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?

Grain and Chaff, Sinners and Saints

Text: Luke 3:15-22

            Of the four Gospels we have telling us of Jesus’ life, Luke is the one you would be most likely to read as a bedtime story. There aren’t the demons of Mark; there isn’t the slaughter of the innocent children of Matthew, there isn’t the constant hand-wringing and “fear of the Jews” we find in John. None of the Gospels are cuddly, but if there’s one that seems closest to “Minnesota nice” it is the Gospel of Luke. So, when Luke says something that appears to be judgmental and harsh we should take pause. These are a few moments when Luke is decidedly not “Minnesota nice,” moments where we are called to remember what was at stake and that these aren’t just nice stories. This Gospel is far more important than that.

            Epiphany is the day in the church calendar where we celebrate the revelation of Jesus as God’s Son—usually it’s with a star that some kings follow to Bethlehem. This year, however, we’re in Luke and the revelation comes in just a couple verses when the Holy Spirit descends on him in baptism. In that moment, Jesus was shown to be more than just another human being; the rumors and the prophecies were finally put to rest. Jesus was the Son of God. For Luke, there could be nothing more important, but Luke is also concerned about what the son of God is going to come and do. You have to remember that people expected the messiah to come as a king and rule over the nations. They expected a military ruler—one who would overthrow the Roman Empire and restore the Jewish people to power they hadn’t known in centuries. Jesus did not live up to those expectations. The people needed to know what it meant for the son of God to come and live in their midst; it wasn’t what they were expecting.

Do Not Worry- Thanksgiving Ecumenical Sermon

A sermon preached for Hallock's ecumenical Thanksgiving service.

Text: Matthew 6:25-33

There may be no reading in all of scripture that holds together multiple viewpoints better than today’s Gospel from Matthew. So it is particularly appropriate for Matthew 6 to be our Gospel reading today; not only because it is a word of thanksgiving but also because it is the kind of text that can bring together Presbyterians and Pentecostals and Catholics and Lutherans, because it is about something very near the core of all of our faiths, by which, of course, I’m referring to food. But food is also only the starting point. This has to do with the birds and the lilies and the grass; it has to do with ecology and the land, and it has to do with who is over the land and who shepherds its resources.

Human beings are worriers. We have in our heads this command—maybe you know the one; it’s very early on in the Bible, when Adam and Eve are still in the Garden of Eden—God tells them to “subdue” the earth (Genesis 1:28). It’s one of the few Old Testament commands that Christians have done a spectacular job of following; in fact, we have often been a bit overzealous in our subduing. In focusing so much on how we can force nature to do our will we have vilified the world and made it into something out to get us—something to worry about. So, in order to make the world out there less scary we domesticated it. We assigned value only to those things that have immediate use for us. Everything became about eating and drinking and clothing. The problem is that in simplifying things we became selfish.

At the root of our worry about life and not having enough is our, often subconscious, understanding that we cannot control the world. We are not God, even if we act as if we are. The more we inflate our egos, the greater our fall when the world turns against us. When that happens “the world” becomes a bad place—not us, but some imagined evil out there. “Do not worry,” says Jesus, because worry isn’t so much about doubt as it is about ego; it is about putting our needs before the needs of our neighbors.

“Do not worry,” says Jesus, because we do not deserve what we have been given, and yet, it is promised to us. God has promised to take care of us—not because we are the best of all possible peoples and certainly not because we never put ourselves before God. God has given us a promise because God is about radical, incredible grace. However, God also sets before us examples of how we should treat the gifts we have been given. In fact, because we are so clearly unworthy of the gifts of land and resources—food and clothing—our thanksgiving must not be hollow. We have to demonstrate that God’s promise is actually lived out in our words and actions.

My Lutheran friends are now thinking I’ve flown the coop. The big joke in the Lutheran church is that we are so allergic to justification by works that what we believe is not so much justification by grace as it is justification by coma. But here’s the thing—and this is why I think this works great for an ecumenical service—whatever your views are about eternal salvation this is a text about salvation in the present. The Latin root of salvation is the word “salve” which is actually the way of greeting one another in Latin; it’s like the Roman “Hello” or “Aloha,” but what it really means is “Health.” In Latin, you greet one another: “Salve”… To your health! And so, salvation is about not just something that happens out in eternity; it is also about what happens here and now. To be saved is to be in right relationship—with God, yes, but also with the world and your neighbors.

