This morning you’ll notice we mixed up the order of the readings a little bit. That’s because I really want to pay attention to is the Jonah reading. The lectionary only gives us the end of it but to really get the whole scope of it, I’m going to go ahead and sort of paraphrase the whole story for you.
Our story begins: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” So Jonah went…to Joppa to find a ship going to Tarshish. Now, to put this in perspective, this is would be like God saying, I want you to go to Chicago, and responding, OK, sounds good, only about four hours to the Mackinaw bridge from here, and from there it’s just a short hop across the UP into Canada and on to Nova Scotia. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, in what is modern-day Syria, east of Israel. Tarshish, however, was a seaport on the western coast of Spain, so basically as far west as one could go without falling off the edge of the known world. Now in fairness to Jonah, the Assyrians were not known for their niceness. They had a well-earned reputation for violence and conquest, and they were really the worst enemies of the Israelites. So Jonah had good reason to fear going there. But the edge of the known world seems maybe a little bit extreme.
When Jonah got to Joppa, he bought a ticket, boarded a boat, and promptly fell asleep. Running away from the presence of God is pretty exhausting work. But the ship was not too far out into the Mediterranean when a massive storm blew in, threatening to destroy the boat. The captain woke up Jonah and pleaded with him to call on God to spare them, but still the storm raged. So finally, Jonah is like, you know what, you’re going to have to just throw me into the sea, I guess. And the sailors are like, we don’t want to do that, if you’re a prophet, your God’s going to be pretty mad at us for drowning you. But Jonah’s like, nope, the only way God will spare you, is if you throw me into the sea. So, what could they do, they threw him into the sea.
But before he drown, a giant fish came and swallowed him whole. Now Jonah’s certainly having a pretty bad day here, but you know who’s having a worse day is the fish. I mean, Jonah chose to run away from God, and Jonah told the sailors to throw him overboard. But the poor fish, he’s just swimming by, minding his own business, doing whatever fish do, and suddenly he’s called upon to swallow this, rather disagreeable, human, and keep him in his stomach. Can’t digest the guy, can’t even chew him up a little bit, just this huge lump of grumpy human sitting in his belly whining about how God, who, mind you, just saved him from drowning, is picking on him. Talk about some serious indigestion!
So finally, after three days of this, God spoke to the fish, and the fish, and this is directly from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, “spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.” Spewed isn’t even really the best translation of the Hebrew here, really the fish vomited Jonah onto the shore. Seriously, if anyone tells you the Bible is boring, have them read Jonah. Especially if that person happens to be a preteen boy.
So now Jonah’s out of the water and back on the land. And for a second time, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, saying “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” And this time, Jonah goes to Nineveh, an “exceedingly large city,” literally in the Hebrew, “a great city to God.” It’s such a huge place that it took three days to walk across it, the same amount of time, remember, that Jonah was in the belly of the fish. But Jonah didn’t make it the full trip across Nineveh, he got about a day’s walk in. He was supposed to be proclaiming a message of judgment, shouting “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be over thrown.” But I wonder how enthusiastically he shouted this message. Was he really shouting? Or was he walking along, sort of unobtrusively, “nothing to see here, nothing to see, forty days, God’s going to overthrow the city, but just, you know, go about your business, don’t let me bother you…”
But even just a day’s walk into the city, the response of the Ninevites was sudden and intense. As soon as they heard the message, they instantly believed God, proclaimed a fast, and begged God for mercy. This brings us to our reading for this morning. Jonah chapter three, verse ten through chapter 4, verse eleven.
“When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. —I love this here, I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and somehow Jonah makes that sound like a bad thing. —And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” — Really Jonah, better for you to die then to live, because you succeeded in your mission and an entire city of people was not completely destroyed? — And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. — Basically, Jonah goes out of the city to pout for a while, and while he’s out there pouting—The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” A Word for God’s people. Thanks be to God.
So here’s what I love about the Jonah story. First off, was there ever such an annoying, thick-headed, little twerp as Jonah? I mean, seriously, ran away to Joppa, whined for three days in the belly of a fish, really apathetically proclaimed God’s message, and then got angry when God saved an entire city full of people. And then got even more angry when the bush he was sitting under died and he had to sit in the sun for the afternoon. Except he didn’t have to sit in the sun. He could have gone into the city, gone home to Israel, really done anything other than sit pouting under a tree, hoping that God might still reign down fire, even though God is, annoyingly apparently, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
But here’s the thing, as annoying and wrong-headed as Jonah was, as many times as Jonah got it wrong, went in the wrong direction, got worked up about something silly, God was determined that Jonah would finish, and not just finish but succeed beyond his wildest dreams, at the task which God had called him to.
And that is great news for us for a lot of reasons. I think, or I hope at least, that Jonah looked back on this event and thought, wow, was I ever a bad prophet. And that’s certainly a feeling I can relate to. Jonah’s a pretty extreme example, but even when I’m actually trying to spread this message of God’s forgiveness, it’s hard to be a prophet and even my best attempts fall flat. But if Jonah, whiney, apathetic Jonah, managed to save an entire city, maybe God can, and in fact is, using my weak attempts at spreading the Gospel.
But I think the best news in this story is maybe also the most challenging. And it’s this, that only God gets to decide who is and who is not forgiven. And God is, whether we like it or not, “a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Jonah was all prepared to send the Ninevites off to damnation, he saw nothing worth saving in these people who he saw as sinners. But God wanted to rescue the Ninevites, and nothing Jonah could do or say was going to change God’s mind. The Ninevites, more than one hundred and twenty people and also many animals, mattered to God.
