Enter Into The Joy

On By J. Barrett LeeIn lectio divinaLeave a comment

Lectio Divina is a significant part of my personal spiritual practice and sermon preparation, even though it does not always find its way into the sermon that I preach on Sunday.

I suspect that this will be one of those weeks, when my personal meditation and my final sermon go in different directions.

However, I found this meditation to be significant enough to merit sharing. As is commonly the case with Lectio Divina, this meditation is far more chaotic and less coherent than a homily. The purpose of this exercise is to foster personal engagement with the biblical text and the unconscious mind, not to offer an academic interpretation.

Disclaimer: I make no claim that what follows is a “correct” interpretation. It is simply what arose in the moment for me.

The text for this meditation is the Parable of the Talents from Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 25:14-30).

Jesus said, “It is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability.

Much has been trusted to me, both in my family, and in my ministry. I sometimes feel overwhelmed and have imposter syndrome. I think there must have been some mistake, because I am not worthy or capable of this. I sometimes feel envious of those who seem to be so much more put together than I am.

God, help me to trust the trust that you have placed in me. When I feel overwhelmed, help me remember that I am not here by accident or mistake, but because you have called me and will provide everything I need.

Then he went away.

God often seems distant. I prefer to hedge my bets with philosophy. Yet, even my doubts, bring me back around to believing in a God that is within everything. I cannot seem to let go of the idea of God, even when I am trying to act like an atheist.

God, help me to trust in your presence within all things and working through me. Help me remember that there is no “away” for you, for you fill all things.

The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents.

The courageous servant had no hesitation, but eagerly went out to risk and to experiment. The willingness to do this is a mark of faith.

God, give me a faith that is willing to try new things, to experiment, and to take risks creatively for the benefit of your people.

In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents.

We are inspired and learn from the examples of others who have gone before us. I think particularly of Rich Mullins and Bob Ekblad in my own life.

God, help me to gain ideas from others who have gone before. Let me not seek to imitate or re-create their work, but use it to inspire my own unique work.

But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

I often dig myself into a hole with self-doubt. I want to hide and be safe. I run from the risks.

God, help me to recognize when I am digging a hole for myself, and trying to hide in it. Help me be honest about it, about where I might need to do it temporarily, and also have the courage to leave it behind when the time comes for me to move on.

After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them.

Just as God is not distant in space, God is also not distant in time. All of time and space are one eternal “here and now” with God. This too is about recognizing the presence of the divine in everything and everything in the divine.

God, help me to live in the eternal now, the fountain of all blessings and creativity, from which all things derive their being.

Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’

Faith brings its partial results, with the same courage that let it out to risk and to experiment.

God, help me to celebrate the partial results that my efforts bring, trusting that even an incomplete good is still good and further inspiring the ongoing work of others.

His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’

The universe is expanding and growing in complexity and consciousness, as Thomas Berry and Teilhard de Chardin have noted.

God, help me to recognize and participate in this expanding universe, which is growing in complexity and consciousness, as it develops in Christogenesis.

And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’

The word for “handed over” also means “tradition” in Greek.

God, help me to honor the living tradition that has been passed down to me. Help me to keep it alive and help it to move into its evolutionary future, taking on every new forms of life in this expanding universe.

His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’

Joy is a journey, not a destination.

God, help me to enter more fully into your joy. Give me the eyes of Faith, to see your wonders with my heart, and to participate in the unfolding journey of the universe.

Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.

I sometimes forget to look at my small part in the context of the whole. I give credit to my ego, when I am actually “the product of the love of thousands,” as some poet once said.

God, help me to remember that it is you who is doing all of these things in me. There is nothing sown that you have not sown.

Here you have what is yours.’

I try to compartmentalize my life, dividing it into sacred and secular, mine and yours.

God, help me to overcome my ego consciousness, which tries to divide everything into private property. What is yours as everything, including me and all that is mine.

But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave!

My impulse to hide in self protection, and claim as private property my small crumbs of the universe, this is the root of all evil. It is folly and illusion.

God, bring me back to the truth, that all things live, move, and have their being in you. I pray as we do at the offertory in our liturgy: “all things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own, have we given thee.”

You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter?

There are so many ridiculous things that I think I know. My small minded image of God is really a form of self limitation. I make it up to justify my fear, my hiding, and my selfishness.

God, help me to question what I think I know, and to adopt an ever-expanding image of you, the universe, and myself, which are all ultimately one thing.

Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.

Regret is a wonderful teacher.

