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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It's About the Money (Matthew 18:21-35; 1st Sunday in Lent; February 22, 2015)

It's About the Money

Matthew 18:21-35
1st Sunday in Lent
February 22, 2015

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

There are a lot of things we can talk about in church. We can talk about the weather. We can talk about our families. We can talk about our health. We can even talk about how the weather has affected our family's health. We can even talk about politics and sex. The one thing we can't talk about is money.

Which is too bad, really, because a lot of life is about money. That's why Jesus talked so much about it, maybe more about it than about anything else. So by not talking about it we leave out a lot of life and a lot of what Jesus has to say.

Based on past experience, I can virtually guarantee that all I have to do is to mention money a couple of times over the course of two or three months and there will be murmurs of complaint—“All he ever talks about is money.”

We preachers have become so afraid of offending folks on the subject of money that we leave off speaking about it even when it's staring us right in the face. Take the parable in today's reading from Matthew for example.

It seems to be about forgiveness, certainly. And in part it is about forgiveness. The parable is introduced by a conversation about forgiveness. Peter wants to know if he should forgive his fellow Christian as many as seven times. Then Jesus tells this parable. So we know that Matthew suggests we read it as a parable about forgiveness. Okay.

But I must say first, we have an odd way of reading parables. We've done it for so long that we no longer regard it as strange, but consider this. Here's a parable that begins with the words, “Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle accounts, they brought to him a servant who owed him ten thousand bags of gold.” We read that parable and we never even consider the possibility that it might be about money. The accountant is there. The lender and debtor are there. The amount of money involved is stated. But we never consider that it might be about money. We go straight to the frame story and assume that it's about forgiveness and only forgiveness, which, of course, we imagine has nothing to do with money.

Doesn't that seem odd to you? I sure does to me. So I would like for us to hesitate, to linger for just a few minutes over this parable to see if it has anything to say about money, before going on to what we're already convinced—by 1800 years' habit—it's really about.

So there is a king and it is a day for settling accounts, or as it was called in Anglo-Saxon England, Doomsday. And well it might be called that for the first slave that the parable mentions. This slave owes ten thousand talents (or "bags of gold" as our version has it), and the king wants his money back. Understandably so. What has the slave done with it? We aren't told. But he doesn't have it.

So the king acts according to the usual procedure in such cases and orders the slave and his family and possessions sold. The slave begs for more time and the king replies in a way that no one would expect: he forgives, that is releases him from, the debt. The slave walks away free of any obligation.

The slave, whose bottom line has just improved immensely and who should be feeling pretty good about the universe, meets another slave who owes him money and the same scene is played out again, for much lower stakes. But the debt-free slave does not share his good fortune, nor does he hear the cries of his fellow slave and has him and his family and possessions sold and he has him confined to debtors' prison until the debt should be discharged.

Slaves had little power of their own. They were unable to deal directly with this stingy fellow, so they complained to the king who had the slave turned over to the torturers.

To understand what is happening here, it's important to remember how parables work. They are drawn from social or natural scenes that would be familiar to the hearer. And certainly debt was a familiar part of the social landscape of Jesus' day. Because money was scarce and because taxes were paid in money, most people had to go into debt to pay their taxes, securing their loans with their land. This would work in good years, but bad years would come and, unable to pay off their loans, these folks would be forced off their land. There is some evidence that many of Jesus' followers were drawn from these displaced peasants. They understood debt. The terrible collection techniques, too, would have been all too familiar. Having to sell one's own children to stay afloat financially was common.

Parables are drawn from familiar scenes, but then there is a twist that causes us to question our assumptions, to see things in a new way. Often that takes the form of some absurd element introduced into the parable alongside the familiar. Shepherds, for example, do not leave their sheep and go looking for strays—that's what makes the parable of the lost sheep so powerful.

