It Doesn't Matter When You Come to the Party.

Matthew 20:1-16

September 24, 2017

I.

Sometime in the 90’s Somerset County wanted to widen and add sidewalks to the main road through our town.  So they held hearings, some of which I attended.  By the way, if you ever want confirmation of the total depravity of human beings try attending meetings of your local planning board.  Talking about property brings out the worst in people.

Anyway, it quickly became apparent that many in the meeting felt that the longer you lived in Martinsville the greater say you should have in decisions like this.  People (mostly old white men) would preface their remarks by proclaiming, “I’ve lived in this town for over 40 years!” as if that held some special weight.  The same men would castigate others for even having an opinion if they only lived here for a shorter amount of time.  If you were a newcomer, forget it.  There seems to be this automatic assumption that seniority and longevity has some kind of intrinsic authority.

I get that.  I mean, on some level, experience and familiarity should count for something.  The word “presbyterian” literally means that the “elders,” that is, those whose been around the longest, should rule.  But that rule is supposed to be according to God’s will, not for your own personal benefit or satisfaction.  

I’ve been in church meetings where I was informed that the fact that someone’s grandparents sat for decades in a certain pew automatically precluded any thought of sanctuary remodeling.  I have actually heard church members say that a church should not get air conditioning in the sanctuary because, “I’ve been in this church for 63 years and we never had air-conditioning before!”  Why would we introduce such a lavish and extravagant, not to say hedonistic, convenience just for some new people?

This kind of thinking is pervasive today, even to the point of people claiming that recent immigrants are somehow not entitled to certain government benefits, but that citizens whose families came here a few years earlier should be able to take the same benefits for granted.  We were all once newcomers.  If we take this logic to its conclusion we would be letting Native Americans resolve all real estate issues… but of course, that’s not going to happen.  Because this argument from longevity and seniority is really just an excuse for one established class to maintain their power.

Then there’s the equally self-serving argument that if we reward people who don’t show up until the last minute we are only giving them an incentive to live raucous, sinful lives in the meantime.  If they know they can always scoot in under the wire with a deathbed confession, there is no reason for them to change their bad behavior any sooner.  Those who struggled to live upright, moral, religious lives for many years are somehow being cheated if these upstarts get let in.  Why should they get the same eternal reward as those who worked for years to be righteous?

It turns out that those who are part of a privileged establishment of elite insiders howl like they are being horribly oppressed when some other group merely asks for equality.  We think we’ve been working hard to earn a place at the table, and want to exclude or at least regulate those who didn’t work as hard or as long as we like to think we have.    

II.

Jesus sees this attitude in the way the establishment of his time did not want to have to admit the riffraff, sinners, tax collectors, lepers, demoniacs, epileptics, prostitutes, and other losers who associate with him.  This petulant grumpiness extended into the time of the early church, and eventually caused the split between the two religions that emerged in the first century: Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.  It was all about the standards and requirements of receiving new people into the faith.

The Lord rejects this kind of thinking out of hand, as seen in this parable.  The insiders betray a sinful, violent, self-serving reasoning that makes Jesus roll his eyes in frustration.  Because what it reveals about the establishment and the leaders is a basic misunderstanding about the Kingdom of Heaven.  They seem to think of it as a place demanding joyless discipline, hard work, stiff competition, and constant ingratiation of yourself to the boss.  If you do all that you might make it in, if you don’t screw up and if you have a little luck.  They saw the Kingdom of Heaven as their reward after a life of mindless self-inflicted pain and drudgery.  And they didn’t want to let anyone in who hadn’t subjected themselves to the same suffering.

If all you know is your ego-self, your old self, what Paul calls “the flesh,” then this is indeed what it looks like.  It looks like the point is to pay by suffering now to earn the reward at the end.  How many Christians, hearing Jesus talk about taking up your cross and losing your life, assume it has to mean he wants us to punish ourselves mercilessly to be worthy of acceptance into the Kingdom of Heaven after they die?  Worse, how many Christians imposed suffering on others, telling them that this was the way to earn God’s love, while profiting from their suffering?

