: Whistle-Blower (12th Sunday after Pentecost; Matthew 25:14-30; August 27, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: Whistle-Blower

12th Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 25:14-30
August 27, 2017

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

It's been a while since we've a crack at a parable, hasn't it? I came back from two week’s vacation ready to dive into this Parable of the Whistle-Blower, as I call it, when I realized that last Sunday would feature the Vacation Bible School celebration. Even if there were time, it would have been pretty jarring to go from VBS to "valuable coins" in the same service, especially since I always read the parables strangely.

But here we are, back on track. Next week we'll have the Parable of the Peasant Revolt and we'll finish the series on September 10th with the Parable of the Merciless Widow. The parables give us glimpses into God's Dream, what the Bible otherwise calls the Kingdom or Reign of God. I like "God's Dream" better because it doesn't distract us with all that talk about kings and kingdoms which are not part of our experience.

So let’s see what we have today.

The Parable of the Whistle-blower, as I call it, begins with a social situation that was certainly not unheard-of: A man wishes to go on a trip. He will be unable to supervise his own wealth while away from home and so he entrusts it to three servants--slaves, literally. In point of fact the rich seldom handled money themselves: it was unseemly. The whole point of being rich was not to have to work. Even at home, a rich person's wealth was managed for them by a slave or employee.

The wealth involved was large. A talent, you may remember (and if you do, you have a better memory than I do) was worth 6,000 denarii, the denarius in turn being the coin that was used to pay a day laborer for a day's work. If we figured this at the current minimum wage, a denarius would be worth about $58 and a talent about $348,000. Call it $350,000.

So the rich man entrusted one slave with $1,750,000, a second slave with $700,000, and the third slave with $350,000. These are unusually large amounts of money, especially when we consider that the wealth of the wealthy was typically invested in land rather than held as cash or even in the kind of investments we take for granted in our day.

But a master tasking a servant or slave with overseeing an investment was not unusual. Nor was it rare for a servant to ask for that investment in exchange for a share of the profits of a side business that the servant would run.

So far, there is nothing really strange about the arrangements.

The rich man left home; the servants invested their master's money. The first two doubled his investment. How they did this, the parable does not say, but we can make a pretty good guess. Increasing wealth was usually done in one of two ways: it was loaned at interest (a violation of the Torah) and/or used to buy out the small holdings of peasants (also a violation of the Torah). The most common and easiest way was to combine the two: lending money to peasants and then, when they are unable to pay, foreclosing on them and taking their land. This is most likely how the first two servants doubled their master's investment and most likely how the master had acquired this investment capital in the first place.

For whatever reason, the third servant opted for an investment strategy virtually guaranteed at least not to lose any money: he buried it in the ground.

The rich man was gone for a long time. When he came back, he called his slaves together and demanded an accounting. The first two servants reported that they had doubled his money. He was pleased and promised them promotions.

It didn't go so well with the third slave who had to confess that he had simply buried the talent and was only able to return the original money, but it was safe and sound and fully accounted for. The master was furious, took the third man's talent, gave it to the first servant, and threw the lazy slave out of the household.

In the traditional reading the master is taken as referring to God who has entrusted his servants--us, that is--with various resources. God seems to be absent but nonetheless expects us to put those resources to good use so that when God returns, we will be able to give a good accounting of what we have done with them. For most of us through history these resources have not been financial. But all of us, no matter how poor, have resources in the form of abilities that we can develop and use faithfully. In fact, the English word "talent" that comes directly from the Greek of this parable is the word that we use to name these resources. We must not bury our abilities, our talents, but make full use of them. Otherwise it’s the "outer darkness" for us.

This, then, in the traditional reading, is a stewardship text. I've used it myself that way, sometimes on Consecration Sunday itself.

But in the last few years, I must confess, I have come to have my doubts.

I understand the part about using our God-given abilities. There are certainly those who do and those who don't. But what am I to make of the part where the master tells the third slave that he should have turned his coin over to the bankers so that he could get it back with interest? How do I turn over a gift for languages to the bankers? How does that work with anything other than money?

That's one question. Another is how do I explain the description of the master that the third slave utters: "You are a hard man. You let other people do all the work and you take the profits"? Does he say this because he is an "evil and lazy servant"? Or is this charge--unanswered in the parable--basically true?

