Click here to read Philippians 2:1-13, and here to read Matthew 21:1-16.
The lectionary is supposed to guide us through the arch of Christian year. It keeps our hearts open to another kind of time—time not determined by the day of the week or the hour of the day, but the cycle of the Christian story. The lectionary year begins not in January, but on the first Sunday of Advent. The story of Jesus is told and retold across the span of a years’ worth of Sabbaths: the anticipation of his birth, the agony of his death, the triumph of his resurrection. After Pentecost, when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church, we enter a period of the church called Ordinary Time. In Ordinary time, we are in between the big Holy Days of the church calendar. We stretch out, slow down, and spend more time contemplating the teachings of Jesus, especially his parables about the Kingdom of God. Indeed, the reason why the church traditionally dresses itself in the color green during Ordinary time is because so many of the parables evoke images of growing.
Well, at least that’s what they told me in seminary. There are also additional patterns woven into the unfolding of the lectionary passages through Ordinary time. Last week we had a parable that trashed the human concept of fairness, proclaiming that the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
This week’s parable continues along these same lines. Matthew seems to be saying Hey— if you weren’t offended by the parable in which the landowner pays everyone what they needed for the day—regardless of how many hours of work they had completed— don’t you worry your little head. This week will surely do you in. Because this week, Jesus teaches the religious authorities that prostitutes and tax collectors have a running start on the Kingdom of Heaven. Meanwhile, in the letter to the Philippians, Paul is singing a hymn about Jesus—a hymn that celebrates Jesus for reasons that are completely inside out and upside down. Paul reminds us that the reason we worship Jesus is because of his humility, his willingness to take on flesh and bones. We worship him because he became ordinary—emptied of glory and filled with suffering.
The theme we seem to be returning to this month is scandal. Paul describes the gospel as scandalous, although the Greek word “scandal” is usually translated into English as “stumbling block.” The phrase “stumbling block” works, to a certain extent. It certainly makes sense that we could be tripped up by mind-boggling parables and sent reeling by the story of a servant King who overcomes death only after experiencing it. But “stumbling block” only goes so far. The gospel is truly scandalous. It is full of surprising stories, radical paradoxes, and countercultural wisdom. The lectionary—the selection of texts that are being read by countless Christians throughout the world—seems to be reminding us that the gospel is fully capable of delivering a swift kick in the pants to anyone who would try to domesticate it.
Today’s parable scandalizes the religious authorities. We have a story of two sons. One publicly dishonors his father by verbally refusing to respect his father’s wishes to go work in the vineyard. He looks like the wayward son, the son who will be judged, the son who is an example of disobedience. But he goes to work in the field. He obeys his father. His brother, on the other hand, said he would labor in the vineyard but played hooky when it was time to show up for work. He only pretended to honor his father. This story was served up to religious authorities who were understandably angered. Jesus was telling them they were like the son who pretended to honor his father. Jesus had little sympathy for hypocritical and prideful behavior. The need to impress people with piety seems to be a common thread of human nature. That Jesus would dare claim that prostitutes and tax-collectors—the most reviled of all persons in ancient times—would be the first heirs to the Kingdom of God is a completely appalling, surprising, and infuriating notion. This is the gospel, and this is scandalous.
In the letter to the Philippians, Paul recounts the life and work of Jesus Christ in a way that is so simple, it functions like a silhouette: by condensing the picture to black and white, we are able to more clearly see the stark and dramatic shape of the story. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.” We worship a God who not only became incarnate, but took on the whole spectrum of what it means to be human. Jesus was born like any other child, from the womb of his mother. He learned to speak Aramaic and Hebrew. He grew into an astounding teacher, sharing parables that are bottomless in their depth of wisdom and spirit. He laughed, he feasted, he wept. And he died. He died a terrible death on a cross. He was the Son of God sent to redeem, and instead of showing up with an army and a battle plan to win an earthly Kingdom, he died promising a Kingdom of Heaven.
