Grace Is Free, Not Cheap

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Sermon for Proper 23, Year A

Matthew 22:1-14

Okay, so that was a really tricky parable! It’s pretty high on my list of “things I wish Jesus had not said.”

At first glance, it looks like a story about a violent megalomaniac who murders people for declining a wedding invitation, and then has his troops go out into the city and bring a bunch of random people in, but then kicks one of them out because he didn’t happen to be wearing a tuxedo that day.

If this doesn’t sound fair to you, don’t worry, you haven’t missed the point. It means that you’re paying attention.

This is a parable that requires quite a bit of unpacking, but lucky for you, you just happen to have a resident Bible nerd to do it. So let’s jump right in.

Jesus spoke this parable during Holy Week, where our gospel readings have been for the last several weeks.

In the reading that we heard last week, we heard the parable of the wicked tenants, who would not give the vineyard owner the fruits of the harvest when the time came. And when the vineyard owner sent his servants to collect that produce, they beat them up, mistreated them, and killed them. Finally, they did the same to his own son.

You can see the parallel between last week and this week. The king’s servants sent out to deliver the invitation to the wedding were also beat up and killed by those who did not want to accept the invitation. Their rejection came with violence. The king then answers with even greater violence.

This is one of those areas where a parable is not exactly an allegory, so it’s not just that the king symbolizes God, therefore everything the king does is what God would do. That’s not how parables work. I think we can see this quite plainly because, at the end of Holy Week, Jesus will be rejected and killed by the established authorities, but he does not return violence for violence. Instead, he prays for the ones crucifying him, saying, “Father, forgive them.”

The world answers violence with more violence, but Jesus shows us another way.

The really remarkable thing about this parable is that, after this initial rejection of the invitation, the wedding feast still goes on. The invitation is then extended to the people in the streets, far and wide, “both good and bad.” Everyone is welcome here.

The elites turned down the invitation, but the common people accepted it. Nobody there earned their seat at the table. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time. They’re at the feast because grace made room for them.

Jesus is creating a community that is a sanctuary, a place that is safe from the ongoing power struggles in the world today. In his feast, belonging is given rather than earned.

But then, we have this coda at the end of the parable, where a guest is kicked out for not wearing a wedding robe.

Why would the king expect a random guy from the neighborhood to be dressed in a tuxedo, if he was just on his way to the grocery store?

This is where the parable is more metaphorical story than party planning advice. This character has accepted the invitation to the party, but refused to participate in the celebration.

Here is a modern equivalent: I’d like you to imagine a wedding where the mother of the groom disapproves of the bride, so she comes to the wedding dressed as if she was going to a funeral: black dress, black veil, head cast down, weeping tears of grief. It would be pretty clear to everyone that she was sending a message with the way she was dressed. She’s saying, “I’m physically present, but I am not joining this celebration.”

I think the same thing is true of this man who did not have a wedding garment. He is deliberately choosing to reject the meaning of the celebration. Jesus ends the parable by discussing some rather stark consequences for this rejection.

The king says, “Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Jesus follows up with, “For many are called but few are chosen.”

I don’t think this warning is about hellfire or damnation. I think this is about the danger that we face when we show up to the celebration in the Church of Christ, but refuse to participate in that celebration.

Grace is free, but it is not cheap.

This story is more familiar to me personally than I would like to admit. When I was in seminary, I had very high academic ambitions.

I planned to get a PhD, write many important books, and have one of those tweed blazers with the patches on the elbows. I wanted to prove that I was the smartest person in the room, so I tried to dominate every classroom discussion and get the professor’s attention.

My girlfriend at the time was disturbed when she saw this behavior. She said, “This is not who I know you to be.”

There was a second problem with my strategy for being the smartest person in the room:
Namely, that I was not in fact the smartest person in the room.

There was always someone who was just a little bit smarter than me, a little bit quicker with their response, and a little bit better at playing academic politics with the right professors.

I was getting really frustrated, and I began to question whether an academic career might not be the right place for me, after all. I asked my roommate one night, “Do you think that maybe ordained ministry might suit me better than a career in the academy?

He laughed in my face and said, “I think just about anything would!”

I thought my problem was that I was losing the game of academic competition. But I realized later that the real problem was the game itself.

I was turning seminary into another contest for recognition.
I was turning theology into another way to win.

But Jesus was offering me something much, much better.

That, I think, is what the symbol of the wedding garment is really about.

In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul encourages the people to clothe themselves with compassion, kindness, humility, patience, and above all, love. This is the clothing of a follower of Christ. This is what it looks like when someone participates in the gracious celebration of the community that Christ has created.

If you’re going to come to the party, you need to dress for the party.

You don’t need money or status.
You don’t need a spotless past.
You don’t need to prove that you earned your spot there.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “When Christ calls a man (sic), he bids him come and die.”

Sometimes, the thing that needs to die in us is that need to win, dominate, and be right. To make other people smaller than we are.

We think of grace as a lovely and feel-good concept, but the fact is that grace is very offensive.

It offends us twice:
First, it offends us because it lets in the people that we think don’t belong there. The people who don’t look like us, think like us, pray like us, vote like us, or love like us. The people we’d rather not have in the room.

The second way that grace offends us is that it asks us to give up those struggles for power and one-upmanship that made us think that we belong more than those other people.

Grace is free. But it’s not cheap.

What grace costs us is the power struggle that we thought we needed in order to have a place at the table.
Because we don’t earn a place at God’s table.
Grace gives it to us.

God Is Not In Competition With Us

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Sermon for Proper 22, Year A

Matthew 21:33-46

God is not in competition with us.

I talk about my kids a lot. When I do, I say, “my kids,” which makes sense because that’s how we’re used to talking. But the thing is: they’re not really my kids, in the same way that my books or my car belong to me.

They’re not my possession. They are their own, independent, strong-willed, intelligent people. And the older they get, the more I realize that they’re going to have their own likes and dislikes, as well as their own opinions (which they are very happy to voice).