And in what way can we say that the power figure in the parable, the rich man, resembles what we know of God? Is it fair to say that we know God to be "hard"? Is it fair to say that God contributes nothing to the production of wealth but keeps it all? Isn't it just the opposite? Hasn't God placed the world in our hands, sustaining and upholding it, while we--humanity as a whole, that is--enjoy the result not only of our work but of God's? And doesn't God have a tendency to forgive a little too easily for our tastes?

Once again, I have been forced to read this parable about a rich man who turned over various sums of money to his slaves as a story about a rich man who turned over sums of money to his slaves. The parable is about money, money in motion, specifically. The parable is about economics, about how money moves, about who controls its movements,
and about who benefits from that motion.

In Jesus' world and in ours the fact that there is a rich man seems natural enough. No one questions how he became rich; he is just rich. He takes some of his money and turns it over to three servants for them to invest and oversee. This, too, seems natural. It's his money; he can do whatever he wants with it. It seems natural, too, for someone with money to seek to become even richer. The first two slaves invest the money. That, too, seems quite natural.

But this is the weak point in every economy, a place where people must see what is not there and fail to see what plainly is. Economies are human constructions but they have to appear to be natural. Arrangements of power and wealth have to appear natural. They have to appear right. If someone is rich, people must look at them and say that this is right and proper. If someone is poor, people must also see that as right and proper. People have to be seen to have what they deserve. When things in an economy seem strange or even unfair, people must respond with, "Well, that's just how it is." They cannot be allowed to imagine that it is only arbitrarily what it is and could just as easily be something else. If an economy does not appear to be a fact of nature, like gravity or the rotation of the earth, then the losers in the economy will stop thinking of themselves as losers and start thinking of themselves as oppressed and aggrieved victims. They will stop thinking of that economy's winners as deserving their reward and start thinking of them as exploiters who have rigged the system.

What keeps the rich and powerful awake at night is the knowledge that they are vastly outnumbered. Their greatest fear is that the poor and powerless will figure this out. They devote a great deal of effort to keeping this from happening. They dangle promises of promotion. They distract with entertainments. They shift the blame to convenient scapegoats. They maintain careful control over the the pageantry of power. They use monuments and memorials--propaganda in marble and concrete--to celebrate the naturalness of their power. And they hope no one sees through it all.

And along comes our third servant, the one who refused to invest the coin. When the time for an accounting came, he turned the tables on his master. He, the slave, rendered judgment on his rich master: "You are a hard man. You don't do the work, but you take the wealth." You give your work to other people and you take the profits they make as your own. You are lazy and yet you are rich. Here is your money, safe and sound.

The rich man did what anyone does who is caught out with no defense. He made a counter-accusation. He accused his servant of being lazy and wicked. The rich always accuse the poor of being lazy. If anything they are the ones guilty of this, but they say this to restore the naturalness of the economy from which they benefit. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," they insist.

The third slave has unmasked the system. He has shown it for the unjust arrangement that it is. He told the truth. He blew the whistle. He was afraid, of course. He knew that his master could destroy him. And in the end that is what happened. But he told the truth anyway.

So what is God's dream like? Jesus tells us it is like this parable. Now we could certainly say that the parable teaches us that it is a bad idea to tell the truth about powerful people. They have ways of making our lives miserable and do not take kindly to being called out. We could say that the parable teaches us that smart people go along to get along and that bucking the system is no way to get ahead.

Certainly the greatest rewards seem to go to the people who are willing to turn a blind eye to the Torah demands of justice and look for the biggest profits they can find. On the basis of what I know about the God of the covenant, the God of the Torah, the God of Jesus, I don't think that this everyone-for-themselves pursuit of profit is God's dream for us. That rules out the behavior rich man and the actions of the first two servants.

That leaves us with the third servant. He shook in his sandals, but he told the truth and he refused to go along. So that must be God's dream.

An economy like the economy of Roman Palestine or an economy like ours, where those who produce the real wealth share less and less of it and the powerful use their power to become rich and their wealth to become more powerful, can come to seem like a fact of nature that can be neither questioned nor challenged. An economy can come to feel like an "iron cage" with no way out and no hope of a more humane life. But God's dream is still at work, still "at hand" as Mark's Jesus has it. A third servant sees through the lies, sees the man behind the curtain in spite of all the distraction. A third servant refuses to do what he is supposed to do. A third servant tells the truth. And the spell is broken.