That wasn’t supposed to be the way it happened, friends. The Christian church grew out of two major traditions: the Jewish tradition of Jesus, and the Greco-Roman culture that ruled the day. And the gospel managed to subvert the expectations and assumptions of both of its cultural parents. The messianic tradition of the Jewish faith called for a King that would drive out the Roman occupiers and reinstate Israel as a nation. Greco-Roman religious mythology was full of stories of gods taking on human form; that part of the Christian story wouldn’t come as a surprise to Roman citizens. But in Roman mythology, the gods and goddesses pretended to be humans for less-than-honorable reasons. Zeus, for instance, was said to become human in order to seduce women. That’s the kind of myth that would have been perfectly familiar and totally ordinary to Roman citizens. But that is a far cry from the incarnate Christ that Paul glorifies in the letter to the Philippians. By taking on a humble human form, Christ Jesus demonstrates to us a compassionate God who suffers with us, and a loving God who is merciful enough to give the astonishing gift of resurrection. This is the gospel, and this is scandalous.
Robert Kysar writes that “unless one is scandalized by the gospel message, she or he cannot embrace it with authentic faith.” I think there is indeed a terrible danger in forgetting the scandal of the gospel. If we pretend that Jesus didn’t really mean that the last will be first and the prostitutes will be welcomed into the Kingdom of God ahead of even the most religious among us, we are in danger of following a hollow gospel that helps us serve ourselves, not our Lord. In the letter to the Christians in Philippi, Paul calls upon the church to imitate Christ—to live in the same scandalous and holy way that Jesus lived when he walked the streets of Galilee. We are called to love, to serve, to put others interests before our own. We are called to follow the hard sayings and narrow path of Christ, called to empty ourselves of pride and let God fill us back up again with songs of praise. We are called to live and to love as scandalously as the living and loving Christ.
Today we sing songs of praise, hymns that were written in light of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. These hymns praise the name of Jesus; as Paul wrote, “At the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” What we cannot forget as we sing these hymns is that the reasons the name of Jesus has such power is because he relinquished all power. We can’t skip over Good Friday and go directly to Easter Morning, and we cannot skip over the scandal to get to the praise. Amen.
9.30.2005
9.20.2005
Broken & Blessed
Click here to read Matthew 20:1-16.
I wonder if I should begin with an apology. The scriptural story we’re considering today is one that is extraordinarily offensive—there really should be warning labels on texts such as this one. It is much more appalling than an R-rated movie. It offends our sense of fairness and topples our concept of love. And it breaks God out of the jail cell we so often put him in, revealing a God who is so merciful and so gracious we are left infuriated, mystified, and maybe even humbled.
The parable of the laborers of the vineyard is what my mother would call a “humdinger.” Jesus once again uses brilliant images to reveal the nature of the Kingdom of God to his disciples, spinning a story worth telling and retelling. In this scripture, a landowner goes out and hires workers to contribute to the hard work of cultivating growth in his vineyard. He finds his workers in the marketplace, where they congregate to wait for work. The first batch is hired at the crack of dawn. These workers are promised a denarius, the amount of money needed to support a family for one day. The workers were probably thrilled that they had been discovered by a landowner willing to pay them a living wage—I imagine they often had to settle for less. The laborers get to work as the sun continues to get exponentially hotter on their backs.
Meanwhile, the landowner returns to the marketplace, hiring more workers at 9:00a.m., a respectable enough time to start a day’s work. Their wage is not discussed; the landowner simply assures them that they will be paid “what is right.” More workers are hired throughout the day, at noon and at three and at five o’ clock. When the sun retreats, and the landowner is ready to call it a day, he has his manager attend to the payroll. Starting with the workers hired last—the workers who did the least amount of work in the vineyard, the workers with the least pain in their muscles and sunburn on their foreheads—he proceeds to pay each and every single worker the same amount. One denarius, enough for each of them to support themselves and their families for the day—the wage that had been promised to the early bird workers. As you can imagine, the workers are livid. They grumble about the perceived slight—only to be rebuffed by the landowner, who reminds them that they received exactly what they were promised. He says, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
We are invited to imagine that this landowner reflects something of the nature of God. By abolishing human definitions of fairness, by obliterating an algebra of merit, the landowner models a way of grace that is truly unnerving. You might have noticed the cartoon I included in the bulletin this morning—I just couldn’t resist sharing such a funny treatment of the gospel passage. This divine landowner seems to have no mind for business and no concern for profit-margins. God really is abundant to the point of appearing bonkers. But beyond the joke, this parable calls out a very real seed of envy and a very potent sense of entitlement within human nature. Imagine yourself in the place of those early bird workers. You have worked hard for what you have. You have earned your share of the profit—you deserve your piece of the pie. So when you find out that the folks who have been lollygagging at the marketplace all day are receiving the same payment as you… well, that’s when our righteous indignation flares up. No matter how many times we’ve been told “life isn’t fair,” we still want to know that our cookie is as big as anyone else’s. We still want to believe that a man who works twice as long should receive twice as much.