It’s great news for the days when we feel like the Ninevites. When it maybe feels like we’re too far gone, too broken, too outside the realm of God to be forgiven. Or if someone has told us, you don’t matter, you’re too far gone to be saved. The Jonah story tells us that it doesn’t matter what the people of God may have decided about you, God loves you. That God is always, always, always, a merciful God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That God is always concerned about God’s people, no matter how far they have strayed.
This is good news, but there is also a challenge for us here. Because Jonah’s judgmentalness, while I’ve sort of made fun of it here, is a real temptation. So here’s the challenge. Sometimes God forgives people that we don’t necessarily think deserve God’s forgiveness. If God is truly, “a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” sometimes God is going to forgive people that we don’t want God to. This story tells us that God’s forgiveness is open to everyone, regardless of who they are or whether we like them or how they got invited to the party. Even the Ninevites, even Jonah, even us. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Monday, September 15, 2014
"Father, Forgive Them": A Sermon on Matthew 18:21-35
Poor Peter seems to be at it again this morning. After totally nailing who Jesus is, he seems to spend the rest of Matthew’s Gospel not quite getting the point being made. So last week, if you remember, Jesus laid out for his disciples what they were to do if conflict arose in their communities. How they were to approach each other, talk it out, and try to move forward. This morning we hear that Peter took the opportunity to sort of push the question a little bit. OK, Peter says, so this whole talk it out thing is great, but really, let’s talk details. If someone sins against me, how many times do I have to forgive them? Like seven times? Which, if you think about it, is kind of a lot of times. Takes seven times to make a habit. Also, interesting fact, seven is a number that shows up a lot in the scriptures. God created the world in seven days; the Israelites marched around Jericho seven times, for seven days, holding seven trumpets; it took Solomon seven years to build the temple. Seven is a number that represented completeness in the Israeli tradition. So there’s some theological backing to Peter picking seven as a “complete” amount of forgiveness. It’s a good, solid, biblical number of times. But Jesus ups the ante. Not seven, but seventy-seven, or seventy times seven. Either way, the point is multiple sevens, which is like more than completeness.
The point Jesus makes with Peter here is that there is a fundamental difference between the account-based system Peter is proposing and the radical nature of God’s forgiveness. The problem really comes down to a problem of scale. As humans, we are finite creatures in a finite system. We exist in a world bound by space and time, numbers and math. There’s nothing good or bad about this, it simply is. In fact, there’s really something sacred about it, because in the incarnation, Jesus came and bound himself by the same finiteness. When Jesus was on earth, he was under the same laws of gravity and physics that affect all of us. So when Peter tried to assess a number to forgiveness, it comes out of this reality of his finitude. There really is only so much to go around. But here’s the problem Peter’s facing, God is not bound by the same finitude that we are. So God’s reality exists on level that is not mathematical or logical. To help make sense of this, Jesus uses a parable.
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. One slave owed him ten thousand talents.
I tried to translate ten thousand talents into modern currency to give you a sense of the comparison, and here’s what I learned. A talent was worth like fifteen years worth of wages for an average laborer. But more than that, a talent was the largest increment of money that existed. And the concept of infinity as a number didn’t exist yet, so ten thousand, a myriad in the Greek, is the largest number that there was. So ten thousand talents is the largest possible amount of money that there could be. The slave could not owe the master more money, because there wasn’t an amount higher than this. You know when two kids are bickering about something and the first one is like, yeah, well I’m right times infinity, and then the other one is like, yeah, well I’m right times infinity plus infinity. That’s basically what Jesus has done to Peter’s argument with this parable. It’s a reduction to absurdity.
And even though the slave owed the king basically all of the money that existed, when the slave begged for mercy, the king granted it. Which is pretty amazing. The king just threw away all that he was owed. And we might have judged the king for his poor money management, were it not for what happened next. That very same slave, having just been set free from this astronomical debt, comes across someone who owes him money. One hundred denarii is the debt, about a hundred days wages. So no small sum either, but not all of the money that had ever existed. And we would expect for the forgiven man to show mercy, right. That would be just, that would be fair. It would be a way for the man to pay back for the mercy he’d received.
But he didn’t. Instead he demanded what he was owed, throwing his fellow slave in prison until he could recoup his losses. And everyone was, of course, disgusted with the first slave, and went and told the master. And the master called the first slave in, chastised him for his failure to show mercy, and threw him in prison. And so too, ends the parable, will your heavenly father do to you, if you do not show mercy. Pretty cut and dry.
At least, it seems pretty cut and dry. But here’s a couple things about parables. First, because we are analytical beings, we tend to try to make parables allegorical, to assign each character a roll. God is the king, or the farmer, or the sower, we the servant, the plant, the weed, angels are harvesters, etc. And that works, to a point. But one theologian I love remarks that using parables to explain concepts is like using riddles to give directions to the airport. Parables get us thinking in the right direction but trying to make these sorts of direct connections always sell them short. God instead exists for us in the intersections of the parables, in the ways the characters come together and in how those interactions change us.
Second, parables can be read as either prescriptive or descriptive. We tend to read them prescriptively, if you do this, then this will happen. But in the Greek, “if” and “when” are the same word. So sometimes parables are more descriptive. They don’t describe the consequences of our actions; they describe the world we already live in.