And when we awaken from the spell we will discover that the master's house was in fact a kind of prison. The "outer darkness" we feared so much only seemed to be dark because of the spell we were under. It isn't dark at all and it is filled with good people like our friend the third servant and other whistle-blowers: the prophets who saw and spoke the truth and Jesus the most notorious whistle-blower of them all. And best of all, this place at the margins, outside of the good graces of the rich and powerful of this world, is the place where God has made a home and we are welcome there.

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.

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Disrespected Worker (8th Sunday after Pentecost; Matthew 20:1-16; July 30, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Disrespected Worker

8th Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 20:1-16
July 30, 2017

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

So far in this series we've had four examples of parables, four examples of my peculiar approach to reading them, born of frustration with traditional interpretations and my interaction with recent scholarship about the parables and about Jesus' ministry in general.

So far, here are the results: We had the parable of the impossible harvest in which the seed that fell into good soil yielded a hundred-fold harvest. God's dream doesn't look very likely, but it has a way of bearing unexpected fruit. Like the wild mustard God's dream wreaks havoc with the smooth operation of the world's domination system. The dream itself belongs to a God whose love is more than a little unbalanced. Part of that dream is for us to be freed from the oppressive debt system.

So far it hasn't been too hard to see how the parables could yield the results that I have found in them. But this week we run into a bit of a problem. That's not because the parable is hard to read, but because we are so accustomed to one way of reading it that any other way feels so wrong!

We are used to reading parables in a way that English teachers call allegorical. The parts of the parable are all supposed to stand for something else. In this case, and in any case where the parable has a character who is male and powerful, we assume that the powerful male character really stands for God. So the landowner--rich, and powerful, and male--in the story is God. The laborers hired at various times during the day are Christians who might have been Christians all their lives or might have become Christians late in life. In either case, those of us who have been at this Jesus-thing all our lives are not to feel resentful of those who become Christians late in life and then die and receive their reward after having worked as God's laborers for a few months or years while we have been at it all our lives. Or perhaps, the laborers hired early in the day are the Jewish Christians who had already been at work before they became Christians and those hired late in the day are the Gentile Christians converted from paganism and God-knows-what sort of lives. Jewish Christians in the community should not resent the Johnny-come-lately Gentile Christians. All of God's laborers will receive the same reward and should have equal status. God is generous and we shouldn't question God's arrangements.

This learning is transferable to other areas of life, too, and the parable becomes a moral lesson that, if heeded, will make Christians good, solid, docile citizens who cause no trouble.

If we think that this was what Jesus was trying to do, then the traditional reading of these parables might be the way to go.

But the evidence strongly suggests that Christians in the ancient world were not good, solid citizens. Christians were a constant pain in the backside, anything but docile, and caused no end of trouble for the authorities, whether they were the Jewish authorities of the synagogue and Temple or the Roman authorities of the Empire.

The problem as I see it begins with the assumption that the landowner is a God-figure. Why is this assumption made? The landowner is male and, in popular imagination, so is God. The landowner is powerful in a direct sort of way and, again in popular imagination, so is God.

But there the similarities end. For Jesus' hearers wealth was not evidence that a person was a faithful observer of the Torah and lived a moral and upright life. Quite the contrary. The assumption for them was that great wealth was automatically suspect, that it had been accumulated by ruthless practice, and by buying the justice system. Read the whole Bible carefully and we discover that rich people are not the good guys. There are some exceptions, but they are startling precisely because they are exceptions.

It is we modern Americans who have become so enamored of wealth that we assume that a wealthy person has done something right, so right that they deserve the wealth that they have. It is one of our blind spots, this adoration of the wealthy and aside from causing us to give far too much deference to the rich, it makes it harder to read the Bible.

No, in my reading, this is not a story about God's generosity and our patience. It is a story about a scornful rich man who shows contempt for his employees and about one of those employees who stands up for his own dignity.

The rich landowner and the hired day worker were certainly familiar figures to Jesus' audience. We have already described the landowner. The day worker deserves some attention, too. Nobody aspired to becoming a day worker. It was something that was forced onto people. This is how it happened.