I have a responsibility to love and care for them, but at the end of the day, it is their life, not mine. I’m their parent, not their owner.

We use possessive language over a lot of things in this world. We talk about my time, my life, my family, my church, my country.

But there’s a danger there: We can forget that we do not, in fact, own time, life, our families, the church, or our country. They don’t belong to us. Nevertheless, we care about them, we are responsible for them, and we love them.

That mistaken identity between stewardship and ownership lies at the heart of today’s Gospel. We hear this story that Jesus tells about these tenants in a vineyard. The owner of the vineyard builds the watchtower, plants the vineyard, sets everything up, and leases it out to them.

They care for it as they’re supposed to. But somewhere along the way, they start to get the idea that it’s their vineyard. And they start acting accordingly.

When harvest time comes, the landowner sends various servants to collect the landowner’s portion of the produce, and the tenants treat those servants with increasing levels of violence: beating them, killing them, and stoning them. Finally, the owner says, “I will send them my son. Surely, they will respect him.”

But that’s not what happens. They kill the son too, thinking that if they kill him, then they’ll get the inheritance. Which doesn’t really make sense, if you know how inheritance laws work. It just shows you how possessiveness and violence can twist our thinking into some really foolish directions.

I can relate to that on a personal level. I notice that, when I feel threatened, I start using language about “taking things back.” I want to “take back my family,” “take back my church,” or “take back my country.” That language gives me away. Because, when I say “take back,” I am implying that I think it was mine to begin with.

If I’m feeling particularly spiritual, I might say, “I’m not taking it back for me, I’m taking it back for God.” But here’s the thing: God never lost it in the first place. God is not in competition with us.

If I say, “I’m going to take this or that thing back for God,” God never lost it, so that doesn’t make sense.
If I say, I’m “taking it back,” it was never mine to begin with, so that doesn’t make sense.
Which means that, in the end, I’m just taking.  

I am willing to use force and violence to perpetuate the illusion of ownership over whatever it is that feels threatened in my life.

Jesus exposes this tendency in today’s parable.
And there’s something very subtle in his response to the people:
At the end, Jesus asks a question, as he often does.

He asks, “What do you think the owner will do to these tenants?”

And they respond, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death.”

Did you notice who gave that answer? Was it Jesus who said that? No. It was the religious leaders that he was talking to.

This scene takes place during Holy Week. The tension between the Jesus movement and the established temple institution is coming to a head. In the midst of this tension, Jesus tells this parable about them, implying that they are the tenants who have mistaken their stewardship for ownership. And the other mistake they make is assuming that God is just as violent as they are.

What Jesus actually does is ask another question. Basically, he asks, “Have you guys never read the Bible, where it says that ‘the stone the builders rejected has become chief cornerstone; This is the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?”

Jesus doesn’t agree with “putting the wretches to a miserable death.” For Jesus, God is in the business of building, not tearing down. For Jesus, “that which has been rejected is now the cornerstone.” They are the bringers of death, but God is the bringer of life.

It’s not a mistake that this conversation is happening during Holy Week. At the end of this week, Jesus the Son of God, is going to be taken outside of the vineyard, Jerusalem, and crucified. And then on Easter Sunday, will be raised from the dead. Thus, showing how God brings life, not more violence. God is not in competition with us.

When my wife was a little girl, her parents had a particular prayer that they prayed for her: They prayed that she would have more faith than they do.

What I love about that prayer is that they’re not praying that she would believe what they believe. They weren’t praying that she would grow up to be exactly like they are, or that she would never change, or that they could always control her. They prayed that she would go beyond where they would go.

This is a wonderful image of stewardship. It is an open-handed holding of what has been entrusted to them. They loved her without possessing her. That’s what being a good tenant of God’s vineyard looks like.

Open hands don’t mean idle hands. We still have a responsibility to care for that which has been entrusted to us. We have a duty to protect that which is vulnerable.

But we do so while recognizing this life belongs to God, and God is perhaps guiding it in ways that we can’t see. Maybe that’s also true of our churches, of our country, and of our very lives.

Because at the end of the day, God is the owner of the vineyard, not us. And God holds everything with those open hands, including us.

Don’t Be A Christian

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 21, Year A

Matthew 21:23–32; Philippians 2:1–13

“Don’t be a Christian.”

That’s probably a bit of a weird thing to hear from your priest on Sunday morning, so I’m going to unpack that a little bit.

Don’t be a Christian. Be Christ.

There is an occupational hazard of my job: it is part of my job to know all of the Christian lingo really well. But the issue is that you can know all of the right Christian lingo, and it still doesn’t change your heart.

It reminds me a little bit of a friend of mine who got really interested in the guitar. So he went online and researched guitars. He bought a book on guitars and read it. He learned all about the history, how they were made, and what the different good guitar companies were.

The only thing he never did was buy a guitar and learn how to play it.

Which kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

In the same way, there was a philosopher in Denmark in the nineteenth century named Søren Kierkegaard. He lived in a culture that was very nominally Christian. Almost everyone around him considered themselves Christian because, well, they were Danish. Denmark was predominantly a Lutheran country.

Most people were baptized, grew up there, went to church, but there was never necessarily a time within that when a person made a sincere leap of faith, a commitment to becoming a follower of Christ.

And for Kierkegaard, that was an issue.

Jesus encounters a similar process today in our gospel reading.

To set the stage a little bit, this passage that we just read comes immediately after the cleansing of the temple. So this is Holy Week, the last week of Jesus’ life. And Jesus, the day before, had gone in and caused quite a ruckus in the temple and disrupted all the normal proceedings.

The religious authorities are quite understandably disturbed and thinking, We’ve got to regain control of this situation.

So they come up with a plan to trap him. They go up and say, “By what authority are you doing this?” Because they know that he is not one of these students trained in one of their schools.

And they also know that if he claims his own authority, then it’s meaningless. And if he claims God’s authority, then he’s blaspheming.

So there’s no good answer.

They think they’ve got him.