And no matter how much we grumble and whine, the God revealed to us through Jesus Christ just will not abide by our standards of fairness. What that landowner wanted was for his workers to have enough for the day. No more and no less. This concept of immediate, daily needs is pretty important to God. It comes up a handful of times in scripture. Proverbs 30:8 petitions, “give me neither poverty nor riches, feed with the food that I need.” And every time we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us, we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” No more and no less. So we really shouldn’t be surprised that justice, to God, means that each and every laborer in the vineyard should receive what he needs to get through the day.
In God’s economics, what we have earned and accumulated is worth nothing. What we give and what we share—how closely we have been able to imitate the kind of generosity demonstrated by the Landowner and by his son, Jesus—that’s what God cares about. One of my colleagues in ministry, Jerry Goebel, writes that when we encounter God face to face, God “will not ask us how much profit we amazed while on earth; he will ask how broke we became- broken hearted, broken in love, broken and blessed! It is in the breaking of the bread that we are blessed, it was in the breaking of Christ’s body, it is in the breaking of our pride and greed. Our blessing comes in giving, not hoarding.”
The parable of the laborers in the vineyard is ultimately about our capacity to respond to the first commandment, particularly that part in the small print about loving our neighbors. By responding to the landowner’s generosity with fitful envy, the laborers revealed that they would rather their neighbors go hungry, rather than allow their concept of fairness to be crushed by the landowner. And knowing Jesus, the definition of “neighbor” is cast widely. Our neighbors include those who look, speak, believe, and act differently than us. Our neighbors include not only our friends and family, but our most determined enemies, those folks we foolishly judge to be completely undeserving of the grace of God. This parable is convicting, because it reveals how easy it is to be unloving, how tempting it is to flaunt our supposed goodness in front of God as if God will forget that we were all once idle and purposeless in the marketplace. This parable blows the whistle on our game of self-righteousness, in which we define the boundaries of mercy as if we earned the grace that God has given us.
This parable is a sober reminder that loving our neighbors doesn’t always mean doing what is prudent, logical, or fair. It is a humbling lesson about the character of real love, the quality and density of love that genuinely seeks the goodwill of all people. If we thought we could love our neighbors without caring deeply for their needs, we have been exposed as sentimental at best and hypocritical at worst.
For all painful conviction this parable serves up, it also proclaims the good news loud and clear. This parable is a joyful reminder that all will receive the gift of God’s unconditional love and grace. Each and every laborer was given what he needed to survive and thrive—the first and the last alike. It may be hard to loosen our grip on what we think we are entitled to. It may be hard to get over the lie that the last one to finish the race is a rotten egg. But once we do, once we recognize that everything is God’s, once we inhale the grace of God and realize that it is sufficient, we are freed to be broken by generosity. Broken, and blessed.
I wonder if I should begin with an apology. The scriptural story we’re considering today is one that is extraordinarily offensive—there really should be warning labels on texts such as this one. It is much more appalling than an R-rated movie. It offends our sense of fairness and topples our concept of love. And it breaks God out of the jail cell we so often put him in, revealing a God who is so merciful and so gracious we are left infuriated, mystified, and maybe even humbled.
The parable of the laborers of the vineyard is what my mother would call a “humdinger.” Jesus once again uses brilliant images to reveal the nature of the Kingdom of God to his disciples, spinning a story worth telling and retelling. In this scripture, a landowner goes out and hires workers to contribute to the hard work of cultivating growth in his vineyard. He finds his workers in the marketplace, where they congregate to wait for work. The first batch is hired at the crack of dawn. These workers are promised a denarius, the amount of money needed to support a family for one day. The workers were probably thrilled that they had been discovered by a landowner willing to pay them a living wage—I imagine they often had to settle for less. The laborers get to work as the sun continues to get exponentially hotter on their backs.