So what if this parable Jesus shares this morning, might be more descriptive than prescriptive. What if that last like is better read this is “when you don’t forgive” rather than “if you don’t forgive”? What if Jesus is telling Peter, when you do not forgive, you hold yourself captive?
All of us carry scars of places where we have been hurt by other children of God. Some scars are visible, some are invisible, but all of us carry them. And God wants desperately to heal those scars, to bring us to a place of wholeness. But those scars came at a cost, a cost we had to pay. And when we are focused in recouping our cost, when our hands and our hearts are full of what we are owed, we don’t have space to hold the gift of mercy and grace which God is extending to us. But when we are able to let go, when we are able to open our hands and our hearts, we find that we have been invited into a different system altogether, a system that is based not on accounting, but on abundance. That less than what the other person deserves is somehow more than we can imagine.
That’s the power of forgiveness. Not that it changes the other person, but that it changes us. Forgiveness is not about love, or even about liking. It’s not about restoring relationship necessarily, and it’s certainly not about forgetting. But it is about deciding that the past will not hold you captive anymore, that whoever has sinned against you will not be permitted to live rent free in your soul, and you will live into the promised reign of God. Forgiveness is about giving up the pain so that God can heal your hurts, mend your scars.
This is hard, God knows it’s hard. Forgiveness takes time, like love it cannot be forced. But we can practice forgiveness. We can practice and like any muscle it will grow stronger. And seventy times seven times God is with us in the practice, coaxing us into an existence that is more than we thought we deserved, more than we think we could be.
As I was prepping for this sermon I came across the story of the first African-American to integrate the New Orleans public school system. Ruby Bridges was six years old when her parents enrolled her in the all-white William Franz Elementary School. The public response was swift and immediate. Looking back, Bridges remarked that the first day she drove to her new school she, “thought it was Marti Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of thing goes on in New Orleans at Marti Gras.” She couldn’t imagine all that commotion was about her. The first day the chaos was so great she spent the entire day sitting alone in the school office, surrounded by U.S. Marshals. By the second day, every other student had been pulled from the school, and every teacher but one had resigned. Ruby Bridges was the only student at William Franz Elementary.
But while the students were gone, the crowds outside only got worse. Ruby continued to be escorted to and from school by U.S. Marshals. Crowds shouted obscenities and set up disturbing displays, people threatened her home and her family. Through all of this, little Ruby Bridges marched to school.
To support Ruby through this time, famous child psychiatrist Robert Coles offered to meet with Ruby once a week in her home. On one meeting, Coles remarked he’d noticed Ruby reciting something under her breath every day as she walked to and from the school. Ruby responded that she was reciting a line from the Bible her parents had taught her to say, a line that they hoped would shield their young daughter from the hatred and the violence that she faced every day. Every day, twice a day, as she walked through angry crowds to integrate her school so other kids would not have to suffer as she had, Ruby Bridges recited, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”
That is the power of forgiveness. It is a power that says your sin, your anger, will not have control over me. Not because I am weak, but because I am strong. It is a power that allows us to stand up in the very face of evil and live forward into the coming kingdom of God. Amen.
The point Jesus makes with Peter here is that there is a fundamental difference between the account-based system Peter is proposing and the radical nature of God’s forgiveness. The problem really comes down to a problem of scale. As humans, we are finite creatures in a finite system. We exist in a world bound by space and time, numbers and math. There’s nothing good or bad about this, it simply is. In fact, there’s really something sacred about it, because in the incarnation, Jesus came and bound himself by the same finiteness. When Jesus was on earth, he was under the same laws of gravity and physics that affect all of us. So when Peter tried to assess a number to forgiveness, it comes out of this reality of his finitude. There really is only so much to go around. But here’s the problem Peter’s facing, God is not bound by the same finitude that we are. So God’s reality exists on level that is not mathematical or logical. To help make sense of this, Jesus uses a parable.
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. One slave owed him ten thousand talents.
I tried to translate ten thousand talents into modern currency to give you a sense of the comparison, and here’s what I learned. A talent was worth like fifteen years worth of wages for an average laborer. But more than that, a talent was the largest increment of money that existed. And the concept of infinity as a number didn’t exist yet, so ten thousand, a myriad in the Greek, is the largest number that there was. So ten thousand talents is the largest possible amount of money that there could be. The slave could not owe the master more money, because there wasn’t an amount higher than this. You know when two kids are bickering about something and the first one is like, yeah, well I’m right times infinity, and then the other one is like, yeah, well I’m right times infinity plus infinity. That’s basically what Jesus has done to Peter’s argument with this parable. It’s a reduction to absurdity.
And even though the slave owed the king basically all of the money that existed, when the slave begged for mercy, the king granted it. Which is pretty amazing. The king just threw away all that he was owed. And we might have judged the king for his poor money management, were it not for what happened next. That very same slave, having just been set free from this astronomical debt, comes across someone who owes him money. One hundred denarii is the debt, about a hundred days wages. So no small sum either, but not all of the money that had ever existed. And we would expect for the forgiven man to show mercy, right. That would be just, that would be fair. It would be a way for the man to pay back for the mercy he’d received.