But Jesus, as he usually does, responds to their question by asking another question, telling a story, and then asking another question after that.

So first, the question.

He says, “The baptism of John—by what authority did John baptize?”

And the religious authorities come up with a really brilliant strategic flowchart in that moment.

They think, Okay, here are our two options. If we say it was from heaven, that it was from God, then he’ll say, ‘Why didn’t you believe him?’ And if we say that it was of human origin, then the whole crowd is going to be mad at us because they think John was a prophet.

So there’s not really a good answer for them now.

They opt for the safe answer and say, “We don’t know.”

Jesus says, “Okay.”

And that’s when he starts to tell the story of a man with two sons.

He says to both of them, “Go and work in the vineyard today.”

The first one says, “No, I don’t want to.”

Which is pretty disrespectful. It’s the wrong answer.

But later on, he changes his mind, and he ends up going.

Then the father goes to the second son, and the second son gives the right answer:

“Oh yes, sir. Of course. I’ll go.”

But the problem is, he never actually goes.

And that’s when Jesus comes to the next question that he asks all of them.

He says, “Which of the two did the will of his father?”

Well, obviously, it’s the first one.

It’s not the one who said the right thing. It’s the one who did the right thing.

And that is a disturbing thing for us as religious people, because we’re very good at putting our Christian labels on things.

We can put them up on billboards and on T-shirts. We can put the Ten Commandments on every wall in the country.

But what good is that really going to do if we’re not putting those same commandments in our hearts and following them ourselves as the people who claim to be Christian?

Christianity is more than just branding.

The whole point is to take the words that are in our mouths and let them sink into our hearts, and then move down from there into our hands and feet so that they actually change the way we live in the world.

That’s where the phrase that Paul uses becomes really relevant in the reading that we heard just now.

He says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

He’s talking about the mind of Christ.

Let the life of Christ become your life.

That same self-giving love. That same refusal to cling to status. That willingness to serve others and show kindness to others.

To be the kind of person that Jesus was—that is the goal.

Not to wear the Christian T-shirts or have the bumper stickers on our cars.

It’s to be like Christ.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

The one who actually went into the vineyard is the one who did the will of his father, not the one who said he was going to go.

That can raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions for us, because what if there are people around us, in this world and in our community, who do not consider themselves Christians and yet are better Christians than us?

I think particularly of Mahatma Gandhi, who said, “I like your Christ, but I don’t like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

Gandhi was a man who did not carry the label Christian.

But in so many important ways, he did bear the mind of Christ.

Let the life of Christ become your life.

Go work in the vineyard.

Don’t be a Christian.

Be Christ.

Grace Isn’t A Paycheck

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Sermon for Proper 20, Year A

Matthew 20:1-16

“Grace isn’t a paycheck” is a hard truth to wrap our minds around because many of us grew up with the belief that life should be fair. We think that good deeds and hard work should be rewarded while bad deeds and laziness should be punished. This belief persists, even though the world we live in often fails to live up to our belief that life should be fair.

We can see this deep-seated belief on full display in the workers who appear in Jesus’ parable in today’s gospel. The first group of workers begin their day at the usual time and agree to work for the usual rate. As the day wears on, their employer keeps going back to the employment line to hire more workers. At the end of the day, the employer pays all the workers the same wage, regardless of what time they started their work.

Those who had worked the longest have every reason to be upset at this new development. Equal pay for unequal work doesn’t exactly incentivize working harder. In fact, it does quite the opposite. Moreover, it undermines that deep-seated belief that life should be fair, that people should only get what they deserve. And that, according to Jesus, is the whole point.

The central fact in this story, for Jesus, is not the balance sheet of right and wrong but the generosity of God. Jesus tells this parable immediately after a conversation with his disciples where they ask about what they can expect to receive in return for all they have given up to follow Jesus. He tells them, in short, “That’s not how God works. Grace isn’t a paycheck. God’s generosity is not limited by what people deserve.”

The meaning of Jesus’ parable becomes more apparent if we hear it from the perspective of the workers who were hired at the end of the day. For all we know, those workers might have been standing out in the hot sun for just as long as those who were hired at the beginning of the day. The story doesn’t tell us why they weren’t hired with the others, just that they weren’t.

All of the workers in this parable were day-laborers, meaning that they had no secure employment. Their entire living depended on what they could earn by their labor in a given day. And no work beyond the present day was ever guaranteed. This is the same boat that all the workers were in at the start of the day.

As the hours wore on, those who were left on the hiring line were probably starting to think about what they would have to tell their families when they got home that night. They had tried to find work but no one had hired them. They may have been dreading the look of disappointment on their children’s faces when dad came home with nothing to put on the table that night. That’s where the generosity of the landowner comes in.

The most remarkable thing about the landowner in Jesus’ parable is how he keeps going out, again and again, hour after hour, until everyone has been invited to come work in the vineyard. At the end of the day, the landowner’s offer of a day’s wage for an hour’s work was incredibly generous, even though it was undeniably bad for business.

The workers who were hired at the beginning of the day would have been perfectly content with their daily wage, had the latecomers not received the same amount. The only thing they lost in this deal was the distinction between themselves and their co-workers. In that moment, their concern for fairness eclipsed the needs of the people standing beside them. For the landowner, who is a symbol of God in this parable, fairness is not enough.

Human institutions, like businesses, governments, and churches, need rules in order to keep things fair. But those rules can sometimes fail us. A social system can function in exactly the way it was supposed to and still leave some people out. A person can follow the rules and do what’s right, but still fall through the cracks of the system. After the rules have decided what people deserve, grace asks, “What happens to them now?” Grace doesn’t say that fairness is wrong; it just refuses to let it have the last word.

I can imagine, for example, a single mother working her way through school while raising her kids on her own. Then government changes the rules for work requirements, forcing the mom to choose between continuing her education or providing for her children. The rule was designed to prevent abuse of the system, but ends up hurting the very people who were not abusing the system. What is a good employer supposed to do for an employee in such an unfair situation?

