Life-or-death faith (or why Christianity is against comfort)

Scripture: Matthew 21:1-17

“That’s interesting.”

You know what that means. To the unsuspecting outsider it sounds like we’re curious about something, like we might even be intrigued, but we know better. To the Scandinavian, interesting is concerning, flavorful is sinful, and different is wrong. So we furrow our brows and say, “That’s interesting.” It’s cultural, it’s our heritage; we’re salt of the earth Scandinavians—we’re an ethnic church, and we like it that way.

Many of these are really positive traits. I tend to like people who are humble, who don’t brag about their achievements and just go about their business whether the world notices or not. I think that’s good. But Jesus’ Palm Sunday example is challenging for us because it shows a brazen disregard for convention. It is most definitely different and interesting, which puts us in a tough spot. Jesus was the Son of God. He took liberties we may have trouble observing, but the life that he lived is one we must observe and consider. Are we brazen enough? Is this faith we have life-and-death enough? Because it sure was for Jesus.

            Life-or-death. That’s really the question of Holy Week: Is our faith a life-or-death thing? And, honestly, I think the answer we usually give is “no.” Not for most of us; not most of the time. It’s just a personal thing. It makes us feel better and maybe it gives our families a moral center. That’s American religion in a nutshell.

            Jesus hated this kind of religion. Hated it. He threw moneychangers out of the temple, because they had made religion a thing to be consumed. Religion had become a token for comfort, and comfort—they felt—must be appropriately priced. But just as bad as the moneychangers were the holy rollers who complained about the kind of crowd that followed him. They, too, had grown to love the comfort of a tidy religion, even though, as Jesus harshly reminds them: it is “out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies” that God has prepared praise. Jesus tells us straightaway that faith is less a commodity and much messier than we would like. Praise is not something we control. Worship is, by its very nature, out of control. It begs us to wonder what Jesus would say about our worship. Is it about praise, or is it about making us feel better about ourselves?

Sheep are silly

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46

This morning I’m going to serenade you with two classic ballads of the Christian faith. Each is as deeply serious as it is theologically rich. The first is entitled “Sheep Are Silly” and it goes something like this:

Sheep are silly! (Silly?) Silly, my friend.

Sheep are silly! (Silly?) Silly, my friend.

They need a shepherd. (A shepherd?) To keep them alive.

They need a shepherd (A shepherd?) To help them survive.

Sheep are silly! Silly, my friend.

And the verse ends with an invitation that all of you associate with deep religious motivation: “Get silly!”

            The second song is perhaps even more familiar, and potentially life-changing (I hope I’m not overselling this). And it goes something like this:

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

            And I pray the Lord my soul to keep

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

Now there’s once verse in particular of this classic that applies to today and it goes like this:

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            Because goats ain’t got no hope.

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

Etc, etc, etc.

I’m tempted to preach no further, instead allowing you to reflect on the depth of the lyrics of Sheep are Silly! and I just Wanna Be a Sheep, but you’re not paying me only to make a mockery of myself up here, so let me expound on the sheepy song silliness for a second,

            There are two things I actually like quite a lot about these songs anyway when it comes to their interplay with the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew’s Gospel. This is a hard, hard, hard parable, and these songs are immeasurably silly. That’s a point in their favor, because to the question, “Is everything a joke to you?” the only correct answer is ever, in the immortal words of Stephen Fry, “Only the things that matter.”

All about the Benjamins (and the Creflo Dollars)

Scripture: Matthew 25:14-30

Often times, reading through the Bible, it’s easy to obsess over one point of view against another. God cares for the poor and the downtrodden. That’s absolutely true. God cares about the widowed and the helpless, the ones without power or influence. Also true. God loves the widow for giving her tiny mite as much as the wealthy for their gifts out of their riches. True and true and true.

            But God is not an economist like we are economists. God doesn’t care much for bookkeeping when it comes to faith. That’s easy enough for us to see with the widow’s mite but much harder to see with the parable of the talents, even though it’s making a very similar point. We have to understand from the start that God doesn’t fit any of our conventional economic molds. This is in part because God is not really an economist at all. God tells parables about money that are not actually about money. We hear parables about money and we can’t see past the Benjamins. While we’re busy figuring out if God’s attitude reflects a conservative or liberal slant—and (surprise, surprise) we’re likely to find exactly our point of view regardless—Jesus is busy telling us a story about faith that is going over our heads. Jesus tells us that God gives faith liberally but he also expects, as we see in today’s reading, a good deal of interest in return. This is a challenging parable largely because nothing gets us as hot and bothered as money. This is not a parable about money. It’s a story about faith. It’s a parable, remember, and its economics are of a different sort.

            In order to understand what this means let’s start with the perspective of the servant who buries the one talent. For those of us who are incredibly careful with gifts we have been given his punishment seems not just extreme but patently unfair. If you’re like me you’re probably fairly risk averse especially when it comes to economic security, so I can resonate with the servant’s behavior. The talent wasn’t his in the first place, so what business did he have investing it? We’re not talking about sticking his talent away at United Valley or American Federal or anything. Every investment in the ancient world carried with it a good amount of risk. More to the point, if the servant was a strict Jew (which we can probably assume he was) he would know that Jewish law advises not to place all one’s money (or resources) in a single position (cf. Genesis 32:8-9). What if he lost it in a risky investment? Wouldn’t that be the one irresponsible thing to do?

