No Limits

a Sermon for Proper 19A
Text: Matthew 18:21-35

Where we've been
Ten years ago today, about this time, 4 hijacked airplanes were used as projectile missiles to cause dramatic and traumatic devastation. Three of them reached their targets and one was sent into the countryside. Many, including those aiding the victims of violence, died. Nearly 3,000 in all.

One of our favorite ways to pay homage to this tragedy is to play the “where were you” game. At approximately 10:50, we were no doubt still scrambling for information; still looking to make sense out of what seemed so senseless. I was working in a bookstore. One of our managers sat all morning in his office, coming out onto the book floor to give us updates. I remember the confusion, the fear, the corporate anxiety. We didn’t know anything.

So what did we do? We responded. Actually, we went hunting—to use former President Bush’s language. We went hunting with guns and dogs. We invaded two countries, rounded up and imprisoned thousands. Death tolls at the conservative end count well more than 100,000 Iraqis killed in the last decade.

We changed the way we treat each other, becoming a culture of suspicion. We changed our expectations for air travel, of what we can expect of one another, what we will consent to, even what we expect will bring us security. 

All of this, the past 10 years has been motivated by that moment, that fear, and those accusations. Those suspicions, that willingness to enter into the human desire for revenge.

It's about forgiveness
If you doubt the place of providence—the place of God’s interaction with us—then look at our readings. Look at our gospel. A gospel about forgiveness and torture on this auspicious anniversary. Perfect isn’t it? Notice that Peter’s question of Jesus that kicks off this gospel passage isn’t truly elementary. He isn’t asking whether or not to forgive a transgression—a personal transgression no less—but something more. For those new to faith, this is the starting place. His teaching has gone out elsewhere in this way:

If I’m hurt by someone, do I forgive them or kick them out? Do I retaliate? 

Jesus says

forgive. 

The next question becomes more specific:

Who must I forgive? 

And Jesus elaborates:

Forgive. Not just your friends, but your enemies also. 

So now we get to that graduate level question. The one that is for all followers that get that this is all about forgiveness; that the entire deal of following Christ, of loving God is about forgiveness. Peter asks

"Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" 

Peter’s question may as well be

When is enough enough? Where do we draw the line?

Jesus’s response, a reference to Lamech in Genesis (4:23-24) is to say

Draw it out here—where you will never reach it.

Then he tells Peter this parable about a slave who owes a debt that is impossible to pay off. The slave, looking for some small mercy, hopes to be given an opportunity to give it a shot anyway. Instead, the debt is completely forgiven. Now the slave turns around and abuses another slave indebted to him. The first slave locks him away with no hope of repaying his debt.

At this point, the other slaves sell the first slave out to the lord who turns around and punishes that slave who was once shown incredible mercy, torturing him and putting that impossible debt back onto him.

Forgiveness is not just about GOD.
This gospel is really troubling because Jesus even connects the dots at the end saying

This is what God will do to all of you if you don’t forgive.

Full stop.  Forgive, period.

Remember that this parable deals with Peter’s question: what are the limits of our forgiveness? And Jesus tells him there aren’t any. This whole deal is about forgiveness because the world around us wants retaliation and revenge. Jesus says to forgive without limits.

 Many Christians can connect these dots easily: the lord in the parable forgives an unpayable debt, so the Great Mystery we call God forgives us of our indebtedness through sin. I’m pretty cool with that reading, except Jesus is much more concerned with what we do with that forgiveness. That we don’t indebt others, that we forgive, and that our forgiveness knows no limits. It isn’t just about being forgiven, but also forgiving others. Jesus knows this is hard. He knows that his hearers were raised in a world of retaliation and evil. And He knows that many will hate to hear this because the human mind lusts after revenge.

And yet, the heart loves love.

This message of forgiveness isn’t about a program like paying it forward or random acts of kindness, though these methods are good. It is about recalibrating our hearts to forgiveness. Rejecting our brains’ meticulous revenge fantasies and focusing on our broad, forgiving hearts.

Sharing forgiveness
So here we are on September 11, 2011, ten years later, and we have a gospel message of forgiveness. I’m reminded of the hymn:

There's a wideness in God's mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice,
which is more than liberty. 