Roman Palestine was being being gentrified. The land there, especially in the valleys, was useful for producing luxury goods: figs, dates, olive oil, and the strong, sweet wines that the region was known for. There was real money to be made in Palestine. The trouble was, then as in the recent past, the land was already occupied by peasants who owned a few acres to grow barley and some vegetables to support the families that lived on the land. Sheep were grazed on village common lands in the hills. It was a sustainable way of life and had been for centuries.

But no longer. The Romans looked for tax revenues to pay for the "peace" that they provided. The peasant economy was not based on the exchange of currency, so they often had to borrow money to pay their taxes. Combine that additional cost with a bad harvest or a string of them, and peasants would lose their land. Others were simply bought out. Farms were becoming plantations in the valleys. Subsistence farming was forced into the hills for smaller and smaller yields at the same time that food was becoming more costly because less land was being used to raise food crops.

When a peasant family lost its land, its members lost their social status. Unless they had a trade that they could sell, there was not much of a future for any of them. The women and children would likely be sold as slaves. The men had essentially two choices. One was to live the short and violent life of a bandit and either die by the sword or by crucifixion. The other was to become a day worker, selling the animal strength of their bodies. This was only a temporary stopping place in their long fall. Their daily wage was not a living wage. Their bodies would weaken. One day, even if jobs were available, they would be too weak to work. And then all that was left was begging and that was only a way to postpone by a few weeks or months a death by disease and starvation, the object of pity and disgust.

The worst of all of this was that a peasant who had lost his land, his dignity, his family, and his place in the community would find himself working for the rich scumbag who had pushed him out on the very land that he used to own and work with pride.

Now, of course, these two people never actually met face-to-face. This is where the parable went off the rail. A landowner never went to the town square to hire day workers. A landowner never paid the workers at the end of the day. The whole point of being a landowner was to have people to do the dirty work of running a business. There might have been two or three layers of people between the landowner and the day laborers who worked for him. The dirty work would be done by a steward or, more likely, a foreman. So the parable being told the way it is allows us to see the real relationship between two classes that the real world hid behind intermediaries.

A landowner, whose plantation produces wine for export, needed workers to harvest his grapes. This is where we should begin. He needed workers. He cannot harvest without them. No harvest, no wine. No wine, no money. No money, no comfy lifestyle. He needed workers. In a more just world this need of his for workers would have given the workers a little bargaining power. But it wasn't just world. Labor was plentiful. The peasant displacement program had seen to that.

There were lots of workers, so he went to the Day Laborer Hiring Area and recruited workers.

But he needed more. He had underestimated how much labor he could get from those he had hired, so he went back and hired more. And yet again, close to the end of the working day, he went back.

This time he begins by insulting them. "Why are you just standing around here doing nothing all day long?" They have not been working because they are lazy. Calling poor people lazy is not something invented in our day.

The first hint that things will not go smoothly comes when these laborers refused to accept the insult. "Because nobody has hired us," they answer and add, "you jerk" under their breath.

The landowner needed workers. So these, too, were hired.

At the end of the day it is time for these men to be paid. The Torah is quite clear about this. In this Christian nation we seem to think that it's perfectly okay to withhold someone's wages for a week or even two, but even this landowner can't get away with withholding wages overnight. Quitting time is the time to settle up.

So the landowner tells his manager to pay the workers, beginning with the last ones hired. Why the last ones first? So that everyone will see how much they get paid. Already the landowner's supposed generosity is called into question: if it were simply a matter of generosity, why arrange things so that all the workers will see how much the last men hired get?

He pays these last men hired a denarius each. That's the standard daily wage, and bears about the same relationship to a living wage as $7.25 an hour in our day. Then, when the manage got to those had been hired first, he paid them the same wage.

The first group of men thought, given what the workers who had only worked part of day had gotten, that they would get more than a denarius. When they didn't they complained.

Well, we say, it's the landowner's money. If he wants to spend it that way, he can. And that, in essence is what the landowner tells them. "Friend," he begins. Nothing is more ominous than being called "friend" by someone with power over you and in that tone of voice that tells you that you are about to be destroyed. "Take your money and go." (We should hear the menace in these words: the man who spoke up has worked his last day as a day laborer.) But how can we disagree with the landowner's argument? The money belongs to him. He can do as he pleases with it as long as he fulfills his contracts. So why are the men complaining?