God, help me to learn from the past, including my own mistakes, and imagine new and better ways to live with creativity and courage and compassion, for the future.

So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents.

What really matters is the exchange within the flow of the universe. It is like the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where they explain how Ferengi religion works. The flow and the exchange reminds me of the Tao, Perichoresis, and Kenosis in the Trinity.

God, help me to be aware of the dynamic flow of energy within the relationships of relationships, within the universe. May all beings and all relationships be consciously welcomed as participants in the eternal network that is you.

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

When I look at myself and the universe through the eyes of Faith, I see an overflowing of abundance and beauty. On the other hand, there is a hilarious irony that those who have nothing will have nothing taken away from them, therefore they lose nothing. What they then have at the end is nothing, which is exactly what they started with. So nothing is lost, but everything is transformed when it is brought into the network of the whole. We could say that “nothing changes“, not in the fatalistic sense but in the literal sense, because nothing becomes everything. It is like the raindrop falling into the ocean. “And they will have an abundance.”

God, give me the eyes of Faith to see my nothing in the context of your everything, so that I might behold the abundance.

As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

Death is an inescapable fact of life. I can try to make myself eternal, but will never succeed, so long as I continue to mistake my part for the whole. This last sentence is scary, because I am accustomed to associating it with punishment and hell. But if it is simply a statement about the fact of mortality, it can hit quite differently. The self-limiting way of the third slave leads inevitably to this. Individual survival is always an illusion and a losing battle.

God, help me learn to identify myself with the universal network of relationships, where the abundant life of the whole can never be quenched, and I am never alone.

Carry the Light

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Sermon for Proper 27 A

Matthew 25:1-13

On October the 22nd, 1844, there was a group of people who were expecting something very, very big to happen. They were known as the Millerites, and they believed that they had figured out the exact day of the second coming of Christ.

And so they had prepared themselves in every way conceivable, selling possessions, quitting their jobs, gathering in prayer and waiting for the end of the age to come upon them. And then October the 22nd, 1844, came and went. And October the 23rd dawned like any other day will.

This became known among them as the Great Disappointment. I don’t want to make fun of them too hard, because they were waiting in faith for the fulfillment of all that Christ had promised: for the world to be set right, for every tear and sadness to be wiped away, as it says in the Scripture.

These were people who lived in hope, mistaken though they were about the exact time and date. I think all of us can relate to the Great Disappointment in some way or another. We have experienced disappointments of our own when we’ve been awaiting test results, or when we’ve been faithfully praying through mending a broken relationship that doesn’t work out, or when we’ve been out there doing the hard work of getting an education and looking for a job and it’s not materializing.

Sometimes when we just watch the news and we see this world that is the way it is, rather than the kind and gentle world that Jesus envisions for us, we too can understand disappointment.

And that’s what today’s Gospel brings us into. Jesus tells the story of these ten bridesmaids who have an important job as part of the wedding ceremony: Their job is to carry the light. Back then, if you recall, there were no street lamps or flashlights.

It’s hard to find your way in the dark, so you need people who carry torches, who walk with you and ahead of you to light the way to where the celebration begins. The bridesmaids, in addition helping the couple to celebrate, also serve a practical function in weddings in the ancient world.

On this particular occasion, the bridegroom is late and things are not going according to schedule. All of the bridesmaids fall asleep, which I think is a very interesting detail. No matter how faithful or how wise you are, everybody needs a nap sometime.

In the midst of the waiting, the time stretches on, the light grows dim, and finally, unexpectedly, they hear the shout at midnight that the bridegroom is coming.

The time is at hand. And there’s the five wise bridesmaids who have brought extra oil for their lamps, and the five foolish bridesmaids who did not. And the foolish bridesmaids say to the wise ones, “Give us some of your oil!”

The wise ones say, “No, we can’t. There won’t be enough.”

Jesus tells the story in this way to underscore the seriousness of the commitment that he’s talking about. Symbolically, he is talking about how prepared we are (or not) for the fulfillment of God’s promises in this world. We are still waiting, after 2,000 years.

While the wise bridesmaids were unable to share their oil, there was something else that I think maybe they could have shared: their light. I wonder: what if the foolish bridesmaids had not gone into town to find a late-night oil dealer, what could have happened instead?

If they had stayed with the wise bridesmaids and shared their light, there would not have been the danger of running out of oil. Then everyone would have made it to the celebration on time.

The wise ones couldn’t share their oil, just as we cannot give our personal faith to someone else, but we can share the light that we carry with us.

It makes me think of the pandemic, when we were all locked down, social distancing, and so many things were shut.