But he didn’t. Instead he demanded what he was owed, throwing his fellow slave in prison until he could recoup his losses. And everyone was, of course, disgusted with the first slave, and went and told the master. And the master called the first slave in, chastised him for his failure to show mercy, and threw him in prison. And so too, ends the parable, will your heavenly father do to you, if you do not show mercy. Pretty cut and dry.
At least, it seems pretty cut and dry. But here’s a couple things about parables. First, because we are analytical beings, we tend to try to make parables allegorical, to assign each character a roll. God is the king, or the farmer, or the sower, we the servant, the plant, the weed, angels are harvesters, etc. And that works, to a point. But one theologian I love remarks that using parables to explain concepts is like using riddles to give directions to the airport. Parables get us thinking in the right direction but trying to make these sorts of direct connections always sell them short. God instead exists for us in the intersections of the parables, in the ways the characters come together and in how those interactions change us.
Second, parables can be read as either prescriptive or descriptive. We tend to read them prescriptively, if you do this, then this will happen. But in the Greek, “if” and “when” are the same word. So sometimes parables are more descriptive. They don’t describe the consequences of our actions; they describe the world we already live in.
So what if this parable Jesus shares this morning, might be more descriptive than prescriptive. What if that last like is better read this is “when you don’t forgive” rather than “if you don’t forgive”? What if Jesus is telling Peter, when you do not forgive, you hold yourself captive?
All of us carry scars of places where we have been hurt by other children of God. Some scars are visible, some are invisible, but all of us carry them. And God wants desperately to heal those scars, to bring us to a place of wholeness. But those scars came at a cost, a cost we had to pay. And when we are focused in recouping our cost, when our hands and our hearts are full of what we are owed, we don’t have space to hold the gift of mercy and grace which God is extending to us. But when we are able to let go, when we are able to open our hands and our hearts, we find that we have been invited into a different system altogether, a system that is based not on accounting, but on abundance. That less than what the other person deserves is somehow more than we can imagine.
That’s the power of forgiveness. Not that it changes the other person, but that it changes us. Forgiveness is not about love, or even about liking. It’s not about restoring relationship necessarily, and it’s certainly not about forgetting. But it is about deciding that the past will not hold you captive anymore, that whoever has sinned against you will not be permitted to live rent free in your soul, and you will live into the promised reign of God. Forgiveness is about giving up the pain so that God can heal your hurts, mend your scars.
This is hard, God knows it’s hard. Forgiveness takes time, like love it cannot be forced. But we can practice forgiveness. We can practice and like any muscle it will grow stronger. And seventy times seven times God is with us in the practice, coaxing us into an existence that is more than we thought we deserved, more than we think we could be.
As I was prepping for this sermon I came across the story of the first African-American to integrate the New Orleans public school system. Ruby Bridges was six years old when her parents enrolled her in the all-white William Franz Elementary School. The public response was swift and immediate. Looking back, Bridges remarked that the first day she drove to her new school she, “thought it was Marti Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of thing goes on in New Orleans at Marti Gras.” She couldn’t imagine all that commotion was about her. The first day the chaos was so great she spent the entire day sitting alone in the school office, surrounded by U.S. Marshals. By the second day, every other student had been pulled from the school, and every teacher but one had resigned. Ruby Bridges was the only student at William Franz Elementary.
But while the students were gone, the crowds outside only got worse. Ruby continued to be escorted to and from school by U.S. Marshals. Crowds shouted obscenities and set up disturbing displays, people threatened her home and her family. Through all of this, little Ruby Bridges marched to school.
To support Ruby through this time, famous child psychiatrist Robert Coles offered to meet with Ruby once a week in her home. On one meeting, Coles remarked he’d noticed Ruby reciting something under her breath every day as she walked to and from the school. Ruby responded that she was reciting a line from the Bible her parents had taught her to say, a line that they hoped would shield their young daughter from the hatred and the violence that she faced every day. Every day, twice a day, as she walked through angry crowds to integrate her school so other kids would not have to suffer as she had, Ruby Bridges recited, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”
That is the power of forgiveness. It is a power that says your sin, your anger, will not have control over me. Not because I am weak, but because I am strong. It is a power that allows us to stand up in the very face of evil and live forward into the coming kingdom of God. Amen.
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Joan Rivers, Romans, and the Uncontainable Love of God: A Sermon on Matthew 18:15-20
Karl Barth is quoted as saying that preachers should approach their sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. I’m pretty sure this sermon is not what Barth had in mind when he said that. The news story that’s captured my attention this week is the unexpected passing of Joan Rivers. Not news I ever thought I’d share in a sermon. Mainly because, truth be told, I never found Joan Rivers all that funny. I guess I’d known of her before, but most of my exposure came from watching Fashion Police with my roommate in LA. She liked it, and I liked watching bad TV with my roommate more than other, more productive, things I could have been doing. But I found Rivers’ humor too caustic, and I really could care less about celebrity fashion.
Because I’d mainly associated Joan Rivers with red carpet fashion criticism, I was at first amazed this week when everyone from NPR to 20/20 covered her life. Then as I listened to some of these stories, I was amazed again, this time to discover that Joan Rivers was a comedic icon. Turns out, and maybe you all knew this but I most certainly did not, that Joan Rivers was a trailblazer. In an industry that had been completely male dominated, Joan Rivers really paved the way for female comedians. And she was not just a pioneer for women in comedy but for comedy itself. Her crass, caustic style created stand-up comedy as we know it today, as a means of social commentary and a forum for social change.
