Jesus’ aggressiveness provokes the total mobilization of his enemies. The Pharisees are determined to destroy him. They invent an excellent trap. If Jesus recommends paying tribute, he renounces his messiahship; if he decides against it, the Romans arrest him. But Jesus’ answer traps the trappers. Since God and the emperor are not equals, we must give to the emperor only what he deserves in the sight of God.

The Pharisees’ question, of course, is our question. We ask just as reverently and faithlessly as they. They wanted to annihilate Jesus’ influence. We want to preserve the influence of old- fashioned patterns and habits. They and we are equally reactionary.

Jesus’ answer turns out to be not an answer but a question. “What is God’s?” Is not everything God’s? We are forced to make decisions well beyond our capacities. Jesus helps us by not helping us. He forces us to take steps, to be independent, judging between the emperor and God.

Not only the answers of ancient oracles, but also the answers to modern prayers, the call of the “guiding voice” and the lack of answers and the silence of the “voice,” with few exceptions, serve the goal of making us independent. We are only told in a general way and often in a puzzling form what we should or should not do. Then we have to think and interpret and decide ourselves. If we receive detailed instructions, we are still in Grammar school. There, the subject is “obedience.” In God’s High School obedience is replaced by cooperation, and in His College we are forced to create independently, and we create disaster because we have learned only obedience, and prefer disobedience, like rebellious little boys and girls. The first counter-attack of the Pharisees (and us) has failed.

October 11, 2020

The universally accepted interpretation (until recently) of the Parable of the Wedding Feast says that the king, introduced at the beginning of the parable, is understood as a reference to God, and the voice the king (God) calls down upon the man without a wedding garment is interpreted as sacred violence levied in judgment for the man’s absolute refusal to accept God’s invitation into God’s kingdom.

Is it possible for a bright sun to shine a new and different light on this text? We’ll try on Sunday morning in the sermon and then at the Sunday morning Bible Class where questions and concerns can be voiced.

I believe Jesus uses this parable to declare to the temple rulers, and to us, that Jesus’ authority will be the authority of the suffering servant. Jesus does this by structuring the parable so that he can introduce into the parable the figure of the “suffering servant” from Isaiah 52:13-53:12. The servant figure in the parable with whom Jesus identifies the servant figure is the man without the wedding garment who suffers expulsion, and worse, at the hand of the king. Jesus is anticipating what will come on Good Friday, which is at the end of the week in which Jesus told the parable. 

Be prepared to think through the issues of the parable at the Bible Class!!!

October 4, 2020

He lent out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their season. Mt 21:41b

Jesus had various reasons for doing so much of His teaching by way of parables. In some instances, it was to hide the true meaning from those who were immature and undiscerning. He must have had the latter in mind when He told this parable of “The Gracious Master” (also known as “The Wicked Tenants.”) It was during His last week upon this earth. The ever- increasing hostility of the religious authorities was about to culminate in His execution. Our Lord, in very picturesque language, levels with His disciples, and there is little doubt that some of them understood full well His meaning.

The parable points up the responsibility of our nation and our church before our Creator and God. Our greatest concern, however, is what He may be saying about us as individuals about our responsibility as His followers. As the Master of the parable sent his son into the vineyard, so Christ is in our midst. And His presence demands a response. We are not as neglectful as were the tenants of this parable; we sing hymns, spell out our creeds, make the elaborate motions of worship, and are respectfully aware of altar and cross. 

But what does Jesus find in our hearts? He does not find the hatred of the parable-tenants, but He might find something just as insidious – preoccupation, procrastination, neglect to fully embrace Christ and His lifestyle, unwillingness to give Him prior devotion or to dedicate our lives to working within His vineyard and living out His purposes in our day-to-day activities because of the discomfort or inconvenience or personal sacrifice this may entail.

May the Lord break through the dominion of sin and self-centeredness in our lives and make us a vineyard that will yield fruit to God’s glory and toward the salvation of others.

October 1, 2020

Jesus gave his followers a prayer, which most Christian traditions use to this day, and which anchors the key points of the Gospel. Speaking The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’ followers pray, not just when a sudden global crisis occurs, but every single day, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. We also pray every day, not simply when a horrible event acts as a trigger, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”.

Being kingdom-people and being penitence-people comes with the turf. That’s part of what following Jesus is all about. Those two petitions – the kingdom-petition, the forgiveness-petition – might just alert us to the real anti- kingdom forces at work in our world, our real “trespasses” (against one another, in our political systems, against the natural world and particularly the animal kingdom, in our farming and food-chain systems) of which we should have repented long ago.

In other words, if we, as Jesus’ followers, are waiting for special events to nudge us into looking for Jesus’ kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven”, or to tell us to repent when we are drifting into careless sin, then we’ve gone to sleep on the job. That is not to say, of course, that Christians never do go to sleep on the job, or that God cannot and doesn’t give them a pinch or a prod from time to time to get us back on track. That, too, is taken care of in The Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. In a sense, learning to follow Jesus is learning to pray The Lord’s Prayer.