My family and I were holed up in our house, like most were. After a while, one of my neighbors had an idea. She said, “Could we gather outside, and social distance, just to be able to see one another’s faces?”

That’s what we ended up doing. On Tuesday night, everyone came over to our backyard. We stayed the six feet apart and ordered pizzas (we socially distanced the pizzas too).

It didn’t make the pandemic go any faster. It didn’t resolve the global crisis we were experiencing, but it helped us to share one another’s lives.

It was a comfort to us. It gave us strength and hope. It was a really sacred time that we had on those Tuesday nights.

There was no church service. It was just pizza and conversation from six feet away. Even in the darkest of times, we were able to share our lives with each other.

We Christians, as people of faith, have an opportunity to share our lives with one another. What that asks of us is that we trim our lamps and keep our oil stocked. That’s an analogy for our spiritual practices and good works. That’s what keeps the light of faith burning within us.

But it’s also true that each of us is only human, so our individual light can’t burn perpetually. Every now and again, the light within us gets a little dim, because we all have tough days.

That’s when we can lean on each other, to borrow some of the light.

We can’t borrow the oil, but we can borrow the light.

If I’m really honest, there’s a little bit of the wise bridesmaid and the foolish bridesmaid in me at all times.

There are some ways in which my oil is fully stocked and my light is burning brightly.
At the same time, there are parts of my life where it’s not burning so brightly, so I need to lean on someone else. I need to ask for help.

That’s okay. Because the good news is that the wedding is not canceled, even though it’s delayed. The celebration is still coming.

If we can do our part to hold on, keep our lamps lit, and ask for help when our lamps grow dim, then we have a better chance of making it through the dark of life’s great disappointments.

This is the gift that God gives us: The gift of each other. The gift of the light that is within us. There are so many ways that we can share gift.

Here in our church, we also have The Book of Common Prayer.

This book is one of the ways that the church is able to carry the light for us when our own hearts grow dim. This collection of prayers and liturgies, some of which are hundreds or even thousands of years old, help us to find the words to pray when we can’t think of the right words.

Some days, I come to church and can pray every single one of those words from the bottom of my heart. Some days, I’m tired and barely making it through. But the words of our liturgy sustain me. It’s a gift that can sustain all of us as well.

The promise holds true: the celebration is still coming. We don’t know how long we have to wait, but we know that the darkness will not have the last word.

So, let’s hold on to the light and hold on to each other.

Radical Amazement

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 24, Year A

Matthew 22:15-22

“Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s, and to God those things that are God’s.”

Familiar words. They are frequently cited as a reference to the separation of church and state. There’s only one slight problem with that: Separation of church and state are not what Jesus was talking about.

In Jesus’ time, there was no separation of religion and politics, where Caesar had the political sphere, God had the religious sphere, and they both staid in their respective lanes. Religion was a political affair, as we can see in the complicated relationships that happened with the religious leaders, living under occupation by the Roman Empire. Also, politics was religious, especially insofar as Caesar himself claimed to be “the Son of God.”

The concept of separation of church and state is a modern one and a good one. I wholeheartedly support it, because it protects the church from the state and the state from the church, but it’s not what this passage is about.

We default to old habits, like associating this passage with the separation of church and state, because it’s easier to let challenging questions can become comfortable answers. And that’s pretty similar to what is actually happening in today’s Gospel.

Richard Rohr is a spiritual writer who said, “Religion is, ironically, often the safest place to hide from God.”

It seems counterintuitive. We ask, “Isn’t religion how I connect with God? I come to church, receive the sacraments, read the Bible to hear from God, and pray for guidance from God.”

But sometimes, speaking only for myself, I read the Bible, not to learn and grow, but to prove that I’m right.
And sometimes I pray, not because I’m looking for guidance, but because I’m looking for permission.
Sometimes I listen to someone I disagree with, not to understand that person’s perspective, but so I can make up my next argument in advance.
And sometimes I ask questions, not to explore the truth more deeply, but to set a trap for someone else. That’s exactly what the Pharisees and Herodians were doing to Jesus in today’s Gospel.

The trap starts with flattery. They say, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, that you teach the Word of God in truth, and you show deference to no one. So tell us, is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

This was a question to which there was no good answer. If Jesus had said, “no, don’t pay taxes to the emperor,” then they could say, “Aha, we’ve got you! You are causing sedition and treason. You are trying to rise up against Rome, so we can get Pontius Pilate to come and kill you.”

But if he had said, “Yes,” then they could say to their Jewish neighbors, “See? He’s not really one of us!”