Here the strange element is the first debt: ten thousand talents. If you're like me, you have no idea of what kind of money we're talking about here unless you look it up. So that's what I did. A talent is a thousand denarii. Well, that's nice, but not too helpful, since I don't know right off the top of my head what a denarius is either. So I looked that up, too. A denarius was a coin that was worth the wages that a laborer would earn in a day, say, in modern equivalents, about fifty dollars. So a talent was worth about $50,000. And ten thousand talents? $500,000,000.

That's a pretty good sized chunk of change, by our standards at least. But that isn't the half of it. The Roman Empire was what economists describe as vastly under-capitalized. Money was scarce. Ten thousand talents was starting to approach the entire annual tax revenues of a small province, say Judea. So we have a king who has loaned his slave money amounting to the equivalent of, say, the annual tax revenues of the state of Iowa.

It's too big to be believable. Kings didn't have that kind of money and, if they did they certainly didn't loan it to a slave. If that weren't strange enough, the king forgives the debt, simply writes it off because of what? because the slave begs? Can you imagine the bank doing that because you couldn't pay a mortgage or car payment?

The parable challenges our thinking. It invites us to imagine something nearly unimaginable: life without debt. It's almost unthinkable. At the end of 2014, Americans owed over 800 billion dollars in credit card debt. That's actually up three percent in the last year. Even more staggering is that Americans owe 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt.¹ This is money borrowed against future earnings that may or may not ever happen, since nearly 44% of college graduates are underemployed, many because they have massive student loan debt to pay.²

The parable asks us to imagine life without any of that. Imagine a life without being indebted. A life free from the obligation to pay, or else. Imagine a life in which we didn't work for the bank, to discharge a debt, but because there is meaningful work to do that puts our best talents to work. Imagine a life in which our behavior toward each other was not driven by debt but by love. Imagine a life without debt.

Imagine a world without debt. We might be able to dream it, but it's hard to imagine.

The first slave had an invitation to do just that. The king erased his debt, gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card so that he could leave, not just his own debts, but the entire debt system behind. And instead of taking the king up on that offer, the slave figured that he had advanced within the system and he could now make it work to his advantage. So when he ran into the fellow who owed him money, he pressed his advantage within the system. And so, naturally enough, the king concluded that he didn't really want to be debt free, that is free of the debt system, so he put him back into the system and packed him off to the torturers.

The slave can either live in the debt system or not. It's true for us as well. We can either live in the debt system or not. What we we can't do is have it both ways, claiming freedom for ourselves and laying an obligation on others.

There is evidence that this was real for the early church. It wasn't at all uncommon for a church to buy a slave's freedom. Slaves often became slaves because of debt. The church operated a debtor's safety net to rescue those whose lives were being destroyed by the debt system.

Now we know this is a parable about forgiveness. The context tells us that. And that's what we've always thought, anyway. What reading the parable on its own terms has let us do is to see that the parable sets forgiveness within a framework of freedom from the debt system.

Have you noticed how much of the language around forgiveness is financial language? Someone has done me wrong, so they owe me. And I can settle accounts. I can pay them back, maybe even with interest.

We even think that God plays that game. How many of us, I wonder, have pictured the book of life at the last judgment as a ledger?

It's clear from what Jesus tells Peter that we are to forgive each other, if for no other reason than because we have been forgiven ourselves. But if we put it like this, "Because God has forgiven us, we owe it to God to forgive each other," we're still in the debt system. Jesus invites us to step out of it altogether. We forgive because, having been freed from the debt system, we are no longer able not to forgive each other—we're living under an entirely different system.

Jesus certainly preached forgiveness, but forgiveness was part of a much broader theme of debt relief of all kinds. Over the course of centuries we have diminished Jesus' teaching. Maybe it's because we wanted rich donors in the church and rich donors don't like the idea of debt relief and we were afraid we'd scare them off. Maybe it's because the church is run by us middle class folk, and we like the idea of social relations based on contracts and obligations. Maybe we just can't believe that Jesus meant what he said and God dreams of our freedom from debt, not only as an obligation but also way of living in the universe.