How do we apply the Biblical words to any great and disturbing events of our time? The New Testament insists that we put Jesus at the center of the picture and work outwards from there. The minute we find ourselves looking at the world around us and jumping to conclusions about God and what God might be doing, but without looking carefully at Jesus, we are in serious danger of forcing through an “interpretation” which might look attractive – it might seem quite “spiritual” and awe-inspiring – but which actually screens Jesus out of the picture. As the old saying has it, “If he is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all.”

So, what might trust in Jesus mean in practice? There is after all only one Jesus: the Jesus of Nazareth who came into Galilee saying “Now is the time for God to become king. Now is the time to repent and believe the good news.” At every point Jesus was redefining all the ancient promises about God becoming king, about the good news that God was coming back at last to set everything right. He was redefining it all around his own vision when he told parables – vivid stories which said “Yes” to the kingdom of God and “No” to the ways in which most of his contemporaries were seeing that “kingdom,” that “sovereignty,” that “divine control.”

That’s not just a first-century issue. It is vital for our own reflection. There is a lot of the talk about “What is God doing in the coronavirus pandemic?” Maybe it would be better to ask what Jesus would do - and then watch Jesus heal a leper, announce forgiveness to a penitent woman, and celebrate parties (with all the wrong people). Then watch Jesus as he goes up to Jerusalem that last time and solemnly announces God’s final judgment on the city, the system, and the institution of the Temple that had refused God’s way of peace. We could watch as he washed his disciples’ feet before he broke bread and passed the cup around on Maundy Thursday with his friends. And comfort his mother as he hung on the cross. Three days later he appeared alive to his astonished friends in the upper room. All these are part of the ultimate announcement: God’s kingdom is now!

The servant in our Gospel Lesson was graciously released from his impossible-to-pay debt only to harass a fellow servant who owed him a small sum. The king had pronounced him forgiven, but that had not altered the resentment and hostility in his heart.

Something of this sort often happens in the Christian frame of reference. Maybe such an attitude is apparent in our prejudices toward other races or social classes, our snobbishness, our looking down-our-noses at the weaknesses and failures of others. If this is true, it may well proclaim to the world that something is out of kilter in our relationship to God. God has been gracious; God has bestowed love and forgiveness on every one of us. If we, in turn, cannot genuinely portray a like spirit of love and forgiveness toward one another, it indicates some basic insincerity or lack of receptivity in respect to the forgiveness of our sin. 

The forgiving and accepting love of God is the basis for our forgiving and accepting and loving one another. If God’s forgiveness of us does not result in our forgiveness of one another, that, according to Jesus, puts us at odds with God. To have the living Christ within us means to feel towards others as Christ would feel and act toward us.

God’s acceptance of us as we are certainly does result in making us tender, accepting, understanding and forgiving toward one another. May we never refuse God’s forgiveness but receive it and pass it on whenever we can.

September 20, 2020

“Why do you stand here idle all day?"

This week’s Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard offers us a straightforward invitation into a whole new world of Grace, a world beyond the rules of fairness we have been taught, to a world of overflowing generosity as practiced by the Master of the Household.

But how does this spirituality of grace work when there are moments of painful loss and suffering? To be honest, I can’t say I’ve ‘arrived’ yet at the fullness of living in a world of such grace, so that not even moments of great personal loss could extinguish the grace. I only glimpse God’s grace and hope that I will be far enough along on this journey to survive life’s greatest losses. And even if I’m not yet far enough along, I have experienced deeply enough the Crucified God in Christ to trust that God will be present with me in my times of greatest suffering, and then can help lead me out on the other side. We have spoken the following words many times: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff — they comfort me.”

Martin Buber, an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher, once said, “He who ceases to make a response ceases to hear the Word.” Jesus is real to us, not just a fad, a crying-post, a pious notion. Because He is real to us, we listen to his voice of invitation, respond to his call, and head for the vineyard in which to serve.

September 6, 2020

“Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” the disciples ask. Isn’t it true that whoever is the greatest gets to do what they want, and doesn’t have to defer to others. Don’t we usually think the greatest is the one who uses their position in the community to establish dominance and privilege, and they certainly don’t hesitate to give offense in doing this? Whoever is the greatest in the world’s way gets to throw stumbling blocks in the way of others. The resentment they instill in those around them, the other members of the community, fester and cause the whole community to stumble as their faith in authority plummets creating confusion, resentment, and bitterness.

What will Jesus say in response to their question? Jesus called a little child over and said, “...unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

How can we turn our life around and become like a little child? What does a little child have that adults don’t? A little child is free of rivalry with adults. Jesus wants us to turn our lives around by giving up our rivalry with each other. If we want to enter the kingdom, we must give up comparing ourselves to each other and asking who has more and who has less. The kingdom of heaven is a place devoid of all rivalry, all comparison, all “us” and “them.” In Christ we have everything already since we know we are deeply loved.

Small children can’t throw stumbling blocks because almost everyone is bigger, knows more and has much to teach them. They are not embarrassed by this and expect big people to help them. When we approach children with no need to communicate that we are big and they are small we are welcoming them into the kingdom of heaven in Jesus’ name. If we need to prove we are superior, bigger, stronger, and smarter than we are in rivalry with them and we are throwing a stumbling block in their path. Our unresolved issues, our brokenness, our sin will trip them up. As they stumble, falling through their native trust fractures in multiple directions.

But remember, all is not lost, non-rivalrous and beautiful community with no bitterness is still available. Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”