In one of the NPR interviews, Rivers shared how when she started in comedy there were all these subjects that couldn’t be talked about. But instead of shying away from these taboo subjects, Rivers came out and made jokes about them. And, I’ll give you, many of the jokes were insensitive and probably inappropriate. But what she discovered in doing this was that by talking, by joking, about issues, it really deflated the power that they had. Suddenly these subjects that had been “off-limits” were able to be discussed openly and worked through in healthier and more productive ways. Through Joan Rivers and people like her, comedy became a form of power, a tool for embracing social issues and taking some of the mystery out of them so they could be dealt with and healed.
But what, you might be wondering, does any of this have to do with our readings for today? Well, I’ll tell you. At its very core, what comedians like Joan Rivers discovered was that our words have power. What we chose to say, but sometimes even more so what goes unsaid. When we don’t talk about something, when we ignore it, push it to the side, hope it goes away, that very act of not bringing something to the light can give it even more power than if we had done the initially harder work of dealing with it upfront.
Unfortunately, that’s not how our Gospel reading for this morning often tends to be read. Instead of offering a framework for conversation, “Matthew 18” becomes a slam text to justify bullying. Have you ever heard this? When Matthew 18 gets used like a verb, a way to justify ganging up on someone we disagree with? I think you’re a sinner, so I tell you that. And if you don’t agree, I bring some buddies, and we tell you you’re a sinner. And if you still don’t agree, we get the church to tell you you’re wrong. And if you still don’t agree, we shun you. Right, that’s what treating someone like a tax collector or a Gentile means? I wish I was exaggerating; I’m not. So often the Bible gets used as this tool to tell people that they are wrong or bad, and that God doesn’t love them, and we don’t have to either.
But here’s the huge, glaring problem with that way of reading of this scripture. The Canaanite woman from the story last week, she was a Gentile. And Matthew, the guy for whom this Gospel is named, he was a tax collector. See the trend here, Jesus didn’t shun tax collectors and Gentiles, he ate with them. He healed their sick. He invited them to travel along with him, to learn from him, to be in relationship with him. He loved them.
Sounds like our Epistle reading from Romans, where Paul talks about how the Roman community is to relate to each other. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” Paul wrote. All the commandments, you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, all of them can be summed up in this one command, love your neighbor as yourself. Paul goes on to say, “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, [let us] put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” Which is great, right. Love each other, don’t hide things in the dark, but bring things to the light. Right, it’s an excellent method for living in community and for being in relationship, just love each other.
Of course, this is like way harder than Paul tries to make it sound. It’s one thing to say we need to love each other, but it’s a totally different thing to actually do it. Especially when the other person seems so darn unlovable.
So I think this Gospel reading is really less about setting up a set of rules regarding how to keep conflict out of our communities, and more about creating a space so open, so full of light, that the darkness that hides within us has no place to flourish. I think maybe, believe it or not, Jesus is encouraging his disciples to be a little bit more like Joan Rivers, a little bit less afraid to say hard things, even if they might be misunderstood, because there is power in speaking truth, because our communities, our relationships are stronger, if we are willing and able to be open and honest with one another.
Here’s the thing. God loves us like crazy. Like more than we can even imagine. And so great is God’s love for us, that this love cannot be contained in a relationship between God and us, it spills out into communities. So much does God love us that God wants us, needs us even, to experience love through each other. And the power in this mutual accountability is that the sin that resides within us, the sin, the pain, the brokenness, that can fester in the darkness of isolation, has nowhere to hide when we come together in communities. When we love one another, when we lift each other up, when we support each other, when we give words to our pain and we hold the words of each other’s pain, that brokenness is driven away in the grace and the love and the forgiveness of God.
That, I think, is the lesson Jesus had for his disciples in this text. That we are stronger together, we are lighter together, that we are more powerful together. That in the love and the grace and the forgiveness of authentic community, the powers of darkness have nowhere to go. It’s hard. We make mistakes, we break relationships, we hurt each other. We’re human. God knows that. But God also knows that only by bringing these hurts to the light of forgiveness can we receive healing, not just for each other, but more importantly, for ourselves. So thanks be to God for people who are willing to speak truth to power, even though it hurts. And thanks be to God for loving us so much that God gave us each other. Amen.
Because I’d mainly associated Joan Rivers with red carpet fashion criticism, I was at first amazed this week when everyone from NPR to 20/20 covered her life. Then as I listened to some of these stories, I was amazed again, this time to discover that Joan Rivers was a comedic icon. Turns out, and maybe you all knew this but I most certainly did not, that Joan Rivers was a trailblazer. In an industry that had been completely male dominated, Joan Rivers really paved the way for female comedians. And she was not just a pioneer for women in comedy but for comedy itself. Her crass, caustic style created stand-up comedy as we know it today, as a means of social commentary and a forum for social change.
In one of the NPR interviews, Rivers shared how when she started in comedy there were all these subjects that couldn’t be talked about. But instead of shying away from these taboo subjects, Rivers came out and made jokes about them. And, I’ll give you, many of the jokes were insensitive and probably inappropriate. But what she discovered in doing this was that by talking, by joking, about issues, it really deflated the power that they had. Suddenly these subjects that had been “off-limits” were able to be discussed openly and worked through in healthier and more productive ways. Through Joan Rivers and people like her, comedy became a form of power, a tool for embracing social issues and taking some of the mystery out of them so they could be dealt with and healed.