Meanwhile, the landowner returns to the marketplace, hiring more workers at 9:00a.m., a respectable enough time to start a day’s work. Their wage is not discussed; the landowner simply assures them that they will be paid “what is right.” More workers are hired throughout the day, at noon and at three and at five o’ clock. When the sun retreats, and the landowner is ready to call it a day, he has his manager attend to the payroll. Starting with the workers hired last—the workers who did the least amount of work in the vineyard, the workers with the least pain in their muscles and sunburn on their foreheads—he proceeds to pay each and every single worker the same amount. One denarius, enough for each of them to support themselves and their families for the day—the wage that had been promised to the early bird workers. As you can imagine, the workers are livid. They grumble about the perceived slight—only to be rebuffed by the landowner, who reminds them that they received exactly what they were promised. He says, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
We are invited to imagine that this landowner reflects something of the nature of God. By abolishing human definitions of fairness, by obliterating an algebra of merit, the landowner models a way of grace that is truly unnerving. You might have noticed the cartoon I included in the bulletin this morning—I just couldn’t resist sharing such a funny treatment of the gospel passage. This divine landowner seems to have no mind for business and no concern for profit-margins. God really is abundant to the point of appearing bonkers. But beyond the joke, this parable calls out a very real seed of envy and a very potent sense of entitlement within human nature. Imagine yourself in the place of those early bird workers. You have worked hard for what you have. You have earned your share of the profit—you deserve your piece of the pie. So when you find out that the folks who have been lollygagging at the marketplace all day are receiving the same payment as you… well, that’s when our righteous indignation flares up. No matter how many times we’ve been told “life isn’t fair,” we still want to know that our cookie is as big as anyone else’s. We still want to believe that a man who works twice as long should receive twice as much.
And no matter how much we grumble and whine, the God revealed to us through Jesus Christ just will not abide by our standards of fairness. What that landowner wanted was for his workers to have enough for the day. No more and no less. This concept of immediate, daily needs is pretty important to God. It comes up a handful of times in scripture. Proverbs 30:8 petitions, “give me neither poverty nor riches, feed with the food that I need.” And every time we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us, we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” No more and no less. So we really shouldn’t be surprised that justice, to God, means that each and every laborer in the vineyard should receive what he needs to get through the day.
In God’s economics, what we have earned and accumulated is worth nothing. What we give and what we share—how closely we have been able to imitate the kind of generosity demonstrated by the Landowner and by his son, Jesus—that’s what God cares about. One of my colleagues in ministry, Jerry Goebel, writes that when we encounter God face to face, God “will not ask us how much profit we amazed while on earth; he will ask how broke we became- broken hearted, broken in love, broken and blessed! It is in the breaking of the bread that we are blessed, it was in the breaking of Christ’s body, it is in the breaking of our pride and greed. Our blessing comes in giving, not hoarding.”
The parable of the laborers in the vineyard is ultimately about our capacity to respond to the first commandment, particularly that part in the small print about loving our neighbors. By responding to the landowner’s generosity with fitful envy, the laborers revealed that they would rather their neighbors go hungry, rather than allow their concept of fairness to be crushed by the landowner. And knowing Jesus, the definition of “neighbor” is cast widely. Our neighbors include those who look, speak, believe, and act differently than us. Our neighbors include not only our friends and family, but our most determined enemies, those folks we foolishly judge to be completely undeserving of the grace of God. This parable is convicting, because it reveals how easy it is to be unloving, how tempting it is to flaunt our supposed goodness in front of God as if God will forget that we were all once idle and purposeless in the marketplace. This parable blows the whistle on our game of self-righteousness, in which we define the boundaries of mercy as if we earned the grace that God has given us.
This parable is a sober reminder that loving our neighbors doesn’t always mean doing what is prudent, logical, or fair. It is a humbling lesson about the character of real love, the quality and density of love that genuinely seeks the goodwill of all people. If we thought we could love our neighbors without caring deeply for their needs, we have been exposed as sentimental at best and hypocritical at worst.
For all painful conviction this parable serves up, it also proclaims the good news loud and clear. This parable is a joyful reminder that all will receive the gift of God’s unconditional love and grace. Each and every laborer was given what he needed to survive and thrive—the first and the last alike. It may be hard to loosen our grip on what we think we are entitled to. It may be hard to get over the lie that the last one to finish the race is a rotten egg. But once we do, once we recognize that everything is God’s, once we inhale the grace of God and realize that it is sufficient, we are freed to be broken by generosity. Broken, and blessed.
9.13.2005
Visit Week of Compassion
If you are interested in finding out more about how The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is responding to Hurricane Katrina, visit Week of Compassion. In addition to information about how monies collected for the relief operation are being utilized, the site also includes updates from Disciples of Christ congregation affected by the disaster.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)