The landowner chooses to be more generous than fairness requires. That is what grace does. It refuses to let what someone deserves set the limits of what generosity can give. And once grace has broken that boundary, it becomes possible to ask not only, “What do they deserve?” but, “What do they need?” When fairness fails, grace makes exceptions.

Grace is willing to risk the fallout that comes when generosity gives people what they need instead of limiting them to what they deserve. The landowner in Jesus’ parable says to the upset worker, “Friend, I have done you no wrong,” and asks the worker outright, “Are you envious because I am generous?” A more accurate translation of that question would be, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”

The phrase, “are you envious” is not entirely wrong because an “evil eye,” in that culture, was a Jewish figure of speech for begrudging another person’s good. What I like about the more literal translation is that it draws our attention to the way that grace changes how people look at one another.

When we look at each other through the eyes of grace, we see neighbors, not competitors. We look into our neighbors’ bowls, not to see if they have more than us, but to make sure they have enough.

That’s how grace sees the world. That’s how God looks at us. And that’s how we see each other, when we look at each other through the eyes of God.

We see someone who God came back for.

We see someone who God chose when nobody else wanted them.

We see someone whose children will not have to go hungry just so I can feel like I got what I deserved.

Getting Your Future Back

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 19, Year A

Matthew 18:21-35

The people who hurt you don’t get to tell you who you are; God does.

I live with teenagers. And when you live with teenagers, the number one rule is: “Nothing edible is safe.”

If I go to bed with one scoop of ice cream left in the container, planning to save it for another day, there’s a good chance that it will be gone by the next afternoon. I grumble about it and get on with my life. Something was taken from me, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that important.

But then there are times when something gets taken from us that really is that important. Sometimes people hurt us in ways that leave marks on our lives for years after the fact. These hurts are harder to look past. When we live with this kind of hurt, it’s easy for it to become the defining fact of one’s life. The good news that Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel is that the people who hurt us don’t get to tell us who we are; God does.

In this reading, Jesus talks a lot about forgiveness, but he doesn’t talk about it in a very pleasant way. It’s a rather harsh story that has sometimes been used as a cudgel to beat victims of violence over the head, telling them that they just need to “get over it.”

They tell this story in a way that puts an extra burden on the survivors of harm, rather than calling perpetrators of harm to accountability. It’s a problem in the way that we Christians have interpreted this text. There is a world of difference between the Christian virtue of mercy and using the Bible as a weapon to excuse bad behavior.

They are not the same thing. We as Christians need to be careful about how we use the Bible, so that we’re not exacerbating the harm that has already been done in other people’s lives. If we look closely at what Jesus is saying in this passage, I think we will see that he is not advocating harm to those who are already hurting. He’s not telling the victims of violence to “just get over it.”

In this passage, we have the story of an enslaved person who owes a massive, impossibly huge debt to a creditor. This debt, the text says, is 10,000 talents. In today’s terms, that would be billions of dollars. Ridiculously impossible to pay back.

The debtor pleads with the creditor and the creditor, in a magnanimous act of mercy, grants amnesty to the debtor. The debt is forgiven and the debtor can go in peace.

Then that same person, who was just forgiven an impossibly massive debt, walks out and sees someone else who owes him money. 200 denarii. Now, a denarius was a day’s wages for a worker, so 200 denarii would be almost a year’s worth of salary. Still a lot of money for a day worker, but much smaller than the debt that was already forgiven.

This first enslaved person, who was just forgiven an impossibly huge debt, grabs his debtor by the throat and says, “You better pay me what you owe!”

What that says to me is that this person, who has just been set free, is still basing his future on the actions of another person. This person is still enslaved.

This person is still burdened with the weight of what is owed.

It’s that slavery of allowing another person to tell you who you are, and what your future looks like, that I see as the core principle behind Jesus’ emphasis on receiving and giving forgiveness.

At the end of the day, forgiveness is not something that we’re really doing for another person. We’re doing it for ourselves. We’re setting ourselves free when we let go of what is owed to us. That’s not the same thing as saying that “it’s okay,” or that what happened didn’t matter, or that perpetrators should be free from consequences, or that survivors should trust their abusers again.

None of those are the same thing as letting go of this other person, so that your future is not dependent on them.

In secular society, we often hear phrases like, “Don’t get mad, get even.” I think most of us can probably agree that’s not exactly the Christian way of approaching conflict.

But it sometimes feels like the only alternative is to tell someone, “You just need to get over it,” and I don’t think that’s any more Christian than the first one.

So instead, I’d like us to look at the process of forgiveness and the different stages of that process.

First and foremost:
Get Safe.
Get out of that relationship, that house, that job, or that situation, if you have to. You’re not going to be able to rebuild your life and your future If you’re just getting wounded, again and again. You don’t owe them that. You owe yourself safety.

Number two is:
Get Real.
Tell the truth about what has happened. Don’t gloss over it. Don’t say it’s okay when it’s not okay. Don’t say it doesn’t matter, because it does matter. You matter.

Next is:
Get Mad.
It’s a really important part of the process of forgiveness. If we’re not telling the truth about the effect that that action has had on us, then we’re not going to be able to work our way through it and build a better life. We need to get mad, at least for a while.

Getting mad also prevents us from turning the pain and blame inward, onto ourselves. As if somehow we deserved the bad things that happened to us, because the fact is that we didn’t.

A friend of mine recently called that, “Putting the shame where it belongs,” which is not with you. It’s with the person who did the hurting. Getting mad is a healthy thing.

Next is:
Get Better.
Seek the support you need. Get into therapy. Talk to someone you can trust. Learn the skills for coping, emotionally and mentally, with what happened.

And finally, in the end:
Get Your Future Back.
This is the end goal. Not telling the other person, “it’s okay,” when it isn’t. It’s getting your future back, so that you can stand in a healed place where you look back at what happened and say, “That was part of my story, but it doesn’t define who I am.”

Because the people who hurt you don’t get to tell you who you are; God does.
The healing can help you carry what happened to you without the hurt carrying you.