That's a shame, really, because what Jesus is offering is freedom. That freedom is about a lot of things. It's about peace within our relationships. It's about reconciliation. It's about freedom from our own past and its pains and failures. But it's also about our lives in the material world. It's about why we do what we do, and, yes, it is about the money.

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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.

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1. Chen, Tim. “American Household Credit Card Debt Statistics: 2014 - NerdWallet.” Cited 19 February 2015. Online: http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-credit-card-debt-household/.↩

2. Bowyer, Chris. “Overqualified and Underemployed: The Job Market Waiting for Graduates.” Cited 19 February 2015. Online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thecollegebubble/2014/08/15/overqualified-and-underemployed-the-job-market-waiting-for-graduates/.↩

The Choice (Matthew 16:24-17:8; Transfiguration; February 15, 2015)

The Choice

Matthew 16:24-17:8
Transfiguration
February 15, 2015

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

This is a hard text. We can see that it was hard for the disciples and it's hard for us. For one thing, the text is relentlessly political. The story is set in the sight of Caesarea Philippi, a Greco-Roman city built by Herod the Great in honor of the emperor. It embodied in its stones all of the things Jews hated about the Roman occupation. Jewish wealth was squeezed from Jewish peasants and artisans, taken to Caesarea Philippi where it disappeared and was used to fund Jewish oppression.

Roman troops were stationed at Caesarea Philippi and the local population had to provide them with food, so peasants and artisans were squeezed some more.

A Greco-Roman city attracted, not surprisingly, Greeks and Romans as well as other pagans with their demands for unclean foods, their loose morals, and their polluting idols and temples.

It was in this space, charged with political tension, that Jesus posed the question to his disciples, "Who do people say the Human One is?" The answers that he got in return were: John the Baptist, Elijah, and Jeremiah.

Each of these people had famously meddled in royal politics in God's name. Each of them had suffered the wrath of a king. Each of them had refused to yield.

Then Jesus asked them who they thought he was and Peter the Impetuous said what they all were thinking: "You are the Christ," that is, God's anointed. There had been others with the title of "anointed" and the one thing these figures all had in common was that they were all kings, from Saul and David through Cyrus, the Persian emperor who overthrew Babylon and let exiled Jews return to Judea. Peter said this in the shadow of the city that projected Roman political and economic power in Roman Palestine. If anyone had overheard, Peter would have been arrested, tried, and executed for treason, a political crime. And Jesus agreed with him.

And, speaking of execution, when Jesus describes his own future, he sees that he will be crucified, a form of punishment used by the Romans for those who resisted Roman authority.

Peter, as we know, was shocked because he could not imagine that, in a showdown between the emperor and God's anointed, it would be God's anointed who would be put to death. Peter was wrong about that, not because Jesus believed that religion and politics do not mix, but because he misunderstood how power worked in the religion of Jesus. Jesus' strategy was not to avoid politics, but instead to make a show of how theologically bankrupt the Roman regime really was. This strategy required that Jesus provoke a violent response from Rome to show that Roman power had nothing to do with justice--as it claimed-- and, therefore, that Roman power was illegitimate even on its own terms.

Every political system-- ours no less than the Romans-- has a theology. There can be no separation of politics and religion because politics always has its own religion. As someone who values the separation of church and state, I get really uncomfortable when I hear someone talking the way I have been talking. So you can imagine how uncomfortable I am that I'm the one who is talking like this! So, Jesus is set on a course that will trigger an accusation of treason and its associated punishment. That's bad.

But it gets worse: Jesus requires of his followers that they, too, will set their lives on a collision course with the reigning regime, a course that will trigger the regime's response. "Live your lives so that you risk crucifixion," Jesus told his would-be disciples. And, with shaking knees and sweating palms, they did just that.

But that's not what we want. So, we do what we do. We set about making this text not say what it says. We make it say something else instead. We say of something, "It's my cross to bear," something annoying, like a snoring spouse, or even something painful, like an arthritic knee or chronic headaches. Make no mistake, some of us really do struggle with pain that can't be helped, real suffering that may call us to live into it with hope and real courage. But that's not what Jesus means when he says that we must take up our cross if we want to follow him. Jesus means that, in the confrontation between God's dream and the way things are, we place ourselves on the side of God's dream, even if we have to do it with shaking knees and sweating palms.

