Legal, Right, or True

Matthew 21:1-17

As we read today about Jesus entering Jerusalem on the precipice of a week full of world-changing history, it’s worth remembering the difference between what is legal, what is moral, and what is true, and I think this is something worth reflecting upon this Holy Week.

            When we teach children about right and wrong, at first it is clear. What is right is what is legal is what is true—that’s where we start. Don’t do drugs, because it’s wrong and because it’s against the law. Don’t steal, because it’s wrong and because it’s against the law. But if you live long enough and find yourself mulling enough tough life situations, you begin to see that these things occasionally diverge. For Christians, who worship this God we know in Jesus Christ, this is forever colored by Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, where he comes in as a king but is quickly arrested and put to death according to the law. According to that law, the chief priests and Pilate were righteous and Jesus was a criminal.

Jesus broke the law. He healed on the Sabbath, he claimed to be God’s Son—even God’s self!—and he claimed authority that pit him against the leaders of the day. Jesus was guilty of breaking the law, which is precisely why we need to remember that our laws are not always not always a mark of morality. Rather, the law is a human thing, created for order, which can be used or misused. Apartheid was the law in South Africa, the Holocaust was executed according to the law in Germany, and, even today, in places as distinct and different as South Sudan, and Israel, and Venezuela, and Russia, the law is used to silence and oppress, sometimes to the point of killing; sometimes more subtly. The passion of Jesus should remind us that the law may easily become morally bankrupt.

            If we look deep enough within ourselves, I suspect most of us take issue with some aspect of our laws, whether it’s about drugs, or abortion, or immigration, or criminal justice, or whatever. Most of us are not fully satisfied, and that’s OK! As followers of Jesus, we are called to struggle together to find a better way of doing things, knowing that the law will never be perfect. The law is a human creation that can always be done better, and it’s always at risk of becoming the thing that kills Jesus all over again.

Sheep and goats; knowing and not knowing

Matthew  25:31-46

            This was the first scripture I ever preached on here at Grace and Red River, and I’m happy to report, in spite of the rumors flying apparently making the rounds in the community, this will most definitely not be my last. No, we’re not going anywhere, so if you’ve heard that one, feel free to go back to the source and correct them. I’ve got far too many adventure race ideas to leave anytime soon.

            But back on the subject of this scripture, this is really a tough one. I mean, on the one hand, we should obviously be treating everybody who is hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison as if they are Jesus himself. This is good. Go do it. Still, I don’t know what Jesus is up to here, because the moral of the story seems to be: Do good and that’s how you’ll earn eternal life, which runs contrary to everything else we’ve been taught—that it’s not about works; it’s about faith. And if it’s about works, then how will we ever know if we are sheep or goats?

            This is where it gets kind of interesting. In this parable, the sheep don’t know they are sheep and the goats know they are goats. Everybody is confused. At first, that doesn’t fill me with confidence. Not only does Jesus suggest salvation is about something different than he’s been suggesting all along, but now it also comes to people who don’t know on which side of the fence they stand. This is not comforting.

            But, then, there is this matter of the sheep and the goats, and I wonder if Matthew’s Gospel hasn’t been preparing us for this all along. This is the last parable. And it’s our inclination to make the last parable the most important, but perhaps that’s not quite it. Perhaps this parable is simply the reminder that all that stuff about faith and grace, which matters so much, doesn’t change who we are or how we are to act. Most of all, perhaps this is a reminder that we haven’t got God figured out, not even a little.

Faith's return on investment

Matthew 25:14-30

            These parables toward the end of Matthew’s Gospel are the hardest parables, no question. They get harder and harder until we get to the point where it feels like Jesus is contradicting himself. I mean, we just spent weeks reading “the least shall be first and the first shall be last” and now Jesus turns it around and says, “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away?” What is going on here?

            Fear. That’s what these parables evoke—fear that we haven’t gotten it right—fear that even after seeking after God earnestly (and, let’s face it, we haven’t always done that so well), even when we have, we are afraid we haven’t done enough, because it’s not clear from Jesus’ parables what “enough” is. There are many folks who spend their lives afraid of being insufficient; afraid of letting everybody down, and nobody more than God; afraid that they are not enough and never will be enough.

            Yet, there is a thread woven through the Gospels of something different. Jesus is hard—harsh, even—but especially to those who believe they have it all figured out. These are the ones who find the swiftest rebuke, so that everybody ends up alongside Peter, asking the question he once uttered: “Lord, to whom shall I go?” You are it. If everything is as I hope, then you are the only one worth turning to, and if it’s not, then I have nothing else to fall back on, so what else is there but you?

            As I read the parable of the talents, it seems to me that that last slave, given the one talent, is absolutely paralyzed by fear. I recognize this, because I see it all the time. I see people who are so scared of doing anything that they quietly live and die never having really lived. I see people paralyzed by anxiety and a feeling of worthlessness—that they don’t deserve a thing and can’t believe anybody would fail to see through their façade and see them for the imposter they are. This slave would rather not have been given the talent at all! It would be much better if the master had just given talents to others!

I’m reminded of that marvelous scene in the Lord of the Rings (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then go read it, go see it, and then go see it again) where Frodo says to Gandalf: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” And Gandalf replies, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Hell isn't the place you think it is

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet…”

            This sounds familiar—a little retelling of Wedding at Cana perhaps?—except this time it’s something entirely different. Things get dark in a hurry. While Cana is an unapologetic reminder that God provides out of the abundance of grace—that Jesus is in the business of making the party last—this second parable is something different. Many are called, but few are chosen.

            Well, what on earth is this? What is grace if it is limited? Why does Jesus do this to us? He seems bent on leaving us both assured and perturbed. He tells us, “You are in!” and then “Are you sure you aren’t out?”