This, I think, is the good news and the goal that Jesus is ultimately talking about: A place where you can get your future back.

You are more than the worst thing that ever happened to you. You are not the victim of those who hurt you. You are their survivor. And your future is not defined by them.

A person who understands this truth very explicitly is Malala Yousafzai. This young woman from Pakistan, because she dared to speak up for the education of girls and women, was shot in the head by the Taliban on her school bus. They were intending to end her future right there.

Less than a year later, after a lot of healing and many surgeries, she stood up in front of the United Nations and said to that gathered crowd of world leaders, “I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same, my hopes are the same, my dreams are the same.”

The Taliban failed to tell Malala Yousafzai who she is and they failed to define her future for her.

And she has gone on to be this incredible advocate for education, especially for women and girls. And to the Taliban who hurt her, she says, “I am doing this for the benefit of your children too.”

This is a person who has gotten her future back.

It didn’t happen by her saying, “it’s okay.” It didn’t happen by her sweeping the offense under the rug. It happened by her
getting safe,
getting real,
getting mad,
getting better,
and getting her future back.

And what is true for her is also true for you:
The people who hurt you don’t get to tell you who you are; God does.

Image credit: By flowcomm – flickrPhotoUrl=https://www.flickr.com/photos/flowcomm/53378313828/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=154127695

Why We Fight

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 18, Year A

Matthew 18:15-20

HE Proper 18 A 2026Download

When we Christians fight, we fight to win.
The question is: “Win what, exactly?”

Athletes are trying to win a game.
Politicians are trying to win an election.
Lawyers are trying to win an argument.
But what are Christians trying to win?

Church is not a game.
I don’t slam-dunk the gospel book after the reading.
(Although… someone did send me a meme this week that said: “If people cared about church as much as they cared about football, they would dump Gatorade on their pastor’s head, whenever he makes a good point.” All I can say to that is: “Please don’t.”)

But you know… there is a game that we play in our broader society. That game is called “the economy.” And the points we score are called, “dollars.” Sometimes we can get caught up playing that game.
Unlike politicians, we’re not trying to win an election. We’re not trying to beat an opponent to gain power.
When we argue, like lawyers often do, we’re not trying to win an argument.
So, what then are we trying to win?

That’s exactly what Jesus is talking about in today’s gospel. He has a lot to say about why we fight and how we fight.

To begin with, he talks about the facts of the fight itself.
He says, “If another member of the church sins against you…”

Has anyone in this room ever sinned against anyone else in this room? I have.
We are human beings. We are flawed. We are going to disagree with one another.

As you have heard me say many times before, and will hear me say many times again, that is baked into our Episcopal tradition. For us, faith is always a dialogue between Scripture, tradition, and reason. People sitting in the same pews, sometimes for years, will disagree on particular interpretations of Scripture or ways of doing church. We, as Episcopalians, recognize that. On top of that, we recognize that we are indeed all flawed human beings, who are doing our best and sometimes failing. That’s life.

Jesus gives us an example of how we’re supposed to have these fights. He says, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.”

That’s an invitation to relationship: A direct encounter with our siblings in Christ. We, as Christians, may not always see eye-to-eye on everything. But at the very least, we can have those conversations face-to-face.

Next, Jesus gets into why we fight. What is the goal that we are trying to accomplish? What are we trying to win?

He says, “If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”
Notice that he does not say, “If the member agrees with you, you have won the argument.”
He says, “If the member listens…”

It’s about listening to one another, even if we don’t agree, to the end that, hopefully, we will have “regained that one,” which is actually a poor translation of this text. In Greek, that text literally says, “you have won your brother.” Which, of course, can also apply to our sisters and non-binary siblings in Christ.

It is about people.
That’s why we fight.
We’re not fighting to win an argument.
We’re fighting to win each other.

After that, Jesus talks about what happens when this conversation does not go well, and what happens when it does go well.

When that does not go well, he says, “If the member does not listen, take along two or three others.”

He’s talking about widening the circle of community, a little bit at a time. The point is not to gang up on someone, but to increase the scope of the conversation. It’s about asking ourselves, “Whose voices are not yet in this room? Who else do we need to be listening to, that we are not listening to right now?”

And then there’s a follow-up step to that: If they don’t listen to the smaller group, bring them to the wider community, in hopes that, by widening that scope of the community again, you can continue to hear more voices, more perspectives, and gain greater wisdom.

As Proverbs says, “In a multitude of counselors, there is wisdom.”

Finally, if even that doesn’t work, Jesus says, “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a Tax collector.”

That’s not about kicking them out. That’s about saying, “We cannot come to a mutual understanding that will allow us to remain in relationship.” And so, sometimes, the community needs to draw a boundary. But that does not mean giving up on those who are on the outside.

Because Jesus said, “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a Tax collector.”
Do you remember how Jesus feels about Gentiles and Tax collectors? He gives them unconditional love. He makes them the special recipients of mercy and compassion, especially as those who are outside the community of faith.

So, what happens when it does go well? What happens when, somewhere in this process, each of us begins to step outside of our own little egos, meet one another face-to-face, and really listen to one another?

Jesus tells us, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. And again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am in their midst.”

This talk of binding and loosing is a little confusing. What Jesus is saying is that there is power in community. When we come together face-to-face, work through the hard conversations, and listen to one another, there’s a power in that, and it gives us the ability to make a difference in our lives and in the wider community.

At the end, Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Somehow, in this process, of gathering, listening, and working through the hard stuff, Christ is indeed among us.

My favorite verse of scripture is 1 John 4:16, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

If God is love, then the only way to really worship God is by loving one another. The only way to honor love is through love.

In later Christian tradition, the fathers and mothers of the Church came up with what we now call the doctrine of the Trinity. Our conception of “God” is not simply that of an “old man in the sky.”

For Christians, God is a community of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing in a state of eternal and perfect love. That is why we say that “God is love.”