So, how do we show our worthiness of these gifts God has given us? Wendell Berry says that there are three ways we demonstrate our worthiness: the first is to be faithful, grateful and humble; the second is to be neighborly, and the third is to practice good husbandry—by which he means to treat what we are given with respect and careful management.[1] This applies to the land and our resources, but it also applies to all of our lives broadly. It’s all well and good for Jesus to tell us not to worry, but most of you won’t hear that, or you might hear it now but you’ll forget it later. Christmas shopping will come along, an unexpected expense will appear out of nowhere; you will feel as if you don’t have enough and you will worry. Some of you will have a perfectly great holiday season and still figure out ways to worry. Worry is the great Scandinavian gift that keeps on giving.

So, you of all people, need this promise. You will be OK. But honestly, the best cure for worry isn’t to hear that. The best cure for worry is to practice being worthy. Be faithful, grateful, humble; be a good neighbor, and care for what God has given you; and guess what? You won’t worry. Not because you will have become more worthy of God’s grace, but because you will have been living out salvation in your daily lives. Salvation is eternal, but you know that. What you don’t remember is that it’s also here and now; and when you are ungrateful or a braggart, when you treat your neighbor with disdain, when you treat the resources God has given you as yours to waste, then you will find a world filled with not-enoughs and worries, and you will seek to escape this world in order to find salvation. That’s not the life God has called us to live; it’s not how to be a steward of God’s gifts; it’s not how to be a Christian—no matter your denomination or spiritual gifts.

We are, each of us, called to these simple tasks: faithfulness, gratefulness, humility, neighborliness, and husbandry. You see, worry isn’t about letting things go; it’s not a Buddhist-sounding philosophy of doing nothing in order to let Christ purge us of our self-doubt. Instead, as Wendell Berry writes, “The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing…It is the ability to do something well.”[2] To be free from worry is to fill our lives with the things that matter.

May your lives be filled this Thanksgiving with all the things that matter, and may God’s gift to you be humility, service, and care for all that you have been given.

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[1] Berry, Wendell. “The Gift of Good Land,” 1979.

[2] ibid

The Beginning of Wisdom: A sermon on fear and the harvest

Text: Isaiah 6:1-13

            I have to admit something today that may or may not make me a horrible sinner. I’m leaning toward not, but I could be convinced otherwise. As many of you know, we have been following a narrative lectionary put out by Working Preacher throughout the fall, which means that instead of reading scripture that centers on a theme for the day we have been following story-lines. I think so far it has been a modest success—at least nobody has threatened to burn down the church unless we return to the good ol’ Revised Common Lectionary. But partly because I have been freed from the constraints of preaching on the same things as every other mainline church in the world I have also felt a little freer to edit the readings as I see fit, and today I am guilty of doing that. Here’s my rationale: I think the tendency among people who create lectionaries—or reading lists—is to skip over the parts that sound harsh, even though some of these are really important parts of the story. I think, being the Scandinavian Lutherans that most of you are, you can take a little verbal abuse from time to time, so I decided today to put it back in—in the case, the prophetic message that Isaiah receives in verses 9-13.

            As far as I can tell, the only reason that the powers on high didn’t include this reading in the reading in the first place is that it is a little lacking in the hope department. How long should Isaiah preach? Verse 11: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.”

That’s not exactly your classic Harvest Festival good news.

            However, I wonder if our attempts to censor the Bible don’t keep us from gaining a more complete understanding of God. I think most of us are probably at least a little scared of what the Bible actually says. But what this jaunt through the narrative lectionary has taught me, even in only a couple of months, is that scripture is so rich we only really ever dip our toes in the water; we never dive in. We all pick and choose our focus. We do this with every biblical story or issue that stems for it—contentious or not. Even though we might have a sense of the trajectory of the whole Bible, it is so much easier to cite a verse or two than it is to craft an argument using the whole Bible. One of challenges with honestly talking about what scripture says is that it holds together multiple viewpoints. Is God wrathful or loving? Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, or quick to judge, mighty and powerful? Or is God somehow both?