That is precisely what we need to understand. Just as the landowner had insulted the last group of workers by accusing them of being lazy, so now he insults the first group of workers by turning the payment of wages, a process that should be governed by justice, into a matter of charity, governed instead by generosity. Why not pay them a just wage instead?

These laborers are men who have lost nearly everything: family, land, and respect in the community. All they have left is the strength of their bodies. Their physical labor and the recognition of the need for that labor and their deserving of its compensation are all their only source of dignity, the dignity that is the birthright of every human being. To dismiss that dignity and its call for fairness is to attack the last vestige of their worth as the sons of Adam. Even the oxen are treated with more dignity than that. Paying those who worked all day long the same amount as those who worked only an hour is an insult. It's the sort of insult that poor people endure all the time from the wealthy.

Most of the time they stay silent. After all, if they hope to be hired again, by this man or by any of his friends, it is wiser to smile and say, "Yes, boss. Thank you, boss." Go along to get along. But that's not what happened here. The disrespected workers resisted the contempt of the rich man, first in the Day Laborers Hiring Place and again in the pay line.

This parable began, as many of them do, with the words "God's dream is like..." We are left to decide what it is about the story that is like God's dream. The traditional reading suggests that we ought to be uncomplaining and docile in the face of apparent unfairness since it is all in the charge of a generous God. But another reading points at the workers who reject the indignities of an oppressive system, who speak the truth to power even at great expense, convinced that their God-given dignity authorizes their protest.

So where is God's dream at work? Is it visible in the rich scumbag who uses his wealth to get power and his power to get more wealth and who gets his kicks from insulting those who are weaker and poorer than he is? Or is God's dream visible in the refusal of the oppressed to accept their oppression as a God-given reality and instead demand justice even in the face of the swaggering threats of the rich?

Listen, all who have ears to hear.

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.

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Crazy Shepherd (4th Sunday after Pentecost; Luke 15:4-6; July 2, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Crazy Shepherd

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 15:4-6
July 2, 2017

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

I've been thinking about Chaplain Jim White. I served with him in Germany in the late 70s. He was good at what he did. He was a capable pastor and a good officer as well. I liked working for him and it seemed that the feeling went both ways: I was always his driver when we went on field exercises.

It was when were on those exercises that the good ol' boy from Shreveport, Louisiana, would come to the surface. He never went into the field without a supply of communion bourbon which he would share in the evenings. He chewed tobacco and liked being in the field where in his words, "all the world was a spittoon." The rest of us in the chaplains' office amended that to read, "all the world is a spittoon, except for the inside of our tent."

It was in the evenings, around the communion bourbon, that the stories would come out. Chaplain White had served with the 101st Airborne Division in Viet Nam in the north up near the demilitarized zone. My favorite story was about an order of communion wine. (There seems to be a theme here!) He was running low on communion wine so he put in an order for a case, twelve bottles. In typical military fashion the order was filled, but instead of a case of communion wine, he got a shipping container full of cases of communion wine. It wasn't one of those forty-foot containers. That would have been ridiculous. Still, he found himself in possession of 175 cases of communion wine.

He tried to give them back, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that. So he turned to Sgt. Jones, his battalion supply chief. Sgt. Jones recognized barter goods when he saw them, and made a trade for enough steak and lobster to serve surf 'n' turf to the whole battalion, courtesy of the battalion chaplain.

I loved his stories.

Of course, there were stories he didn't tell. He began his tour in Viet Nam going on patrol with the companies in his battalion, but the company commanders were being "protective" of him and he realized that this was endangering the troops so he stopped going on patrol. Instead, he spent a good deal of his time at the battalion aide station.

This was where casualties were first brought in and "triaged". I had heard that term triage before. But it was from Chaplain White that I learned what it really meant. It means to separate the injured into three categories. In the first category are those whose injuries are not life-threatening. They can wait for treatment. In the second category of the injured are those whose injuries are life-threatening and whose lives can be saved with timely treatment. There is a third category, one that no one talks about, composed of those who will die regardless of what treatment they are given.