Offensive grace and the judgment of invitation

Scripture: Matthew 22:1-14

A quote from Robert Farrar Capon: “Hell, ultimately, is not the place of punishment for sinners; sinners are not punished at all; they go straight to heaven just for saying yes to grace. Hell is simply the nowhere that is the only thing left for those who will not accept their acceptance by grace—who will not believe that at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, free for nothing, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world actually declared he never intended to count sins in the first place. What then do I make of, ‘Many are called but few are chosen’? Just this. The sad truth of our fallen condition is that we don’t want anything to do with a system of salvation that works by grace through faith.”

            ***

            Isn’t that the truth? We imagine that we like grace. We think that we are “grace-full” people. We even name our churches accordingly. Grace Lutheran—we must be into grace here! But when grace comes to us in all its glory our first instinct is not joy or relief but suspicion. Why have I received such a gift? What have I done? And if I have received this gift, perhaps I could hold out for something better. Perhaps somebody else has been given something better than me!

            The idea that there is “No such thing as a free lunch” is an eminently practical principle conceived by suspicious people completely afraid of grace. This is a parable filled with such people: idiots afraid of grace. The king sends out an invitation. The works-righteousness side of us imagines God standing by a door waiting for us to knock. That’s the image Jesus himself gives us in Matthew 7, but the context of that image was aside things that seemed rather impossible for us-human beings to do: Judge not; take the log out of your eye before taking the speck out of our neighbor’s; do unto others; enter through the narrow gate. All things that sound great. All things we fail to do, more often than not.

The king sent out the invitation and we have only to respond, you might say. But the problem is that nobody comes. Nobody! If Jesus is waiting for us to knock, he’s going to be waiting an awfully long time. Then the king doubles down. Let’s share with the invitees all of the incredible things about this particular wedding feast which they are freely given. They get to eat and drink and dance from the vast wealth that I possess. This is going to be the best experience they’ve ever had.

Being a loser, bearing the cross

Written for the Men's Lenten Breakfast

            One of the toughest things for us to wrap our heads around is Jesus’ constant reminder that grace requires losing. To be grace-filled is to be a loser.

            Here’s what I mean by that.

            It takes losing something in order to need it; it takes an understanding that we need God in order to enter the kingdom of heaven; and it takes God’s work on the cross to make that possible. All of that is predicated on losing. We lose our perfection, we lose our ability to boast about how great we are, we eventually lose our lives, even as Christ lost his. We are all losers.

            That’s what taking up our cross is like.

            Personally, I don’t like to lose. I’m pretty competitive, especially when it comes to sports and games where chance is taken out of the equation. I hate losing because I have nobody to blame but myself. So I’m always trying to be better. The reason I’m up early biking or running isn’t because I love to bike or run; it’s because I want to be better. The better I am at something the more upset I get when I fail. As Kate could tell you, nothing makes me more upset than losing a chess game. And since I’m airing all my many overly-competitive faults, I also hate losing at Trivia Crack and any other thinking game that doesn’t require chance. I may not show it, but there probably aren’t many people around who hate losing more than me.

            But there comes a point where all of that work turns a corner and becomes something more insidious. I’m not really benefiting the world by being a better runner or bicyclist or chess player. At a certain point I’m no longer doing things for self-improvement; I’m just doing things out of selfishness. Cross-bearing is being a loser, but even worse, it’s being a loser for losing’s sake. It’s saying, “Enough.” All that striving for personal glory gets in the way of taking up our cross and following Jesus.

The virtue of working a full day... or just a few minutes

Scripture: Matthew 20:1-16

             There is the one thing that every person does that seems like a normal, healthy way of living, but at its core is the root of sin. Everybody does this rather often—some are even doing it now—but it isn’t the kind of insidious thing you might be imagining. In fact, it seems benign and therein lies its power. I’m talking about comparing—ourselves to others, things to other things, ideas against ideas. It’s how we function as human beings in a complex world.

But comparison is also at the heart of sin. It’s in relation to others that we feel entitled, that we feel little, that the blessings we have seem not enough. It’s when we stack ourselves up against others—What kind of car do they drive? What kind of house do they live in? How much money do they make? How do their kids behave?—it’s when we make these comparisons that we determine what is fair, what is just, and what we deserve (which tends to be at least a little bit more than what we have).

            The parable of the laborers in the vineyard is a parable of comparison, so it is both a parable of judgment and a parable of grace, and you might see it as either depending on where you’re standing. It’s also clearly meant to upset. If the landowner in the parable wanted things to go smoothly he would have paid the first workers first and the last at the end. Then, even if he used this strange method of payment where each got a full day’s wages regardless of their workload no one would be the wiser. But clearly this is meant to strike at the roots of where our understanding of self-righteousness lies. The first workers feel entitled, but only because they are comparing themselves with the last. But wouldn’t you?