We’re being called to this radical forgiveness like a conviction. We haven’t been in a forgiving mood. As a country, we haven’t had one day in 10 years in which our operating mood was forgiveness. But anniversaries give us the chance to get rid of all that. To exercise old demons; to let go of our own blood lust and forgive from our hearts.

 Don’t we feel it? That corporate and personal need to forgive? Don’t we feel the need to seek forgiveness? To ask God to forgive us? Hasn’t the last 10 years been Hell? The anger, the infighting, the bitterness. That is the stuff of Hell. But we can be forgiven. If we ask for it, God will forgive us.

 Right now, in this assembly, we can ask God and our neighbors for forgiveness. So are we up to it? We can forgive and be forgiven. We can wipe the slate clean and begin to heal this broken world with our no limits forgiveness.

So in a moment we will pray, confess, and receive God’s absolution. And as we do so, I ask that we offer up all the grudges and evil we carry and ask for our own forgiveness—that the grace of God will make it possible for us to forgive—so that when we share the peace, we do so with the wideness of God’s mercy. We’ll prepare the table eat together as one. Then we will throw open the doors to love everyone and let our forgiveness pour out from this place.

Blessed

a Sermon for Epiphany 4A
Text: Matthew 5:1-12

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a fleshing out of those notes as best as I can.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you gave us Jesus as Messiah and Lord. Open our hearts to love as he loves, our imaginations to dream as he dreams, and our eyes to see the world as he sees it. Amen.

The first five words of the gospel give us an interesting way to see this very familiar gospel of the Beatitudes:

“When Jesus saw the crowds.”

We don’t know what he sees, or what he makes of it, but this symbol is very powerful; Jesus saw them.

Who we are not talking about
Jesus gives us a pretty good description throughout each of the gospels of the people to whom we are to minister. In many places, it is the outsider, such as…

1. People from another tribe—like the Samaritans,
2. Traitors to the tribe—tax collectors were seen as traitors because they were Jews that taxed other Jews on behalf of Rome, and of course,
3. The ritually impure within the tribe—prostitutes and other “sinners” whose very livelihood kept them from being considered one of the “normal” people.

In other places we get a glimpse of those that fall through the cracks: the destitute and the desperate—the poor, the sick, the disabled.

Through all of these stories of Jesus talking to, eating with, advocating for these groups, we start to harmonize them and see any of Jesus’s teachings about others as being about this faceless group of outsiders, condemned by Jewish society. We make the relevant translation to our own world and see the homeless we’ve met or the people we’ve helped in the words of the gospel. But today, let’s not do that. These might be the people Jesus really is talking about in this gospel, but for today, let’s not think about them. Let’s say that this has nothing to do with others. In fact, this has to do with us.


9 that are blessed
The way the Beatitudes are set up is as nine blessings. The first is telling: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. We often jump to the other with this one. We think of the depressed, or the doubter, or the one unhappy in church. If we were Evangelicals, we call these “the unchurched.” Instead, let’s see this as people that look out the window and see the trouble in the world. People that are hurt by the pain they see through that window, and are made sad by destruction and evil.

The next is “Blessed are those who mourn”. This isn’t simply widows, but all of those who grieve what they or others have lost: all people that know loss and are pained by what is gone.

“Blessed are the meek” isn’t just talking about the weak or the timid, but all those who refuse to watch one more person get hurt or abused—and we also refuse to be the one who does it.

These first three are more or less passive, or receptive. What is seen affects their outlook and begins to affect their action. The next three are increasingly active.

The fourth, and I love the way this is described, is “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. Think about those descriptors: how do we feel hunger, but as the very seizing of our stomachs—a pain that rises from our bellies. Thirst is similar: our throats get itchy and irritated, our tongues and mouths get dry and scratchy; our entire neck and heads scream out for relief. For those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, it is the very body that feels and reflects the pain of injustice—compelling us to relieve that pain.

The fifth, “Blessed are the merciful” are those who reject vengeance and hatred, because there is already too much of that, and instead respond to everything with compassion and love.

The sixth, “Blessed are the pure in heart” are those who do not respond out of intellect or tradition, but out of GOD’s righteousness.