As the injured came into the battalion aide station, they were evaluated and categorized. The first waited to be treated until the "rush" was over. The second category was treated immediately, stabilized, and sent on, often eventually, back to the United States. And the third category? Well, they were sent to what was called the "check out line." It did not make sense to spend valuable medical staff time treating men who were going to die no matter what you did. It just made good sense to use that valuable time to treat those who would actually be helped. Chaplain White went where he was needed most: to the checkout line to comfort the dying. He spent much of his tour cradling young men in his arms, telling them that they were going to be okay, as they cried for their mothers or their wives or sweethearts until they died.

He didn't tell us those stories. I only learned of them much later. There wasn't enough communion bourbon in the whole world to unseal those memories.

Triage, as actually practiced in the Viet Nam war sounds brutal, but it saved lives. Spending hours on a patient who was going to die no matter what was done while allowing four or five patients to die who could have been saved just isn't a way to save as many lives as possible. Triage is just a severe and gut-wrenching case of a rational cost/benefit analysis. How do we get the most good from the resources we have?

We use that principle all the time, often without even thinking about it. Let's say that you are in an auto accident. You are okay, but your car got banged up pretty badly. You call your insurance company and they send an adjuster. They look at your car and decide how much it will cost to repair. If the cost to repair it is more than the car is worth, your car goes to the checkout line. It is, as they say, "totaled" and the insurance company sends you a check. If the car is worth the expense and effort to repair, the insurance company authorizes the repair. The cost is compared to the benefit in order to make a decision about what to do.

Let's take another, happier example. Let's say that there is a ten-year-old girl who has been figure-skating since she was five. She's always seemed to have an aptitude for it, but lately she's really caught fire. She is highly motivated. She's doing very well in competition, often out-performing girls who are older and more experienced. It's time for a conversation with her coach. She says that to go to the next level she will need to have access to better coaching. The question now is, Does she have what it takes? Is it worth spending the extra money and turning the family's life upside down? If she is truly gifted, then it might be worth the expense, but if she's not, then no amount of money will get her to the Olympics. The ten-year-old might have a life-long hobby and might even make some money teaching at the elementary levels, but the dream of Olympic competition will, sooner or later, get sent to the checkout line.

You see how this works? The buyers of the house that used to be next door went through the same process. Does the benefit of having that house outweigh the cost of moving it and then updating and repairing it? Or would it make more sense to start from scratch and build it the way they want it from the ground up?

Doing a cost/benefit analysis is just being smart and sensible. That's always been true.

—

There was a shepherd who had a hundred sheep and one of them wandered off, as sheep will do. At some point the shepherd noticed that there no longer one hundred sheep; one of them was missing. Now, here's the question: Does it make sense to go after the lost sheep if doing that means leaving the ninety-nine sheep behind?

Now, the shepherd is not alone; he has his dogs. Sheep dogs are amazing animals. They use many of the skills that wild dogs use to find and kill game, but they don't kill or even injure the sheep. Instead they keep them together and protect them. Obviously, though, one stubborn sheep has gotten past them. Does the shepherd leave the ninety-nine sheep with his dogs--the same dogs who have already let one of them get away--or does the shepherd stay where he is and send a dog after the lost sheep instead. What's the smart and sensible thing to do?

If we hadn't been carefully trained by repetition to think that it makes sense to abandon the ninety-nine in search of the one, we would interrupt Jesus when he says, "Wouldn’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the pasture and search for the lost one until he finds it?," and we would say, "Of course we wouldn't! That's not the smart move at all! This shepherd is nuts, crazy! The percentage move is to send a dog. That's what we would do. That's the smart and sensible thing to do." And we would be right.

This is place where the story goes off the rails. And this is the place in the story that reveals God's dream. The shepherd in this story doesn't use a cost/benefit analysis in deciding about going after lost sheep. This shepherd doesn't triage his problems. This shepherd is crazy, but it's craziness skewed in favor of the lost sheep. Van Morrison kind of got it right: it's "love, love, love, love, crazy love" that motivates this shepherd.

That's what God's dream is like. In God's dream no one gets triaged. We might be off by ourselves thinking, No sane and sensible God would come looking for me. But we don't have a sane and sensible God. We have a crazy God who comes and finds us anyway.