Of course we'd rather avoid that if we can, so we imagine that Jesus' dramatic words are only for the religious superstars, the occasional martyr, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Oscar Romero, people who insisted on God's dream so loudly, so persistently, and, above all, so publicly, that the regime had no choice but to kill them. But I'm not so sure we can wiggle out of it so easily.

On Wednesday evening Carol dragged me-- rather willingly, actually-- to hear Michel Martin speak at Luther College. Martin is an African-American journalist. She's also a woman, in case you thought that maybe she was a man from France. She works for NPR and used to be the host of Tell Me More, now, alas, canceled, one of the worst programming decisions NPR has ever made. She talked about race and gender and how social change is happening all the time, and how we are a part of it and that our daily decisions hinder it or help it along.

After about forty minutes, she finished her prepared remarks and there was time for questions. A brave student was among the questioners. She began by observing that other speakers at Luther on the subject of race had been activists who had left the impression that college students need to drop their plans-- and maybe even drop out-- to do "activist-y" things instead. But, she noted that it looked like Michel Martin had been able to be a positive part of social change and still have a career as well as a life.

Ms. Martin's response was that life gives us all sorts of chances to be on the right side. We don't really have to seek them out: they'll come to us. She recounted an experience she had while working for ABC early in her career. She and a crew were sent to interview a boy who had been horribly abused by his parents by being chained in the basement of his family's home. He had only been discovered because his older sister had broken the family rules and had brought home a friend who told her father who happened to be a deputy sheriff who investigated and so the parents were arrested and the boy's life was saved. Martin arrived with her crew at the grandparents' house where the children were staying. The camera was set up and the boy was mic-ed. She was ready to start the interview when she noticed that he was shaking like a leaf. She decided in that moment that she was not going to force this child to re-experience the trauma of his abuse for the sake of a news story. She said, "We're done. We're not going to do this. Go play with your friends."

In the confrontation between God's dream and the world as it is, she took her stand with God's dream against the regime that told her to get the story at any cost. The regime has ways of fighting back, of course. Her producer was furious. She expected to be fired, to have to find a new job, maybe even a new career: crucifixion in one of its modern forms.

It happens to all of us, to each of us. We hear a friend insult someone by saying, "That's so gay!" We can let it go. We can pretend we didn't hear it or that it doesn't do any real harm. Or we can face it head on. We can speak up and disown that sort of gay-bating insult. There is a risk, of course. The regime of homophobia has its own forms of crucifixion and we may lose a friend.

An employer may require us to look the other way when they do something illegal. And then we have a choice. We can go along, feeling badly about it, maybe. Or we can face it head on. We can refuse to go along, or even report it to the authorities. But that may come with its own costs, its own form of crucifixion.

Our lives are full of chances to stake our stand with God's dream or not, to stand with the powerless, the disadvantaged, the excluded, and the spat upon, or not. We can stand with God's dream or we can stand with the way things are. If we stand with the way things are, then we'll probably get along in the world. We'll keep our friends and our jobs. If we stand with God's dream, though, we may pay a price, a big one, maybe. But we'll be following in Jesus' footsteps from Caesarea Philippi, to the mountaintop, to Jerusalem, to the cross, and to the tomb and beyond. It is after all God's dream and while is is a long time in coming, it will not fail, and, if we choose it, neither will we.

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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.

Anxiety with a Side of Fear (Matthew 6:25-34; Epiphany 3a; February 1, 2015)

Anxiety with a Side of Fear

Matthew 6:25-34
Epiphany 3a
February 1, 2015

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

Being in a room with a crying baby is hard, especially a baby that can't be comforted. Or worse yet being on an airplane with one. The few times I've had that unhappy experience I could feel the blood pressure of every passenger going up.