But what, you might be wondering, does any of this have to do with our readings for today? Well, I’ll tell you. At its very core, what comedians like Joan Rivers discovered was that our words have power. What we chose to say, but sometimes even more so what goes unsaid. When we don’t talk about something, when we ignore it, push it to the side, hope it goes away, that very act of not bringing something to the light can give it even more power than if we had done the initially harder work of dealing with it upfront.
Unfortunately, that’s not how our Gospel reading for this morning often tends to be read. Instead of offering a framework for conversation, “Matthew 18” becomes a slam text to justify bullying. Have you ever heard this? When Matthew 18 gets used like a verb, a way to justify ganging up on someone we disagree with? I think you’re a sinner, so I tell you that. And if you don’t agree, I bring some buddies, and we tell you you’re a sinner. And if you still don’t agree, we get the church to tell you you’re wrong. And if you still don’t agree, we shun you. Right, that’s what treating someone like a tax collector or a Gentile means? I wish I was exaggerating; I’m not. So often the Bible gets used as this tool to tell people that they are wrong or bad, and that God doesn’t love them, and we don’t have to either.
But here’s the huge, glaring problem with that way of reading of this scripture. The Canaanite woman from the story last week, she was a Gentile. And Matthew, the guy for whom this Gospel is named, he was a tax collector. See the trend here, Jesus didn’t shun tax collectors and Gentiles, he ate with them. He healed their sick. He invited them to travel along with him, to learn from him, to be in relationship with him. He loved them.
Sounds like our Epistle reading from Romans, where Paul talks about how the Roman community is to relate to each other. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” Paul wrote. All the commandments, you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, all of them can be summed up in this one command, love your neighbor as yourself. Paul goes on to say, “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, [let us] put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” Which is great, right. Love each other, don’t hide things in the dark, but bring things to the light. Right, it’s an excellent method for living in community and for being in relationship, just love each other.
Of course, this is like way harder than Paul tries to make it sound. It’s one thing to say we need to love each other, but it’s a totally different thing to actually do it. Especially when the other person seems so darn unlovable.
So I think this Gospel reading is really less about setting up a set of rules regarding how to keep conflict out of our communities, and more about creating a space so open, so full of light, that the darkness that hides within us has no place to flourish. I think maybe, believe it or not, Jesus is encouraging his disciples to be a little bit more like Joan Rivers, a little bit less afraid to say hard things, even if they might be misunderstood, because there is power in speaking truth, because our communities, our relationships are stronger, if we are willing and able to be open and honest with one another.
Here’s the thing. God loves us like crazy. Like more than we can even imagine. And so great is God’s love for us, that this love cannot be contained in a relationship between God and us, it spills out into communities. So much does God love us that God wants us, needs us even, to experience love through each other. And the power in this mutual accountability is that the sin that resides within us, the sin, the pain, the brokenness, that can fester in the darkness of isolation, has nowhere to hide when we come together in communities. When we love one another, when we lift each other up, when we support each other, when we give words to our pain and we hold the words of each other’s pain, that brokenness is driven away in the grace and the love and the forgiveness of God.
That, I think, is the lesson Jesus had for his disciples in this text. That we are stronger together, we are lighter together, that we are more powerful together. That in the love and the grace and the forgiveness of authentic community, the powers of darkness have nowhere to go. It’s hard. We make mistakes, we break relationships, we hurt each other. We’re human. God knows that. But God also knows that only by bringing these hurts to the light of forgiveness can we receive healing, not just for each other, but more importantly, for ourselves. So thanks be to God for people who are willing to speak truth to power, even though it hurts. And thanks be to God for loving us so much that God gave us each other. Amen.
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Pick Up Your Cross: A Sermon on Matthew 16:21-28
Peter’s kind of had a rough go in the gospel readings lately. A few weeks ago there was that whole “walking on water” attempt/debacle where he like almost drown in a storm, and then across history scholars chastised him for having “little faith” and getting out of his boat. And last week he had that whole epiphany moment of identifying Jesus as the Messiah, and getting called the rock of the church, only to this week have Jesus call him a stumbling block, and even Satan. I joked about it last week, calling Peter a “wishy-washy” rock, but the truth is, you can’t fault Peter his response here.
Think about what’s happened here. We’re at chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel, so Peter’s been traveling with Jesus for a long time now. He’s seen Jesus teaching, heard him preaching, watched him heal. He’s even seen Christ manifested through Peter’s own life, when Peter himself distributed five loaves of bread and two fish to feed the multitudes. Peter’s experience in the world up until he met Jesus had been pretty tough. He was a subsistence fisherman, a poor freeman in a world of class politics, a Jew under Roman occupation, his opportunity to have any life other than the hard-scrabble one he knew simply didn’t exist. And then Jesus appeared. And sudden Peter knew he could be more than that. Suddenly Peter saw the promise of the reign of God. He saw a world where the blind saw, the lame walked, the sick were healed. He saw a world where there was enough food to go around, where everyone, no matter their background, had value. And last week we heard Peter testify to that realization, that in Jesus the world as Peter knew it would be changed.