Or, more likely, we might be one of the good ones who never wander off, never give God any trouble. One day we might notice that one of us is missing and we say, "Hey, where did Sven go? Isn't that just like him? It's a good thing we're not like that, because no sane and sensible God will leave us to go find someone who has wandered off." But God isn't a sane and sensible God. God is crazy. Our God is crazy stubborn and one more time we see the wisdom in Bishop Palmer's formulation of the Good News: God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.

In all the time I spent with Chaplain White I never once heard him even suggest that someone was beyond God's caring. From the private who just could not seem to get his act together to the upwardly mobile colonel, they were all within the circle of God's crazy love.

So you can imagine what it cost him to carry that crazy love to the checkout line, and tend to the soldiers who had been left to die, to the place where sane and sensible becomes a kind of physical and moral hell. Chaplain White bore the weight of that moral injury all his life. He numbed himself with bourbon that went far beyond the sacramental. His marriage crumbled. Eventually he succumbed to the weight of the unseen injuries he had suffered, a late but by no means the last American life lost in that war.

It was, I believe, the contradiction between God's dream and the reality he confronted at battalion aide that tore his heart in two. Rather than face this injury he consigned himself to the checkout line. This is the contradiction at the heart of the cross, in which the reality of the world attempts to put God's dream to death.

Eventually, we have to choose which of those two will have the allegiance of our hearts. Will it be the sane and sensible course or the path of a crazy God? We know that Jesus' choice was vindicated on the third day. Jesus was raised to new life. I didn't always know, as I do now, that Chaplain White who laid down his life for his friends and who died on account of the sin of the world, will be vindicated and raised to new life. And you and I with him. We, too, have the choice between the careful calculus of a dying world and the unbounded life of a God of crazy love.

I can't choose for you, but I can offer you something that might help. Here we have Christ's table, and it is a way of making visible in our midst God's crazy dream. There is a reason why we refuse to triage people at the table. No one can get along fine without it. No one is unreachable through the meal that is offered here. We are all hungry. We are all thirsty. We are all torn. We are all in need, in the same need, of the healing and nourishment here freely given.

When the crazy shepherd found the lost sheep, "he [was] thrilled and [placed] it on his shoulders. When he [arrived] home, he [called] together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost sheep.’" In God’s dream no one gets triaged.

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.

Hearing Parables Otherwise: The Noxious Weed (3rd Sunday after Pentecost; Mark 4:26-34; June 25, 2017)

Hearing Parables Otherwise: The Noxious Weed

3^rd Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 4:26-34
June 25, 2017

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

A parable takes the form of a story that is drawn from ordinary life, a scene that his hearers would recognize. This means that we have to know something about ordinary life in Jesus' time. The story does not exactly go as we (or his hearers) might think that it would,though. There is always something out of place and that something is always the key to understanding the parable. Parables are not allegories, stories in which the elements stand for something else, like a rich landowner standing for God.

The mustard seed is, says Jesus, the smallest of the seeds. This is an example of the common Hebrew practice of exaggeration. Not the smallest, precisely, but pretty small. Toss it on the ground and when it germinates and takes root it becomes, well, not the greatest of shrubs, but pretty darn big. From very small to very big. So big that the birds nest in it.

Birds like bushes. Perched inside them they can see predators coming. Predators can't really move very well through bushes, so the birds are a little safer there.

If you want to attract birds, good advice is to provide some bushes. We like birds. The more birds the better.

So here is the mustard seed. Plant it and it becomes a shelter for birds. Isn't that nice! This is the ordinary sense we make of this scene from ordinary life. The mustard bush is a good thing because the birds are a good thing.

Birds are a good thing, unless you happen to be a landowner in Roman Palestine. Remember that in those days in and that place they practiced what is called “scratch plowing.” First the seed was sown on the un-worked ground. Then a scratch plow was drug across the field to cover the seed with the thinnest of layers of dirt. They had no moldboard plows that dig deep and turn the earth over. They had no corn drills to make sure that the seeds were planted at the ideal depth, safely away from the birds.

So when the sower left the field, the birds came, picking through the dirt and eating the seeds.

And then later, toward harvest time, when the grain began to ripen, the birds would ravage the crop again.

The birds of the air were not the delight to the farmers of Jesus' day that they are to us. They were a nuisance; they were obnoxious pests.