I imagine that if there's anything worse than being with a crying baby it's being the crying baby. Babies have little ability to tell the adults around them what they need. They just cry. I say they have little ability, but that's more than none at all. Parents learn to tell the difference between the "I'm hungry, feed me" cry and the "I'm feeling scared, hold me" cry. And some parents have learned to use some very basic American Sign Language to talk to and listen to their babies. But even so, babies have a hard time telling us what they want and need.

So they resort to telling us loudly that they are unhappy--they have unmet needs--and they let us figure out just what it is they want. We human beings seem to be hard-wired for it: to figure out what babies need and to meet that need. It's a good thing, too, because human babies are absolutely helpless. Fawns are born and a few minutes later they wobble to their feet. Eaglets batter their way out of their eggs and are soon jostling their siblings to get first crack at supper. Human babies cry to survive. Their ability to make us anxious by crying is a survival skill. Our anxious response to babies who cry means that our little band of humans will survive and replace itself.

The psychiatrist Erik Erikson that we grow through a number of predictable life stages, each having to do with meeting a basic challenge of being human. In the first two years of our lives the basic question that we confront is "What kind of universe is this? Will anyone or anything even notice that I am here? Is it the kind of place where I can live? Will it meet my basic needs?"

Of course we don't do this in so many words. But we do come to have a sense of an answer to those questions by the time we are two or so. Most of us had our basic needs met more or less well enough. We were fed often enough when we were hungry, we were held often enough when we were lonely or scared, the people around us paid us enough attention. We have a basic sense of trust and hope.

At the same time, the universe doesn't exist simply to give us what we want. There were times when even what we needed was slow in coming, even when we were a year old and a lot cuter than we are now. So the sense of the universe we tend to have is that it is mostly trustworthy. Our sense is that our needs will be met most of the time. We matter some to the universe. But, we have some anxiety. Some of us have more and some less, but all of us have some.

That's not a bad thing. A little anxiety keeps us on our toes. It helps us keep an eye out for stalking lions and other dangers that might be lurking about.

And that was fine until some local tough guy got the idea into his head that he could use our anxiety and decided to start calling himself a king. He taught us to worry about the tough guy from the next town. In the meantime the tough guy in the next town was telling his people the same thing. The king's arguments became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our anxiety about the universe is a spark that is always ready to be fanned into a flame. People seeking power have always understood this. In the twentieth century until the advertising industry made a science of it.

If our anxiety is at its root a fear of not having our basic needs met, we would think that we wouldn't be very anxious. After all, we're warm even in the winter--at least when the heating system is working the way it should. We're well-fed--even too well-fed--and our refrigerators and cupboards have enough food in them to keep us alive for quite a few days. We can lock our doors at night and besides we mostly trust our neighbors, so we can sleep without having to keep one eye open. We should be carefree.

Guess what? The places where people suffer the most from anxiety are North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.¹ The places where we are the most anxious are the places where we have the least reason to fear not having the basic needs of life met. Pundits reacted to this discovery by blaming the precarious job market, the loss of control of daily life, and other factors.

Jesus directs our attention in a slightly different direction. He points to the natural world around us. What is the level of suffering from anxiety among day lilies and Queen Anne's lace? How much Xanax do goldfinches need in order to get through their day? When we look, of course, we find that very few day lilies and Queen Anne's lace have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. And, unless the ingredients list on the bird seed I buy is incomplete, very few goldfinches need any Xanax at all.

No, the lilies are beautiful and the goldfinches are carefree. So, Jesus says, we should be the same way.

So, have you ever tried telling yourself when you're feeling anxious, "Stop that! Be carefree. Be unconcerned."? How did that work for you? So now, not only am I anxious, but I'm feeling like a failure because I can't do what Jesus told me to do. Guilt on top of anxiety: that's just where I wanted to be.

No, we can't stop being anxious by willing it so. But that's not really where Jesus is telling us to look.