God is a community, so paying attention to the quality of our life in community is the way to honor the God who is love and who is a community.

As Christians, this is how we fight. And this is why we fight.
We fight to win.
Not to win points, or to win power, or to win an argument.
We fight to win each other.

Whenever we do that, by sitting down, face-to-face, and listening, we will find in some mysterious way that Christ is indeed here among us.

Life is Changed, Not Ended

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 17, Year A

Last week, we heard the story where Peter gave the “right” answer about who Jesus is. This week, we have the comfort of hearing Peter give the “wrong” answer. Faith isn’t about having all the right answers.

Immediately after Peter confesses Jesus to be “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” Jesus explains what “being the Messiah” really means. It means going to Jerusalem, being betrayed into the hands of the religious leaders, suffering, dying, and rising on the third day.

And Peter has a bit of a conniption over this. He says, in effect, “No way, José!”

The text says it a little more eloquently. It says, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

And Jesus rebukes him quite harshly. He calls him, “Satan.”

I think we should not be too harsh on Peter for giving this response.

First of all, Peter gives the wrong answer because he had several culturally-shaped ideas about who the Messiah was supposed to be. According to the views of that time, the Messiah was going to be a victorious king who was going to restore freedom and prosperity to the land of Israel, who would finally get people back on track spiritually, teach them to obey God’s commandments, whip this country back into shape. People were really excited about that kind of Messiah. That’s the image that Peter had in mind when he confessed Jesus to be “the Messiah.”

Jesus, of course, did not come to be a conquering king. He came to do something different. We know that today, but Peter hadn’t quite got the memo yet.

Second of all, Peter says what he says because he loves Jesus. Any one of us can imagine that, if a friend came up to us, while facing a challenging situation, and sounded like they were on the verge of giving up, we would say, “Hey now. Hold on. I know it’s rough right now, but we will get through this. I believe in you, my friend.”

That’s what Peter is trying to do with Jesus. He loves Jesus and is trying to encourage him. I can empathize with Peter, especially in his love for his friend.

I have two teenagers at home who are currently learning how to drive. (Pray for me.)

As many of you know, if you have kids and grandkids: When they reach that stage of development, your relationship with them begins to change.

Up until this point, I had been the one who drove my kids around. I put them in the car, checked the mirrors, used the turn signals, watched the speed, hit the brakes.

It was my job to get them to where they’re going. But now, they are learning how to get themselves there.

My job, at this stage, is to move over, get out of the driver’s seat, grab hold of that bar above the door, and try hard not to scream obscenities. It’s hard, but it’s also good. The goodness does not eliminate the hardness, but neither does the hardness eliminate the goodness of this transitional stage. The time has come for me to move out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger’s seat.

That’s similar to what is going on with Peter in today’s Gospel. When Jesus says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan,” he’s not just being offensive or calling names. He’s also not kicking Peter out of the community of disciples.

He says, “Get behind me.” That word choice is very specific. In the very next verse, Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them take up their cross and follow me.” The Greek word for “follow” is the exact same word as “get behind me.”

So, when Jesus rebukes Peter, he isn’t saying, “Get away from me.” He’s saying, “Follow me.” Peter had become a stumbling block by trying to get ahead of Jesus, but Jesus is saying to him, “I need you to get behind me. I need you, Peter, to get out of the driver’s seat and trust that I’m leading you in the direction where you need to be going.”

That is very much the point of the Christian life: Following Jesus.

When Jesus, in this reading, talks about his own journey of death and resurrection, he is also giving us the primary metaphor for the Christian spiritual life: It is a process of death and resurrection.

We are not used to thinking about this, but it’s been right under our noses the whole time. We frequently hear in church that Jesus died for us, but the Scriptures of the New Testament and the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer also say that we die with Christ and are raised with Christ.

In our Baptismal liturgy we pray a blessing over the water in the font. We say of that water, “In it, we are buried with Christ and his death. By it, we share in his resurrection.”

In our funeral liturgy, we have a beautiful phrase that I love: “For your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.”

I love that phrase because, as we are going through our own journeys of death and resurrection, it’s tempting to think that death is the end, so we need to be reminded that there’s also a resurrection on the far side of it.

I think that point is especially pertinent for Peter, because he seems to be only half-listening to Jesus. He hears the part about being killed, but doesn’t listen to what Jesus says about being raised from the dead.

You and I have the benefit of knowing the rest of the Gospel story, but Peter didn’t. He hadn’t yet witnessed the empty tomb and the risen Christ. We have celebrated nearly 2,000 Easter Sundays since that first conversation happened. It’s as if the end of the movie has been spoiled for us, but Peter is still in the middle part of the story.

Today, many of us are still in the middle part of our own stories. We going through the metaphorical deaths and resurrections in our lives.

Maybe, like me, you too are teaching your teenagers how to drive. (If so, bless you.)

Many of us remember the experience of being a kid who is growing up to take their place as an adult. As adults, we get married, become parents, lose jobs, getting new ones, get divorced, and retire. We take on changing roles in our families, as it becomes our duty to care for our parents, who once took care of us.

All of these events involve a death to one way of life and a resurrection to another way of life. That image, which Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel, is one that we can use to guide our way along life’s journey. Once we start looking for it, we begin to find it everywhere.

It’s not just that Jesus died for us; it’s that we continually die with him, and are also raised with him. We might not always know what that resurrection will look like, just as Peter didn’t, but that’s okay.

Jesus doesn’t ask us to have all the answers; Jesus just asks us to keep following him and keep trusting him.

As you “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” hear Christ saying to you, “I am with you,” and “Death will not have the final word in this story.” Because for us, his faithful people, “life is changed, not ended.”

The Gates of Hades Shall Not Prevail

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Sermon for Proper 16, Year A

Matthew 16:13-21

When I was in seminary, I had a friend named Cole.

Cole and I had a class together that met out of town, about two hours away, and Cole would regularly give me a ride. Two hours was a long drive, so we’d get to talking, and we would talk about everything: Faith, family, the future.