Each of these “blesseds” builds up to the seventh; the crux of the whole thing, and the most active: “blessed are the peacemakers”.

And the last two are what happens in response to how we act, seemingly bringing us back to the receptive beginning:

8. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake
9. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Christ is the Beatitudes
This entire conversation isn’t a list of tasks for Christians. It isn’t simply an ethic.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

“Action in accord with Christ does not originate in some ethical principle, but in the very person of Jesus Christ.” (Ethics 2005, 231)

Jesus is the center of the Beatitudes.

Notice that the gospel’s description is not simply what would be if we did this, but the future that will be when we are this.

Remember? “Blessed are the meek”—not “you will be blessed when you choose to be meek”.

The Two Most Important Words
This gospel uses two really important words that we should look at.

1. Blessed: We take the word blessed to mean blessings in life—some of you (not me) have been blessed with good looks or wealth or talents. In other words, the stuff we get from GOD. A more ancient and appropriate understanding would be sanctified or consecrated or holy. ‘Holy are the meek’.
2. Peace: The 21st Century American English word is so inadequate to describe Jesus’s intentions for us. All we know about peace is the absence of war or conflict. Jesus meant, and would have used the Hebrew word Shalom. Shalom doesn’t simply mean the absence of war or conflict, but

Safety…
happiness…
justice & truth…
Wholeness, completeness…
The well-being of others.

This is why the seventh Beatitude is so important to the whole gospel: “Holy are the Shalom-makers, for they will be called children of God.” We know that it is our job to bring wholeness and completeness to the world. That we are the ones that transform this gospel about other people into a gospel about us in this world. That these Beatitudes are, in fact, about us.

The Jesus at the center of this gospel, longs for us to make this world complete in the hear and now. He has given us a vision of the Kingdom and about who we are to be. We are invited to be reconciled and to reconcile, to love and to be loved. To share in the sanctified as poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, righteousness seers, mercy bestowers, lovers, and shalommakers.

May we be receptive to the world, moved and inspired by righteousness and love, that we seek mercy instead of vengeance, hope in the face of despair, and justice when we feel pain; and may the world be so transformed that we see one another as blessed. Amen.

Getting a Job in Jesus’s Economy

Text: Matthew 20:1-16

Two words come to mind when reading that gospel: not fair. Jesus’s parable, spoken to the disciples doesn’t seem fair, the landowner doesn’t seem to be treating these laborers fairly, and the fact that we know that Jesus is talking about our relationship with God, well, that seems to make it worse. How fair is it that somebody working out in the sun all day would receive the same wage as someone that was working for an hour? It just isn’t.

The landowner goes into the marketplace and chooses some day laborers and agrees to give a daily wage for a day’s work. The laborers agree and go inside. Then the landowner goes out again at 9:00, noon, and 3:00, each time finding laborers willing to work, ushering them into the vineyard with the promise that they would receive “what was right” (a promise of justice). Lastly, an hour before the end of the workday, the landowner goes out again and finds more laborers standing around. He asks them “Why are you standing here idle all day?” To which they reply “Because no one has hired us.” We don’t know what is going on with these people, what took them so long to get there, but we are already upset, worrying about those that have been working in that vineyard all day. And when Jesus flips around the line to receive wages, that the last in get to be first out and they are getting the same wage as everyone else¸ it makes us want to scream, doesn’t it? It just doesn’t seem fair.

And even though we’re willing to admit that some people have it harder, that some people have life stacked up against them, it doesn’t preclude the landowner from being responsible. A flat tire on the way to work is an excuse. Childcare, foster care, or caring for one’s elderly parent doesn’t get us very much in the sympathy department—you still have to show up to work on time. Life has to be separate from work. Any sympathy we might have for those laborers, seemingly showing up at the last minute, is nothing compared with our sense of unfairness in this passage.