This breaks Jesus’ heart.  He sees the Kingdom of Heaven in a completely different way.  For Jesus the Kingdom of Heaven is a magnificent banquet where everyone is happy, liberated, and fed, the admission to which is absolutely free, and which starts now in the life of the gospel communities he is founding.  The point of releasing your old, small, sinful, broken, and false self is not self-hatred.  It is not a punitive act of self-flagellation.  

Rather, Jesus insists that the letting go of our ego-self is what allows our true Self, the Image of God within us, our essence, the true humanity we share with Jesus, to emerge.  This is happens not just after we die; and not just at the end of time when Jesus returns; but it begins now.  It begins in the life of repentance, of gaining a new way of thinking and acting, in community together.

III.

So it doesn’t matter when you come to the party!  Everyone is welcomed when they do come.  Knowing the joy of the banquet, how can we possibly resent those who stayed crippled in their addictions and pain for longer than they had to?  

If you’re in a 12-step group like AA I don’t imagine that you have this anger toward people who remained mired in corrosive, self-destructive behavior for longer than others.  Many only show up at all after they hit bottom.  At most there might be a feeling of grief and sorrow over those who waited too long to come in.  They wasted years of their lives, but thank God they finally got to a meeting!  Thank God they finally got to a place of healing and acceptance!  

Indeed, if we feel resentful about those who continued to devote years of their life to profligate debauchery before finally coming to the gospel community, that is a sure indication that we do not ourselves know the Kingdom at all.  If we’re envious of people in the process of ruining their lives and the world, then we really don’t get what the Kingdom of Heaven is about.  And we are most certainly not in it, but in some counterfeit, fake version that just calls itself the church, but really knows Jesus not at all. 

Because to work in this vineyard, the vineyard of the living God of love, is a labor of love, joy, and peace.  There is nothing not to like!  It is the work of delight and wonder.  It is the labor of freedom, fulfillment, and ecstasy.  God’s vineyard is the kind of place where if you have been working in it since 7:30 in the morning you still have nothing but happiness and welcome for someone showing up at 4:30, and you are completely satisfied and delighted that they get the same reward as you.  Because just to work in this garden is a reward in itself.  Which is to say, just to be a part of the community of disciples, the church, sharing in God’s life, represented in God’s body and blood, is more than enough. 

For the Kingdom of Heaven is a revelation of God’s infinite abundance and generosity.  It is not the rare commodity we try to turn it into so we can stick a high price on it and restrict access to it.  It is emphatically not dependent on our work or our time.  And it is even less a place of drudgery and exhaustion, pain and penitence.  Working in the garden of God is itself a privilege and pleasure.

A vineyard is often a metaphor in the Bible for Israel or even the whole creation.  So on one level, Jesus is talking about our life together in the community of disciples in which we practice the values of healing and blessing and acceptance and forgiveness that Jesus embodies and teaches.  The church is sort of an outpost of God’s Kingdom in alien territory where we live by Jesus’ rules of love, even while all around us different rules apply.

At the same time, the values and practices of Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven are supposed to shine and flow outward into our larger neighborhoods and towns and regions.  We are to witness to others concerning this abundance of God.  God has given us enough for all if we get the distribution right.  That goes for things we need like food, water, shelter, and health care.  It also goes for love, peace, joy, and forgiveness.

IV.

Jesus’ concluding message, that the last will be first and the first will be last, is a restatement of his theme of reversal.  He has come to turn the world upside down.  In a sense the Kingdom of Heaven is a kind of “oppositeland,” where the haves become have-nots, and the have-nots become haves.  Those who are privileged and powerful in the old order, must lose everything to participate in God’s realm.  Those with nothing in the old order, experience the reign of God as a veritable flood of benefits.

Jesus is about redistribution.  He is about reparations.  He is about reversal.  How else do you understand, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last”?  And if we are angry and resentful about that, then we have treated our work in the vineyard, not like a joy and a privilege to participate in God’s world, but like some limited commodity we worked hard to acquire to which no one else should imagine they have access.  And that means we are very far from the Kingdom of Heaven, and very far from Jesus.

If we have an ounce of sympathy for those who worked all day, we have missed the point of whose vineyard it is and what a delight it is to work in it.  To begrudge the generosity of God is to not know God at all.