Our reading began with the word, therefore. Whenever a sentence starts with "therefore", we have a clue that we need to look at what came just before. Unfortunately, that sentence isn't in our reading. But I know because I have the whole Bible with me, so I can just look it up. And I'll even share it with you. And here's what Jesus said just before he said, "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

You cannot serve God and wealth. Notice that this isn't a command or even advice; it's a simple statement of fact. We cannot serve God and wealth. It can't be done. We can try. But then what we get is anxiety. The harder we try--as individuals, as families, as towns, as a nation, as a world--the harder we try to serve God and wealth, the more we get anxiety.

Therefore... Therefore don't worry about your life...

Better, but not there yet.

Jesus gives a lovely little list of things not to do. And we can't do them for the same reason that we can't not think of elephants when we're told not to. Our minds don't work that way. But, if I tell you to think about butterflies, there's a much better chance that you won't think about elephants.

So, Jesus, at the end of the list of things not to think about, tells us to set our sights on God and on God's justice. If we do that, if we give our lives to connecting with God and to seeking God's justice, to living justly ourselves, and to seeing that justice is done for others, then we see a way forward. It's not an easy way forward--in fact it will be hard--but it's possible, and that's all we're asking for.

This, then, is God's dream for us: that we might live our lives carefree and unconcerned, trusting in the goodness of God's world and of the God who gave it to us. We live into God's dream by seeking God and God's justice for ourselves, our neighbors, and our world.

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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.

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1. Pederson, Traci. “Anxiety More Common in the Western World, Depression in East.” Cited 31 January 2015. Online: http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/07/26/anxiety-more-common-in-the-western-world-depression-in-east/42253.html.↩

Seriously?! (Matthew 5:1-20; Epiphany 3a; January 25, 2015)

Seriously?!

Matthew 5:1-20
Epiphany 3a
January 25, 2015

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

We've been at the gospel of Matthew for some time now and we've slogged through some tough stuff. Any journey through the Bible and even through most of its books will sometimes have us hacking our way through the undergrowth of what seems to be an impenetrable forest. We can hardly see the trees, let alone the forest. It's hard to get our bearings.

How good it is, then, to stumble on a text like this morning's, most all of which is familiar and even beloved: The Beatitudes, parables of salt and light, and the warning about not loosening the Law. We know this stuff. Some of us even memorized some of it. It's known well enough that it can even be spoofed. In the version of the Sermon on the Mount in Monty Python's Life of Brian Brian is preaching to a crowd who can't hear him very well. "What did he say?"

I think it was "Blessed are the cheesemakers".
Aha, what's so special about the cheesemakers?
Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.¹

So, this morning we'll visit this early part of the Sermon on the Mount and see what it might have to say to us.

One of the things that we run into right away is the phrase the "kingdom of heaven". It pops up five times in these twenty verses, thirty-two times in the whole gospel and nowhere else in the Bible. The phrase belongs to Matthew and no one else. Let's see if we can get a handle on it.

As we know Matthew, Mark, and Luke have many passages in common. In the places where Matthew has "kingdom of heaven", the parallels in Mark and Luke have "kingdom of God". Why does Matthew seem reluctant to use "kingdom of God" very often?

Well, when we read Matthew carefully, we can see that it was probably written for a partly-Jewish readership. Already in Jesus' day, the Jewish people had mostly stopped saying God's name. I suspect it was partly out of reverence and partly out of fear that they might misuse the sacred name. So, instead of saying Yahweh, they said Adonai, which means "Lord". We know that Jesus told people not to swear by heaven, because it is God's throne, or by earth, because it is God's footstool. This gives us a hint that people were substituting heaven or earth for God in their oaths, and that gives us a clue about what Matthew is doing in using the phrase "kingdom of heaven" instead of "kingdom of God". He is either reluctant to speak so directly of God himself or he is respecting the sensibilities of his readers.

That leaves the rest of the phrase, the part that we translate as "kingdom". A number of scholars note that there are many places in Matthew and through the New Testament where the propaganda of the Roman Empire is countered point for point. They also note that in Greek there was no word for "empire" or "emperor". For both of these "kingdom" or "king" were used. The main idea of the phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" is God's kingdom or empire as opposed to that other empire, the one that has Caesar as its ruler.