            The God who comes to Isaiah in a vision is that classic, Old Testament model who teaches us that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This is not a cuddly God. The message God gives to Isaiah is not something anybody wants to preach. Tell the people: “‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ Make the mind of this people dull, stop their ears, and shut their eyes.” Now, some of you might be thinking that’s what I do—make the mind of the people dull, stop their ears and shut their eyes—but that’s another matter.[1]

It’s verses like this that make faith in God seem unfair. We are given these senses—sight, hearing, touch—and then we’re told that they are completely unhelpful in knowing God. Seeing God will kill you. Listening won’t help. Touch is a sign of a lack of faith—ask the disciple Thomas. Our senses enable sin. All of this makes us fear a God who is not only unapproachable but who demands unreasonably from us. You’re beginning to see, I can imagine, why we don’t read these verses.

This God—our God—commands fear.

Our problem—and the reason we cut off readings when they get harsh—is that we have come to think that this is a bad thing. Fearing God is not high on our list of religious priorities.

But maybe it should be.

I mean, if God is the most fearful of all things… then what more do we have to fear? And if God could be understood simply with our senses… then what more could we hope for? So, even though we have this Bible with so many prophets, like Isaiah, to condemn us and to induce fear, we also have these threads of tremendous promise woven through these stories. The Bible is interested in showing us a God who is both far away and near, a God who is frightful and loving, a God who puts to death and a God who resurrects. When we focus only on one side of God we actually lose the ability to cope with the darker side of life.

Isaiah’s call is to preach judgment, and the fact that this call exists in the Bible means that God cares enough to set us straight. These are not godless moments. God realizes that, on our own, human beings will always believe that what we create is a product of our own genius. We will forget God as quickly as Peter denies Christ on his way to crucifixion. Without fear, we make ourselves into gods. It’s the same story in 785 BC as it is today. God uses Isaiah to remind us that nothing is so sacred that it is left standing before God. Our idols will be razed to the ground, because only when everything is put in its place can it be resurrected.

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There is this thread of metaphors that run from the beginning of Genesis, through the entirety of the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, through Jesus and the Gospel witness, through Paul’s writings and through Revelation to the end of our Bible—beginning to end. It is the thread of agricultural metaphors that appears here in Isaiah. Whenever agriculture turns up in the Bible it is to teach us something about the nature of death and life. What happens when fields or forests burn? The same thing that always happens: new life.

Isaiah is called to tell the people that the land has been emptied and God has burned the last remnants of the fields. Everything will die. This is God’s slash and burn philosophy to farming. But then there’s this line about the holy seed and the stump. It is a strange turn at the end of the reading—and the Hebrew is incredibly difficult to translate—but for those of you who have lived in an agricultural community for a long time you should know why that turn of phrase is there at the very end. The fields are dead… but the seed is planted.

There are plenty of times where the pastor is honestly less qualified to talk about the Bible than the farmers.

Can you imagine if farmers were as scared of facing harsh realities as we are when we read scripture? Nobody would ever grow anything. In fact, farmers provide us the model for how to read scripture. Good farmers are interested in every little aspect of the farm, but they never lose the big picture. When we read the Bible we are interested in every little aspect of the Word—not because we like it all, not because it all makes sense, and certainly not because every part of it is as important as every other part. No, we read the whole picture, because just as a farmer is concerned with the whole farm so are we concerned with the whole picture of God—the parts we like and the parts we don’t. At the same time, a farmer could obsess over one beet—or one acre—but it would be to the detriment of the whole. The winds will howl, the snow will blow, and everything will turn to muck—frozen, dead muck. Winter has come. The harvest is over. Isaiah brings us a message of death and despair. Green has turned to yellow has turned to brown has turned to black.

Still, underneath it all, buried under snow and our fears of what may come, something lies dormant; a seed you cannot see. Holy, holy, holy, say the seraphim. Holy, holy, holy, we sing—both merciful and mighty—worthy of fear, the God who will lay waste and the God who will plant seeds. Winter has come. Harvest is over. The promise is hidden.
            …

But the seed is planted.

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[1] This reminds me of Jesus in the Gospel of John saying to the Pharisees, “‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains’” (John 9:41).