The point is to love the Lord and to love people so much that not only are you overjoyed that newcomers get the same pay as you, but that you are willing to donate your pay to them as well.  If we really knew the transcendent joy of the Kingdom of Heaven, if we really knew the abundance and beauty of this vineyard and how healing and fulfilling it is to work in it, we wouldn’t even care about the pay.  We would work in it for free.  We would in fact sell all we have for the privilege.

+++++++  

Inevitable... AND Necessary.

Matthew 16:21-28

September 3, 2017

I.

Last week we heard Peter make his famous confession that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  Christian faith will be founded upon this confession.  But left to our own understanding of what that means, we invariably miss and distort the point.  We fall back on our own ego-centric, self-serving ways of understanding who God is and what it means to be a “Messiah.”  And we ignorantly assume that what Jesus means is exactly the kind of power, wealth, and popularity that Jesus himself rejects back in chapter 4 when Satan offers them to him.

Even Peter does this.  Which means that Jesus has to unpack what it really means to be “the Messiah, the Son of the living God”.  What it doesn’t mean is that Jesus would take political power for himself in a successful violent revolution in Jerusalem.  Instead, Jesus knows what he’s really in for when he gets to Jerusalem: he tells his disciples that he will “undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

Jesus knows that his ministry is so profoundly counter-cultural and so threatening to the religious and political authorities, that they will not allow it to continue.  In order to preserve their power and prevent people from following him and organizing in his Name they will have no choice but to engineer his death.  It is inevitable.  

The Lord knows that there is nothing more offensive and dangerous to powerful leaders than people who are awake and gathering together in support of one another.  Nothing is more alarming to them than that people start living according to Jesus’ teachings of sharing, forgiveness, welcoming, healing, and non-violence.  Because if people start living that way, if they start following Jesus, the power of the rulers — which is maintained by fomenting fear, anger, and hatred between people — is over.

Human leaders will do everything they can to prevent this from happening.  Where Jesus teaches welcoming and acceptance, they said that those disgusting, lazy Gentiles — which is to say, anyone different — should be feared and excluded.  Where Jesus teaches non-violence, they said a huge Roman military is necessary to protect from terrorists.  Where Jesus enacted an economics of sharing together in God’s abundance, the rulers said that the only system that works is when rich people continue to get richer.  Where Jesus includes and elevates women, they said that women should stay subservient and powerless.  Where Jesus embodies liberation and forgiveness, they insisted that slavery, torture, and mass incarceration were necessary to deter crime.  Where Jesus teaches that the Law is about love, they made it about control and the preservation of their own power.  

Jesus also knows that human rulers have always rid themselves of people like him by means of the legalized murder of the death penalty.  Many of the prophets end up as enemies of the elite, and so will he.

II.

Hearing Jesus’ prediction of his own suffering and death, Peter objected.  He even rebuked Jesus!  Maybe he thought Jesus was being cynical and negative about his prospects, and it was Peter’s job to build him back up into a more positive attitude.  Maybe he thought he would be Jesus’ cheerleader or self-esteem coach.  In any case, Jesus snarls back at him that he is no less than Satan.  “You are a stumbling block to me;” he says, “for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 

In other words, Peter saw things from the perspective of his ego and conventional thinking.  He was thinking like everyone else.  He was thinking according to the standards of fallen humanity.  And that made him a stumbling block.  He was getting in Jesus’ way.  He was obstructing Jesus’ mission.  It becomes clear that he didn’t understand his own confession of faith, which he made just a few verses earlier.  

Peter did not understand that not only is Jesus’ death inevitable given what he is doing, it is also necessary.  As Jesus says elsewhere, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  Jesus here predicts that he will die… and be raised on the third day.  Peter apparently neither heard nor understood this last clause about being raised.  But it is of course the key to everything.

There is a famous quote about revolutionary movements: “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”  Jesus would amend that saying adding the words “then you die” before “then you win.”  Because the winning for Jesus comes only after death.  Otherwise it is not a real transformation or change, just a new adaptation and adjustment in the old power arrangement.  Which is what most revolutions are.  For all their lofty propaganda, they simply catapult a different group of self-important, self-serving leaders up into the palace.  They may have a slightly different narrative justifying their rule, but because they have done no spiritual work, which is to say, they haven’t died, the effect on the ground is largely the same.  As Pete Townsend once sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”  

Only the finality of death closes the book on the previous identity sufficiently enough that the new thing that emerges is really different, higher, and better.