And the mustard bushes that gave them shelter? The mustard bushes were noxious weeds that disrupted the economy of the great landowners, threatened the smooth operation of their great farms, slowed the amassing of wealth and power into the hands of the rich. If the Roman Empire was a machine that ran on grain; then the mustard was a plant that clogged the machine, adding friction to the system, slowing it down, even bringing it to a stop maybe.

Now let's hear the parable of the mustard seed again. “What is the reign of God—God's dream—like? How does it operate? What sort of metaphor can we use for it? It's like a mustard seed. The mustard seed is small. You can crush it between your fingers, grind it in a spice mill. A mustard seed doesn't look like much. But don't let looks deceive! The mustard seed grows into a large bush that gives shelter to the pesty birds. The mustard seed is a threat, a nuisance, a menace, even to the mighty. That's what the reign of God is like. It doesn't look like much. It's small. But its power to disrupt the smooth functioning of unjust systems is huge.”

To what ordinary object would Jesus compare the God’s dream today—an object that we would recognize without having to have an explanation of ancient farming practices before we understand? How about these?:

The reign of God is like a tiny pebble. It doesn't look like much, but it can bring the strongest man to a stop if it's in his shoe.

The reign of God is like a wasp. A wasp is a tiny insect that can be crushed with a fist. You wouldn't think that it's very strong. But introduce one into a crowded room and see how disruptive it can be!

The reign of God is like a grain of sand. It can be so small that you can hardly see it. It's entirely insignificant, unless it gets in your eye.

Or maybe it would be good to stick with the seedy theme of today's lesson: The God’s dream is like a thistle seed. It's only a tiny seed, but look what it can do to a nicely manicured lawn!

The reign of God—God's dream—works like the these little things. It's small to the point of insignificance. But give it any place at all to take root and it will become a royal pain, hurting feet that had other business, distracting attention, disrupting the smooth functioning of a world that is all-too-often a place of injustice, defiant in its insistence that it can order its life without regarding in the least the demands of the God of Jesus for justice and peace. The reign of God is a seed that grows into a noxious weed, giving aid and comfort to those who ask unsettling questions, providing cover for those who make the world uncomfortable and uneasy.

That's not exactly the way we're accustomed to reading that parable, is it?

To Jesus' hearers I suspect it was a word of encouragement—since they were peasants and workers. "Don't worry if you think that what you're up against is so much bigger than you are. Don't worry if the forces trying to dehumanize your life seem so much stronger than you are. Don't worry if the odds in your struggle for dignity seem overwhelming. Remember the mustard seed!"

I suppose it sounded like something else to the wealthy and powerful. "Don't imagine that your strength and your wealth and your power will mean that you can resist the reign of God. God's dream works in ways that you cannot stop. Remember the mustard seed!"

What we hear depends very much on where we stand.

With us, I think, or at least with me, it is rather more complicated. You and I are neither powerless nor among the powerful elite, but somewhere in the middle. Unlike the displaced peasants of Jesus' audience, we have enough at stake in the world as it is to be fearful of any great change. Unlike the elite among his hearers, we don't feel particularly powerful. We would like simply to go about living our lives, trying to be kind and considerate of each other, helping our children as we are able and—when they are older—as they permit it. We would like to mind our own business while other people mind theirs. We have found a comfortable place, and, God willing, we would like to stay in it.

But then we hear this story about a mustard seed which, as it turns out, is a call to see that the God of Jesus is at work in the world, yes, in part to uphold and sustain, but also to disturb, disrupt and dislocate. God's dream is like a thistle seed that can take root anywhere—even in the tiniest crack in the pavement. Give it time and it will take any structure and crumble it into dust.

If that is true, then to follow Jesus, to be his disciple, isn't simply about being kind and considerate; it's also about being servants of the disturbing, disrupting and dislocating God. It's about inciting disturbances in the smooth functioning of injustice. It's about watching over disruptions of the culture of war-making. It's about tending dislocations in the arrangements of power.

If it is true that the reign of God is like a seed that becomes a noxious weed, and if it is true that the Church is called to show the world what the God’s dream looks like, then I suggest that we are far too concerned with fitting into a well-manicured town. Not nearly enough powerful people say about us, Now there's a noxious weed if ever I saw one! We too little resemble a thistle or even a mustard plant. In short, we could be a lot more seedy and noxious and a lot less manicured and attractive.

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.