We talked about where God might be calling us in life. We talked about family because he was about to become a dad, and I was about to get married. Those conversations became really important to me because I was at a moment of transition in life, thinking about my future and my calling.

I had gone to seminary thinking that I was going to be some fancy professor, but along the way, I started sensing something changing. It began to occur to me that I might actually be called to be a priest. And Cole was one of the people who was alongside me while I was wrestling with that question. Cole was a friend who could truly see me.

Maybe you have had friends like that in your life: Someone who really sees you, deep down. Sometimes they can see things about you that you can’t even see about yourself. Somebody who helps to shape you into the person that you are becoming. And maybe you’re helping shape them in that same way. Those kinds of friendships are really special and mysterious.

I bring that up because there is a moment of a deep seeing between friends that happens in today’s Gospel.

Jesus and his disciples are traveling through the region of Caesarea Philippi, and Jesus conducts an opinion poll of the disciples: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is? ”

The disciples gave him the answers they had heard: “Some people say John the Baptist, or Elijah and Jeremiah, or the other prophets.”

Then Jesus makes the question a little more personal: “But who do you say that I am?”

Simon Peter is the one who answers, saying, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Simon sees Jesus for who he is. And Jesus then blesses Simon.

And there’s something else in this passage that I had never noticed before this week:
Jesus then turns around and talks to Simon Peter about who he is.

Jesus says to Simon, “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

So, Peter sees Jesus.
Jesus sees Peter.

I see you.
You see me.

I don’t think Jesus is only seeing a secret identity that Peter already had inside of him and was waiting for someone to notice. He is seeing who Peter is becoming. Because Peter isn’t finished yet.

Peter gives a pretty good answer, today: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.”
But next week we’re going to hear the story that comes right after this in the Gospel, where Peter gets it completely wrong.
So, that should assure us that being Jesus’ disciple and friend isn’t about having all the right answers, because none of us do.

Peter is still becoming the person he’s going to be. Jesus sees that in him, even as Peter sees Jesus for who he is.

I see you,
and you see me,
and we become us.

This is not just about Peter. It’s about all of us.

Jesus says, “On this rock, I will build my church.”

He’s not talking about a building or an institution. He’s talking about the community of gathered disciples that now covers the Earth and spans the last 2,000 years. This is about all of us seeing each other and loving each other into who we are.

And then, finally, Jesus says something else that’s really, really remarkable:
He says, “The gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

Which brings me back to my friend Cole:

At the end of seminary, in those days before social media made it possible for us to stay in touch with everybody we’ve ever met, Cole and I decided that we respected and loved each other too much to lie to each other.

I was going to the East Coast and Cole was going to the West Coast. We weren’t going to make false promises about calling every week or writing letters. We knew that probably wasn’t going to happen.

So, instead of fooling ourselves, Cole and I told each other the truth. We gave thanks for the beautiful time we had together, for the ways that we had shaped each other as fellow disciples of Jesus, for the love we shared as brothers in Christ, and then we went our separate ways.

A couple of years later, Facebook became a thing, and we got back in touch. We were never as close as we had been on those days when we were making those drives, but the fondness remained.

And then, about a month ago, Cole died of cancer.

I reached out to his wife. I attended his memorial service online. I got to hear all these amazing stories of the people who had loved him in the 20 years since I had last seen him. I got to hear about the kind of husband, and father, and pastor that Cole had become. And I was filled with so much gratitude for him, even as I was missing him.

That’s when I was struck by Jesus’ words about the gates of Hades not prevailing:

Hades means death. It is the Greek name for the underworld and the god of death.
According to Jesus, Hades has gates.
And gates are defensive.

We tend to think of death as something that is attacking us, so we huddle in our churches and pray that it will eventually give up and go away, but that’s not how Jesus sees death.
According to Jesus, we are the ones attacking death, and death is on the defensive.

We’re afraid of death, but it’s death that should be afraid of us.

Jesus says that Hades is behind those gates and the gates will not hold.
Death will not have the last word.

I think I learned something about that at Cole’s memorial service.

The love that he and I shared was greater than the geographical space between us, and even bigger than the space between life and death itself.

Death cannot undo what love has made.

Kindred in Christ, I think our calling this week is fairly simple:
Look deeply and really see one another, not just with the eyes of our heads, but with the eyes of our hearts.
Know one another deeply and allow yourself to be known.
Help nurture one another into who we are becoming,
so that, like Jesus and Peter, we too can say:

I see you,
you see me,
we become us,
and, by the grace of the living God,
death cannot undo what love has made.

Pastor Cole Meckle

The Sin of Stupidity

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 15, Year A

Matthew 15:10–20, 21–28

Dearly beloved kindred in Christ:
Don’t be stupid. Amen.

Okay, I should probably unpack that a little bit before I sit down. When I say, “don’t be stupid,” I’m not talking about a lack of intelligence or knowledge. That’s ignorance. And the fact is that every single one of us is ignorant about something (or many things).

Stupidity is not a lack of information.

Learning is hard work, but there comes a point when it takes more work to not learn something than it would take to just go ahead and learn.

And when we reach that point, we have become committed to our ignorance. And it’s that commitment to ignorance that I define as “stupidity.”

Therefore, stupidity is not an intelligence problem at all. It’s a moral problem.

Stupidity is a sin in the eyes of God.

I bring this up because today’s gospel contains a story where Jesus refuses to be stupid.

The scene begins with him traveling to the region of Tyre and Sidon. This is Gentile territory, not Jewish. A bunch of pagans running around with different culture, and different customs. Things that Jesus and his disciples were probably not familiar with on a day-to-day basis.

While they’re traveling through this area, a very impertinent woman comes and starts shouting after them. “Jesus, Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And at first, Jesus is just ignoring her, not responding at all, until his disciples get annoyed.

“Jesus, can you send her away or something? She’s really getting annoying.”