There are so many ways in which we look around at all of those around us and say “that’s not fair”. We like to compare ourselves, where we’re at, with others, don’t we? We look at the stuff in our neighbor’s yard and we say, “well, maybe I should get a sail boat. I don’t know how to sail…but I’ve always wanted to learn!” Or we see fairness as all paying the same. An early episode of Friends highlighted the problems people from different situations have in balancing fairness. The group goes to a nice restaurant and the three with steady, high-earning jobs expect the group to split the bill into six pieces equally. To many this is fair. When it is highlighted to those three that it isn’t fair, that the other three didn’t spend as much, each pays for his or her own—another variation of fair. But for those three, even going to that expensive restaurant wasn’t fair—they couldn’t afford a full meal—in gospel terms—a day’s bread.

And our gospel doesn’t just deal with fairness of wage, but fairness of interaction: as each set of laborers receives a different promise, with different respect. Isn’t that part of our irritation, part of what makes this gospel seem unfair? Don’t we think that the hardest working, the most talented, and strongest among us deserve the highest reward? Don’t we reward success and punish laziness? How could the same wage be fair?

Our state and federal governments have often tried to find ways to make things more fair, progressive taxation, affirmative action, Medicare, Medicaid to name a few. But our understanding of fairness seems less interested in theoreticals and strangers than in the people we know. We obsess about what our neighbor has or what our neighbor receives—that we forget to notice who they are and what is really going on with them.

Jesus’s economic justice is unfair.

In the setup for our gospel, the preceding passage was the one about the young rich man who is told to give up his possessions (he doesn’t). Then Jesus teaches the disciples about wealth using the example of the camel through the eye of the needle. Lastly, Peter asks—‘we’ve done all that, so what do we get?’ Jesus responds by telling them that they’ve got a special place, but don’t forget: “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

For Jesus, it isn’t fairness—it’s justice. It’s breaking free of egocentrism: “What do I get?” and revel in the glory of God. That Kingdom work on Earth will raise up every valley and make every hill low. This isn’t an environmental or agricultural suggestion—it is an economic reality! The landowner has agreed to hand out a usual day’s wage to anyone who works in the vineyard—an agreement that the eager beavers accept with no reservation. They only get upset when it occurs to them that someone else will get the same: someone that they judge as inferior; someone they judge as lesser and undeserving of such mercy. What do I get? A daily wage—enough to get me through today. Tomorrow is another day and these same laborers will be out in the marketplace again, looking for work, looking for a generous landowner that will overlook today’s tantrum or performance, negotiating another contract for a day’s wage.

According to Jesus’s Economy, we get the daily opportunity to make a daily wage from a generous landowner. We get the chance every day, regardless of where we come from, to turn to God with the hope of mercy and justice.

Talking about justice and the economy reminds me of a place that certainly doesn’t represent Jesus’s Economy: Mississippi. We know that Mississippi has one of the worst economies in the country, but they have a regressive tax structure, which means the poor pay a higher percentage of their wages in state taxes than the wealthy: in fact, they pay nearly three times as much. For us, Jesus’s Economy is one of justice, not fairness. It is one in which circumstances and ability do not keep a person from receiving the uncompromised love of God. It is one in which we are given the opportunity to share in this ministry with God, showing courageous, unbridled love to all.

It also reinforces the position Jesus takes in Matthew 19:30 and in the Beatitudes in which the last are first: those last picked for kickball or for a debate team; those ignored because they live in the wrong place and do the wrong things; those driven to the edge of our consciousness must be placed in the center of it. Making the last first (and our rightful place at the end of the line) is to give them the preferential position, closest to God’s heart; loving the poor and the marginalized with incredible love.

What is so hard for most of us to get is that the Kingdom of God is not a meritocracy. Praying harder or better doesn’t get you a better parking spot in heaven any more than it does at the mall. The true gift is working in the kingdom, getting the chance to share in God’s mercy by showing it. By leveling the playingfield for others. By taking the same wage that God freely gives to others. This is the reward for hardvwork, this is the opportunity in Jesus’s Economy. When we adopt it, we aren’t going to make a lot of money, but we are assured of one thing: Jesus loves us. That’s the binding contract. That’s the payment we receive, regardless of whether we were picked first or last for kickball, regardless of the mistakes we’ve made (and will make again). And to all who have been pushed to the margins, forgotten or exploited by our secular economy, overcome by their physical and environmental conditions, God in Jesus says “You are loved. Come on in. These people will gladly make room for you in the treasured seat next to me.”