But this doesn't mean that God's empire is simply Caesar's empire only with God in Caesar's place. God's empire doesn't work that way. Remember, Jesus told us, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave..."². "God's empire" is not simply the Roman Empire with God in charge in place of the emperor.

I think Matthew wrote his gospel so that we could begin to have some idea of what God's empire might look like. It certainly isn't like anything that we would call an empire or a kingdom. I've stumbled onto calling it "God's dream" and I think that will do as well as any translation. Matthew's gospel is about God's dream. It is an invitation to be a part of God's dream. So, as we move through the rest of Matthew between now and Easter, one of the questions we will bring to it each week is, "What is God's dream?" and "What does it mean for us to be a part of it?" Incidentally, if you're interested, this is another version of two different questions, "What is God's vision of the ministry of 1st United Methodist Church?" and "How can we embody that vision in our shared life?" The answers to the first set of questions are the answers to the second.

So what is God's dream like, according to the Beatitudes? What is life like living in God's dream? Well, it's not very much like the life under our current regime.

In the current regime, poverty of any kind is avoided and those who are poor are blamed for their poverty, and exploited. In God's dream the poor in spirit are the owners of that dream.

In the current regime, peacemakers are shouted down and ridiculed. In God's dream they are revered as God's children.

In the current regime, those who are hungry and thirsty for justice are dispised as ignorant of how the real world works. In God's dream, they will feast on justice.

In the current regime, we admire those who are famous for being well-known. We call them celebrities and we follow their love interests and their child-raising adventures. In God's dream, those people disappear into obscurity. Instead, those who are in exile because they love justice more than public opinion come home.

In the current regime, the popular kids are respected and imitated. In God's dream, no one will have ever heard of them. Instead, the ones who discover who God had called them to be and who lived that out, will be admired.

In God's dream, the things that our culture values, the things that we value, are given little thought. Instead values, things, and situations that we avoid are put on a pedestal.

What are we supposed to do with that? Jesus turns our world upside down. Jesus tells us to value what we despise and to despise what we value. I don't think that's putting it too harshly.

You can imagine that Christians over the years have resisted taking this sermon to heart, however much we have claimed to admire its sentiments. We have embroidered samplers with the Beatitudes. We have Precious Moments(r) versions of theme. We are fond of the sentiments of the Beatitudes. But that's the problmem isn't? They are sentimental, but not very realistic, are they? So we look for ways to let ourselves off the hook. Søren Kierkegaard put it best:

...[W]e Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand [the Bible] because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?³

I know a half a dozen intellectually respectable ways around the Sermon on the Mount and its harsh demand that we "pledge ourselves to act accordingly" and suffer the possibility or even the probability that our whole lives "will be ruined." But let me step around them and see what happens.

If I read the next few verses, the text itself coerces me:

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

"You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste..." How can it do that? Salt tastes salty. If it doesn't taste salty, it's not salt. Salt cannot lose its taste.

Precisely. Salt is what it is. So is light. Salt flavors and light lights. It's what they are. It's they do.

No, says Jesus, it's what we are. We are salt. We are light. It is only with the greatest and most foolish of efforts that we have been able to avoid tasting salty and avoid shedding our light.

This sermon, as most good sermon's do, invites us--or even forces us--into a choice. We can live out the values of the current regime. We can be full, comfortable, and respected. We can be full participants in the great competition for the limited goods that our regime offers. We can hold on to what we have.

Or we can live into God's dream. We can let our light shine. We can flavor the culture around us with the taste of God's dream of a banquet.

It's a simple choice, even if it's not an easy one. It's a costly choice, at least in terms of the things we have been taught to value. But the reward is that we get to be a part of God's dream, get to see it up close, get to see it come true.

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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.

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1. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, et al, Life of Brian (1979), accessed January 24, 2015 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/quotes.↩

2. Matthew 20:25-27, NRSV.↩

3. Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 201.↩