But this week, from where Peter is standing, Jesus seems to be pulling the wool out from under him. Peter’s seen, and heard, and learned, and understood all these amazing things that Jesus is about, when suddenly Jesus starts talking about how he’s going to suffer, be sentenced to death, and die. And with those words, Peter just feels his world slam shut. If Jesus is dead, everything Peter’s experienced will stop. If Jesus is dead, the sick will not be healed. If Jesus is dead, the hungry will not be fed. If Jesus is dead, oppression will continue. All these dreams that Peter thought would be happening, the promise of the coming reign of God, with Jesus’ pronouncement about his death, Peter feels all those dreams die in an instant, come crashing down around him along with what remained of the life he once knew.
So Peter lashed out at Jesus. Not because Peter is dumb or a jerk or not faithful, but because that’s what we humans tend to do when we’re hurt or scared or angry. No, Jesus, no, Peter said, and even in the text you can hear the anxiety in his voice, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
Jesus rebuked Peter, because Peter has made a crucial error here. What Peter demonstrated in this comment was that even as he recognized Jesus as the Messiah, as the very Son of God, his vision of who Jesus is, is still too small. Peter saw Jesus as coming to save him, his time, his community, his people. But Jesus’ vision was not just for Peter, or for the Jews, or even for the first century. Jesus came to change the very foundations of the world, the very way in which creation itself relates to God its creator. Peter missed the forest for the trees, if I can simplify it down that much. Peter had experienced so much good, so much salvation, in his travels with Jesus, that he was terrified to let it go. But what Peter missed is that what Jesus was about was even bigger, even greater, than the things that Peter had already experienced. And only by letting Jesus go, only through Jesus death, could Peter, could the world, experience the fullness of God’s promise in Jesus, a death that defeats death, and a resurrection that leads to life eternal. Not just for Peter, but for the world, across time and space, forever.
That’s the thing about Jesus, he’s always bigger than we can imagine. He’s always more than we hoped for, greater than our expectations, deeper than our understandings. So much so that it’s scary sometimes, even terrifying, to understand the depth and the breadth of this kind of love. It’s more than we can fathom. So sometimes, like Peter, we try to put limits around this love, try to determine who is in or who is out, and what we have to do to make sure we’re in on this action of salvation. Because it feels like there must only be a finite amount of Jesus to go around. Peter tried to make Jesus about the people who knew Christ in the flesh. We try to make it about people who think like us, or act like us, or fit whatever definition of being right that we understand. It’s well-intentioned sin, but it’s sin nonetheless. Jesus love is bigger than the boundaries we try to draw around it, his salvation is more expansive than the requirements we try to place on it. This scripture invites Peter and us to hold lightly onto Jesus, or better stated, onto our expectations of who Jesus is and how Jesus will work. When we try to pin Jesus down, we are libel to miss him entirely. But if we open our hands wide and let Jesus roam where he may, we find ourselves drawn deeper and closer into the love that he is.
And then we get to the bit about picking up the cross and following. And I find myself cringing inside, because it feels like all these promises I have about how Jesus works in the world come crashing down here in the same way that it must have felt for Peter when Jesus told Peter that he was going to die. If Jesus died to set me free, why then to follow Jesus do I have to pick up a cross?
And part of my struggles with this section is I think that we as a church, and I’m talking about the church here, like the church across history, have done a horrible job with this passage, and with this idea in general. There’s two main branches of Christian thought, and without going into any sort of detail, there’s the moralistic Christianity I touched on last week, that idea that if we do good things than God will do good things for us, that God is about making us feel good. And that’s of course a problem because sometimes you can do everything right, and things can still go wrong, and that doesn’t mean that God is not still with you. But the line of thinking that’s come out of this section I think is even more dangerous than the sort of “feel good” Christianity we talked about last week, this idea that the Christian life is all about suffering. And that anything bad that happens to you or to the world, you just have to sit with it, because it’s your cross to bear. But see, I don’t think that’s a cross, I think that’s a burden. And burdens, brothers and sisters, we are meant to bear together, burdens Christ bears with us. Jesus says later in Matthew’s Gospel, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. If something is hurting you, holding you down, calling you less than you are, making you feel like you do not have value in the kingdom of God, that is not your cross, that is your burden, and I promise you however you may feel, you do not bear that burden alone, but Jesus Christ bears it with you.
But a cross is different. A cross is something you pick up. No one can tell you what your cross is but God, and because of free will, God lets you make that decision on your own. Because here’s the thing about the cross. Jesus chose his. He chose to suffer, he chose to die, because the benefits for humanity outweighed for him the cost. Jesus didn’t pick up his cross because he needed saving, he picked up his cross because we needed saving. That is the truth about crosses. The crosses we pick up are for the sake of the world, for the sake of each other. We pick up crosses because caring for each other is the kind of life Christ calls us to; it’s the kind of life Christ modeled for us. And here’s the other difference about crosses, picking up our cross gives us power. When Jesus took up his cross, the very foundations of the earth shook. And when we pick up our crosses, like Jesus said to Peter last week, the very gates of hell themselves will shake. Amen.
Think about what’s happened here. We’re at chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel, so Peter’s been traveling with Jesus for a long time now. He’s seen Jesus teaching, heard him preaching, watched him heal. He’s even seen Christ manifested through Peter’s own life, when Peter himself distributed five loaves of bread and two fish to feed the multitudes. Peter’s experience in the world up until he met Jesus had been pretty tough. He was a subsistence fisherman, a poor freeman in a world of class politics, a Jew under Roman occupation, his opportunity to have any life other than the hard-scrabble one he knew simply didn’t exist. And then Jesus appeared. And sudden Peter knew he could be more than that. Suddenly Peter saw the promise of the reign of God. He saw a world where the blind saw, the lame walked, the sick were healed. He saw a world where there was enough food to go around, where everyone, no matter their background, had value. And last week we heard Peter testify to that realization, that in Jesus the world as Peter knew it would be changed.