Jesus says, “Listen, ma’am, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Does she listen? No. She stays on him, blocks his path, kneels in front of him, and says, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus says something really rude at this point. He says, “It is not fair to take children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

He’s calling this woman a dog. We have a word for that in English. I’m not going to repeat it, but you know what it is. It’s really uncomfortable to imagine Jesus talking to someone in that way, especially someone who’s just a mother seeking help for her child! So what if she’s from a different culture?

But still, this woman doesn’t give up. She says to him, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs receive the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Jesus is taken aback.

“Woman,” he says, “great is your faith.”

And let’s not gloss over that moment. Remember that Jesus, a faithful Jew, the central figure of the Christian religion, is talking to a pagan and saying, “You’ve got a lot of faith.”

That’s the way Jesus interacts with people of different religious beliefs.

What we see happening here is Jesus changing his mind.

That also might make us uncomfortable.

We have this idea that Jesus is perfect, he’s the sinless son of God, and things that are perfect don’t change. So why would Jesus change his mind? Unless… changing is part of his perfection.

Jesus here is refusing to be stupid. He’s willing to change his mind when love demands it.

In the beginning, it seems like he really thought his whole movement was just for Jews only. But then, as a result of this encounter, Jesus changes his mind.

In Luke’s Gospel, it says that Jesus “increased in wisdom.”
In the letter to the Hebrews, it says that Jesus as the son of God “learned obedience.”

Jesus learns.
Jesus grows.
This makes sense because Jesus was fully human.
And human beings grow.

If that’s true for Jesus, then it can be true for us too.

I think of the people who I tend to write off because they disagree with me, or because I think they don’t know as much as me about something.

Sometimes I get a big ego about it.
I want to write them off, and in that moment, Jesus comes to me and warns me about the sin of stupidity.

The sin of stupidity is not about being wrong. It’s about being so convinced that I am right, that I am not willing to consider any other perspectives, or change my mind, no matter what truth or love demands of me.

That’s the sin that Jesus avoided and gave us an example for how to avoid.

Here in today’s gospel, the incarnate Son of God is willing to be challenged. He’s humble enough to consider someone else’s situation and change his mind when he’s presented with new information.

Jesus refuses to be stupid.
Our invitation is to do likewise.

As we go into this week, encountering people who may differ from us or disagree with us, let’s remember how Jesus acted with someone who disagreed with him:

Let’s keep an open mind.
Let’s be like Jesus.

And most of all,
Let’s not be stupid.

The Last Word

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 13, Year A

Matthew 14:13-21

When my wife and I argue (and believe me, we do), we don’t usually shout or call names. We do something much more insidious: we commit time abuse. We take an issue and analyze it to death, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning.

We do this because each of us is vying for the last word in the discussion. We don’t just want to win the argument; we want to drop that last bit of wisdom that makes the other person go, “A-ha! I see your point. You’re so wise. I’m so lucky to be married to you.”

Of course, when both of us are trying to get the last word, nobody really wins.

In life, too, we often assume that the last word is the thing that defines everything else. Whether or not this is actually true, we often live as though it is.

Today’s Gospel is a story about what gets the last word. But that fact only becomes clear when we realize that this passage is the second half of a two-part story. The first half happens in the twelve verses immediately preceding the section we heard today. Our lectionary skips over that first half because it is far less pleasant than the one we read this morning.

In the first half of the story, King Herod Antipas holds a luxurious banquet for his courtiers. At this banquet, his stepdaughter performs a dance that delights the guests so much that Herod rashly promises to give her anything she asks. At the urging of her mother, she asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

Matthew tells us that Herod is grieved by the request. But in the end, he gives in because he is afraid of losing face before his guests. Herod allows fear to have the last word. And the final effect of that word is death.

Our Gospel picks up immediately after that story.

Jesus hears that his friend John the Baptist has been murdered.
Understandably, he withdraws by boat to a deserted place to be alone.
If anyone had reason to say, “Not today,” it was Jesus.
But the crowds follow him. And Matthew tells us something very simple:
“He had compassion for them and cured their sick.”

The story that follows is another banquet.
Unlike Herod’s banquet, this one is not held among the privileged elite in luxurious halls of power, but among ordinary people in a deserted place.

Jesus blesses and shares what little is available: five loaves of bread and two fish. When everyone has eaten, twelve baskets of leftovers remain.

At Herod’s banquet, fear has the last word.
At Jesus’ banquet, love has the last word.

Jesus refuses to let his own pain have the last word in how he responds to others.

Herod, tragically, allows fear to become the final voice, and the result is more death.

But for Jesus, love has the last word, and the result is more life than we know what to do with.

This is what Jesus is like.
This is what God is like.
And this is why, from this hillside to the upper room to the empty tomb, love always gets the last word.

Dorothy Day, the Catholic activist who founded houses of hospitality during the Great Depression, was frequently asked whether there was room for one more hungry person at the table.

Her answer was always the same:
“There is room for one more.”
Years later, she titled her memoir of that ministry Loaves and Fishes.
Like Jesus, she trusted that God’s love was greater than human scarcity. She lived as though love, not fear, should have the last word.

Kindred in Christ, every one of us comes to this place carrying something, whether that is grief, anxiety, frustration, or exhaustion.
We cannot always choose what happens to us. But by God’s grace, Christ can slowly reshape how we respond.
He meets us in our own pain.
Not by pretending it isn’t real.
But by refusing to let it have the final word.
And as we are fed at his table, Christ teaches us to let love—not fear, not cynicism, not pain—have the last word in our own lives.

This week, someone will cross your path while you are carrying your own burdens.
Perhaps the invitation of this Gospel is simply this:
Before fear, cynicism, or pain gets the last word…
Remember the One who came ashore grieving, saw the crowd, and had compassion.
He refused to let his own pain have the last word in how he responded to others.
Because in Jesus Christ, love gets the last word.

At Herod’s table, death had the last word.
At Christ’s table, love had the last word.
At Calvary, death seemed to have the last word.
At Easter, love had the last word.

And because love gets the last word, there is always enough grace, enough mercy, and enough room for one more at Christ’s table.