If Jesus had said Yes or No, it would have been a bad answer, but Jesus is a pretty smart guy. He sees what they’re doing and calls out their hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, in this case has a very specific definition. It’s not just somebody who fails to live up to their ideals. Because that applies to every single one of us in this room.

In this case, the Pharisees and Herodians are hypocrites because they are telling the truth in the service of a lie. They are not interested in seeking truth; they’re interested in what they think the truth can do for them. They’re using the truth. That’s the hypocrisy that Jesus is calling out in today’s gospel.

He says, “Okay, I’ll play. Show me the coin used for the tax.”

So they bring him the coin. He holds it up and says, “Whose image is this?”

And they say, “It’s Caesar’s image.”

That’s the moment when Jesus reversed the trap on them. Caesar’s face was on the coin, but Caesar himself, as a human being, was made in God’s image. So, whose image was really on that coin? God’s. That’s how Jesus exposed their hypocrisy.

Jesus demonstrated how the religious authorities were failing to recognize the image of God. So, when He says, “Render unto to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” He is really saying, “Let Caesar have this silly little coin if he wants it, but give to God what is God’s.”

What belongs to God?
You. Me. Everything. The universe.

That’s how Jesus avoids their trap and exposes their hypocrisy for what it is. The coin may bear Caesar’s image, but Caesar himself, along with you, me, and everyone else, bear God’s image. Jesus exposed the hypocrisy of the religious authorities, but the good news is that he keeps engaging with them.

He keeps posing these uncomfortable questions in order to get them to look below the surface fights over religion and politics. He says, “I want you to see the presence of God in all of this.” That is true spiritual insight.

When we look at the world through those eyes, we discover that we don’t have to craft a fancy image for ourselves. Because we already bear the image of God. We don’t have to earn it, and we can’t lose it. No matter how good or how bad we are, as persons, the Imago Dei is simply there.

And so Jesus, yes, does expose their hypocrisy, but the good news is that exposure does not lead to rejection, but healing.

I experienced a little bit of that this week while I was preparing this sermon.

I started reading and praying through the text, like I usually do, and I was thinking about all the people I don’t like. I thought, “They’re all hypocrites with ulterior motives!” I was going to come up with all kinds of witty examples to prove their hypocrisy.

But then I started looking a little deeper. I stopped looking at their motives and started looking at my own. I was crafting a sermon that was all about pointing the finger at “those hypocrites over there,” so I was falling into the same trap that the Pharisees and Herodians fell into.

Sometimes, when I’m reading an article, I check to see whether the author is part of my ideological “club.”

Sometimes, I assume the negative intentions of another person before I’ve really heard them out.
Sometimes, like the Pharisees and Herodians in this passage, I might technically tell the truth about something, but do it in a misleading way. It might be true to the letter of the truth, but not to the spirit of the truth.
I came to this passage, looking to point my finger at people I don’t like, but I ended up pointing at myself. That was painful, but it was also healing.

Because, even in that mistake that I was making, I was still loved. I am still made in the image of God.
All the people I love are still made in the image of God.
All the people I don’t like are still made in the image of God.
And that’s true, whether I want to admit it or not.

But if I can embrace that truth, I can grow, even though that growth is sometimes painful.

What it requires is that I have the humility to admit when I’m wrong and the courage to see the image of God in someone with whom I disagree.

When Jesus presented these questions and exposed the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the text tells us that they were “amazed.”

Amazement is amazing. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

For a brief moment, Jesus’ question opened up their horizons, giving them an opportunity to look deeper, to see the true meaning of who they are, and experience the true meaning of their lives in this world.

The tragedy is that they were not willing to stay that amazement.
The text says, “When they heard this, they were amazed; they left him and went away.”
That’s a tragedy for them and a warning for us.

We occasionally will have moments where tough questions are able to open our minds and hearts. If we can stay in that moment of radical amazement, letting the questions break us open, then the possibility of transformation begins.

We have an opportunity to see the presence and image of God in ourselves and in everyone around us: The inherent beloved-ness, “the dignity of every human being,” as we say in our Baptismal Covenant.

What this opportunity requires of us is that we stay in the difficult questions long enough to be amazed, and stay in the amazement long enough to be changed.

As you go out into this week, I encourage you to be open to the challenging questions that come your way. Be open to radical amazement at the most ordinary things. Let that amazement change you from the inside out, so that you can know yourself, and everyone else, to be utterly unique reflections of the image of God.

Grace Is Free, Not Cheap

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

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

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

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

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

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