But this week, from where Peter is standing, Jesus seems to be pulling the wool out from under him. Peter’s seen, and heard, and learned, and understood all these amazing things that Jesus is about, when suddenly Jesus starts talking about how he’s going to suffer, be sentenced to death, and die. And with those words, Peter just feels his world slam shut. If Jesus is dead, everything Peter’s experienced will stop. If Jesus is dead, the sick will not be healed. If Jesus is dead, the hungry will not be fed. If Jesus is dead, oppression will continue. All these dreams that Peter thought would be happening, the promise of the coming reign of God, with Jesus’ pronouncement about his death, Peter feels all those dreams die in an instant, come crashing down around him along with what remained of the life he once knew.
So Peter lashed out at Jesus. Not because Peter is dumb or a jerk or not faithful, but because that’s what we humans tend to do when we’re hurt or scared or angry. No, Jesus, no, Peter said, and even in the text you can hear the anxiety in his voice, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
Jesus rebuked Peter, because Peter has made a crucial error here. What Peter demonstrated in this comment was that even as he recognized Jesus as the Messiah, as the very Son of God, his vision of who Jesus is, is still too small. Peter saw Jesus as coming to save him, his time, his community, his people. But Jesus’ vision was not just for Peter, or for the Jews, or even for the first century. Jesus came to change the very foundations of the world, the very way in which creation itself relates to God its creator. Peter missed the forest for the trees, if I can simplify it down that much. Peter had experienced so much good, so much salvation, in his travels with Jesus, that he was terrified to let it go. But what Peter missed is that what Jesus was about was even bigger, even greater, than the things that Peter had already experienced. And only by letting Jesus go, only through Jesus death, could Peter, could the world, experience the fullness of God’s promise in Jesus, a death that defeats death, and a resurrection that leads to life eternal. Not just for Peter, but for the world, across time and space, forever.
That’s the thing about Jesus, he’s always bigger than we can imagine. He’s always more than we hoped for, greater than our expectations, deeper than our understandings. So much so that it’s scary sometimes, even terrifying, to understand the depth and the breadth of this kind of love. It’s more than we can fathom. So sometimes, like Peter, we try to put limits around this love, try to determine who is in or who is out, and what we have to do to make sure we’re in on this action of salvation. Because it feels like there must only be a finite amount of Jesus to go around. Peter tried to make Jesus about the people who knew Christ in the flesh. We try to make it about people who think like us, or act like us, or fit whatever definition of being right that we understand. It’s well-intentioned sin, but it’s sin nonetheless. Jesus love is bigger than the boundaries we try to draw around it, his salvation is more expansive than the requirements we try to place on it. This scripture invites Peter and us to hold lightly onto Jesus, or better stated, onto our expectations of who Jesus is and how Jesus will work. When we try to pin Jesus down, we are libel to miss him entirely. But if we open our hands wide and let Jesus roam where he may, we find ourselves drawn deeper and closer into the love that he is.
And then we get to the bit about picking up the cross and following. And I find myself cringing inside, because it feels like all these promises I have about how Jesus works in the world come crashing down here in the same way that it must have felt for Peter when Jesus told Peter that he was going to die. If Jesus died to set me free, why then to follow Jesus do I have to pick up a cross?
And part of my struggles with this section is I think that we as a church, and I’m talking about the church here, like the church across history, have done a horrible job with this passage, and with this idea in general. There’s two main branches of Christian thought, and without going into any sort of detail, there’s the moralistic Christianity I touched on last week, that idea that if we do good things than God will do good things for us, that God is about making us feel good. And that’s of course a problem because sometimes you can do everything right, and things can still go wrong, and that doesn’t mean that God is not still with you. But the line of thinking that’s come out of this section I think is even more dangerous than the sort of “feel good” Christianity we talked about last week, this idea that the Christian life is all about suffering. And that anything bad that happens to you or to the world, you just have to sit with it, because it’s your cross to bear. But see, I don’t think that’s a cross, I think that’s a burden. And burdens, brothers and sisters, we are meant to bear together, burdens Christ bears with us. Jesus says later in Matthew’s Gospel, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. If something is hurting you, holding you down, calling you less than you are, making you feel like you do not have value in the kingdom of God, that is not your cross, that is your burden, and I promise you however you may feel, you do not bear that burden alone, but Jesus Christ bears it with you.
But a cross is different. A cross is something you pick up. No one can tell you what your cross is but God, and because of free will, God lets you make that decision on your own. Because here’s the thing about the cross. Jesus chose his. He chose to suffer, he chose to die, because the benefits for humanity outweighed for him the cost. Jesus didn’t pick up his cross because he needed saving, he picked up his cross because we needed saving. That is the truth about crosses. The crosses we pick up are for the sake of the world, for the sake of each other. We pick up crosses because caring for each other is the kind of life Christ calls us to; it’s the kind of life Christ modeled for us. And here’s the other difference about crosses, picking up our cross gives us power. When Jesus took up his cross, the very foundations of the earth shook. And when we pick up our crosses, like Jesus said to Peter last week, the very gates of hell themselves will shake. Amen.
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