            What is this?

            Ultimately, I think the best way to rectify the inconsistency is to see these two parables as talking about two different things. The first (the wedding at Cana) is a parable of how the kingdom of heaven works—grace, as abundant as it is free. The second is also about grace, but it is telling us something about what it means to be human—that we choose to respond to God’s grace mostly be closing our ears and deciding we can do better on our own. This parable suggests that hell is a place of our own making.

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.”

            ***

God's economy is not fair (and it shouldn't be)

Matthew 20:1-16

That’s not fair! It doesn’t take too long working with kids (or adults, for that matter) to hear those words. We have this innate sense of the fairness of the universe that doesn’t match up with many of the things that actually happen to us. Perhaps that’s why we have this feeling, after all. We look out at a world that is patently unfair and set our sights on making the little bit of life that is under our control as fair as possible. In that way, it might feel like we are shining a little bit of light into the darkness.

            The parable of the landowner is a parable about life’s unfairness, but Jesus doesn’t lead us toward the place we might expect. Jesus doesn’t show us a world governed by fairness. If he did, the landowner would act differently, more rationally, more fairly. Instead, he shows us a world governed by grace. Fairness is everybody getting paid for the work they did; fairness is getting paid what you deserve. Grace is everybody receiving the whole lot of it, regardless of whether they worked long and hard or short and sweet.

            As we deliberate on how best to be a society, we often have this conversation in our own way. What is fair? Where does grace fit into our society? Does it? These are questions that can divide us along political lines.

            But the thing about fairness is that it’s always judged by the lord of the land. The landowner is always able to pick the best, who in turn got to be the best by some unknown combination of hard work and luck. Meanwhile, the least are left behind—working less on the one hand, having less opportunity on the other, and the cycle continues. Beneath the surface, this one little parable says a lot about the world we live in. Haves and have nots; hard workers and the poor, who may work hard too… or not… I suppose that may lay bare our assumptions. But this is not a parable about how to govern, or about economic structures, or capitalism, or socialism, or anything like that. That’s the trap. We quickly mold God’s economy into our own when God’s economy is absolutely, completely other.

Fighting Spiritual Abuse

Matthew 18:15-35

The scripture for today is about two things: (1) Forgiveness, and (2) how to be the church together. These things are interwoven. How we forgive one another and how we address conflict and deal with those who we feel have wronged us is going to directly affect everything about we follow after Jesus. It starts with accountability to others. We have to know forgiveness with one another so that we can begin to wrap our heads around the goodness of God’s forgiveness of us

            Unfortunately, we live in a world where people see our brokenness and take advantage of it. Rather than helping the most vulnerable by pointing out that God’s grace is for them; abusers I the church gently coax victims to put their trust in people—in church leadership—rather than God who has saved you by grace. Abuse runs rampant in the church—in any institution with power, and the church has plenty of power. Worse still, because the church feels like it should be a place of moral authority, it’s easier still for people to be taken advantage of. The most visible, awful manifestation of this is sexual abuse, but it’s certainly not the only form. Plenty of pastors are spiritually abusive—whole churches are.

Christians are losers

Matthew 16:24-17:8

When we went on a Youth Works mission trip the first summer I was here, one of the t-shirts that the organization was modeling had a single word across the front of the chest: Loser.

            It was an attention-getter—the kind of thing nobody wants to be, the last thing you would want in bold print across your chest. But it’s one of the many paradoxes of the Christian faith that to be a follower of Jesus is to be a loser. The reverse side of that t-shirt made reference to Matthew 16:24-25:

Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Become a loser, Jesus says. Lose your life for my sake.

            I thought about that again this week when a friend of mine posted a story to Facebook about the New England Patriots chaplain, who calls himself a “character coach.” In the wake of the arrest of the team’s owner for soliciting prostitution, the chaplain resigned, but, as Adam pointed out, it’s a sign of how poor American Christianity has become that a chaplain leaves a team “because the owner turns out to be a real live sinner. This is what needs to die (in American Christianity),” Adam concluded.

            I wholeheartedly agree. Christianity in America has allied itself with winners. Big churches. Lots of money. Lots of influence. Christians get mad when the government is not explicitly Christian, when statues of the Ten Commandments are removed from public places, or when Christian prayers are not said in public schools. Pastors run when leaders do not live morally superior lives. In this view of the Christian church as a place full of winners, the church can only be a success when it keeps sin in check, except it can’t, it never has, and it never will. Christians aren’t better people than any other faith; we aren’t better than Jews or Muslims or Hindus, and we aren’t better than atheists either. We are sinners. Every one of us. But from the seat of power, Christians have too often deemed ourselves beyond sin. We have imagined that to be a Christian is to pretend to be something we are not—that we have become like Jesus by virtue of our awesomeness at following Jesus.

            In place of being losers, we pretend to be winners.

            The biggest open secret in American Christianity is that none of this is true. Everybody sees that we-Christians, who sit on our high thrones and pronounce moral judgments on society, are just as sinful as everybody else. In fact, if we do that, we are worse, because the moral power we wield corrupts us to our core. This is why we see rampant abuse scandals in the church—in the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Church—scandals whose enormity would destroy any other institution in this nation. We need to see that this is a direct result of the presumption of moral superiority; it’s because the church has believed itself to be full of winners—full of people who would never do something like that. Then, when it’s proven that we are all sinners—not winners—the church does its best to rid itself of the bad apples when those are precisely the people that Jesus turns around and welcomes as sinners, full of the desperate need for repentance.

            Too often the American Christian church is so full of winners that it doesn’t have any room left for Jesus.

            Losers. Jesus would have us be losers instead.