But, you know, even this has been self-servingly misconstrued by the powers-that-be to push redemption, liberation, healing, freedom, forgiveness, and joy way ahead into the afterlife or even to the end of time.  Such an approach reduces Christian faith to at best a matter of spiritual procrastination where instead of embracing God’s Kingdom now we wait patiently biding our time for the sweet by-and-by.  Indeed, many people, generation after generation, have accepted this watered-down, domesticated, neutered, vapid as what Christian faith is.

III.    

That’s because we are deliberately misled about what death really is.  Our egos are terrified of death because they think it is utter annihilation and obliteration.  But if Jesus’ analogy of the grain of wheat is correct, then that’s not what death is at all.  Death is a transformation into a new kind of life.  here is even some continuity between the seed and the plant, the acorn and the oak tree, say.  They have the same dna.  The oak-tree is simply the final form of the acorn.  It is the acorn’s destiny.  But in order to get there the acorn-self has to die so the oak-tree-self can sprout, emerge, and grow.

I have mentioned before the famous quote from The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  “When Christ calls someone he bids them come and die.”  It is not what we want to hear any more than it is what Peter wants to hear.  Yet it is the core of discipleship.  There is a sense in which in order to be faithful to Jesus we have to embrace and even love our own death.

To some this makes Christianity seem incredibly depressing and morbid.  But when Bonhoeffer hears Jesus say, “Come and die,” it is not an invitation to slit our wrists or jump off the Driscoll Bridge.  Real discipleship is about being called by Jesus to “come and die…” so that in the process God’s Kingdom may emerge in us here and now.  Real discipleship is about letting go of our acorn-self, our grain-of-wheat self, so that our new, amazing, apparently impossible self, our oak-tree-self, which was always our real Self and true destiny, can emerge.  

What has to die is our old self, the self that finds its meaning and purpose in wealth, power, and popularity; the self that expresses its existence in what it can consume, own, control, keep, and demand; the self that is primarily motivated by fear, shame, and anger; the little ego-self driven by our personality, that is limited in vision by ignorance, crippled by desires, deaf to the voices of others, and defiled by sin.  In other words, it is maimed by all the conditions Jesus explicitly heals in his ministry, when people come to him with bodies broken by them.

Here Jesus intentionally connects his death with the death he is requiring from his disciples.  He goes right from a prediction of his own execution to the demand that his disciples also “deny themselves and take up their cross and… lose their life for [his] sake.”  He clearly does not want anyone to come away with the wrong idea, as if he is dying so we don’t have to.  What is really going on is that he is dying to show us the pathway to resurrection.  He is dying so we can too, and emerge with him in new life.  That’s the whole point.  That’s why the initiation ritual for entry into the Christian faith is… Baptism: a symbolic dying with Christ and rising again with him.  It is the pattern of growth into resurrection life

IV.

So, yes, Christianity is focused on “life after death.”  But that life after death begins to happen now, in the giving up of our old, ego-centric, selfish existence in practices of repentance and discipleship.  Jesus even warns us to get busy with this work now, because if the Son of Man comes in his Kingdom before we taste this death, that is, before we know who we truly are, it could be too late.  We will not recognize him because we will still be trapped in our old, shallow, fearful identity.  The oak-tree will appear and we will not be able to imagine that it has anything to do with us acorns.  In fact it will scare the living daylights out of us.

Paul writes that “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”  The point is resurrection.  The goal and destiny of human life is…. life!  With that as our future, it almost doesn’t matter what we have to go through to get there.  Our old self only sees the death part.  It can’t imagine anything on the other side of it.  The Christian life is about cultivating a better and truer imagination, convincing ourselves that, though we may be acorns today, will be oak-trees.  And the Christian life is about losing, releasing, giving up, letting go of our acorn-selves, which die… so that the new Self, Christ-in-us, the Image of God in which we are created, emerges into its fullness and glory.

+++++++ 

 

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

 Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’