Sunday, October 12, 2014

In the Presence of?




Matthew 22:1-14 (29)

1Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4Again he sent other slaves, saying, “Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.” 5But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them. 7The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. 8Then he said to his slaves, “The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” 10Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

11 ‘But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he was speechless. 13Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 14For many are called, but few are chosen.’

This is the Word of the LORD
Thanks be to God

Psalm 23 (KJV)

1The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
2He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
3He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
4Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest my head with oil;
My cup runneth over.
6Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

This is the Word of the LORD
Thanks be to God.

The stores have already started selling Christmas. One can walk past aisle after aisle of costumes: princesses, pirates, warriors, and witches and begin to see the elves and evergreens that have come to characterize the season leading up to December 25th.

Two months out, and already the powers of advertisement and commerce are working to grab out attention, to ask us to choose sides, telling us that if we want to be the special ones who have exactly the right stuff, we have to come to them. As we approach Thanksgiving, their voices will intensify, urging us to trade sleep and time with family for a discount on whatever device the marketing firms have decided to lead us to this season.

Even more prevalent this time of year, as we approach Election Day, are voices of spokespeople and politicians. Asking for us to support their campaigns, to buy their rhetoric, to put our name on their list, because they will be the ones to guide us into a new age of right values and responsible action.

The commercial jingles and the political soundbites whirl dizzyingly around our minds, leaving us disoriented and numb, waiting for the flashiest or the loudest voice to carry us to the only place we can see to go.

Perhaps it was always this way, or perhaps something has changed in our lifetime and things will be this way forever. After all, this is the way the world is, we are separated into our economic brackets, organized into our political parties, divided into our denominational loyalties. It's not practical to try and shift too far from that reality.

We are bound up in affiliations and categories and manufactured wants.

But what if...

What if instead of letting party lines and brand loyalty guide us...

"The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want."

The dominant culture may be pulling us apart. We may find shouting voices use fear to control our perception of the world. The tiny, flickering, differences between us might be stoked into sources of infernal conflict.

In a culture that prefers to be ruled by fear and division, "The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want," brings us together and surrounds us with the comfort of centuries of faith and tradition. Rather than focusing on everything that could go wrong, every reason to be afraid, both trivial and substantial, we are invited to imagine how God will bring us together. Instead of the scarcity we have learned throughout our lives, we are given permission to trust in God's abundance: "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters."

Green pastures and still waters feed us in a very different way than the calls to action to which we have grown so accustomed. With the LORD as our shepherd, we don't have to scrounge for weeds in the wilderness or hoard every drop of water. We do not even have to seek them for ourselves, because God guides us to where we need to be, providing for us and the rest of his flock at each stage in the journey.

So why is this reality one we experience through metaphor and faith when we can imagine a world where we experience it through our senses? Would not the Psalm 23 life free us to live faithfully, justly, and lovingly? What hold does the dominant reality have on us that we only turn to this Psalm in trouble?

We've turned to this Psalm for comfort for more than four hundred years, going back the the scholars and poets of the King James Version. Before that we sought the same poem in different translations for thousands of years going back to David's lyre and the breath of the Holy Spirit. We need it's comfort most when our world is spinning out of our control, when a loved one is in surgery, when we are wracked with fear in a dark parking lot, when we confront our own mortality at a graveside. We turn to this Psalm when we need the comfort that God is control, and that God loves us faithfully.

That's the cost of a Psalm 23 life: we must abandon the illusion that we are in control and submit to the LORD. Our broken souls struggle to make that leap, and we seek to serve ourselves, and the dominant image of the world becomes skewed toward fear. 

Perhaps that’s why, in our Gospel lesson this morning, those who had been invited to the King’s Wedding banquet reacted the way they did to the slaves call to come to the feast. I think our tendency, when we hear someone talk about the kingdom of heaven or about submitted to the sovereignty of God, is to ignore them in favor of  - quote - more important things - unquote. We can control our farms and businesses, or at least we think we can. We certainly have more of an impact on them than we do on the joyful feast of the kingdom of God.

Sometimes, though, our resistance is more severe. The history of Israel is full of prophets who were killed for telling the truth, for imagining a different world than the one earthly kings tried to rule. As God’s people expanded to include the church, the violent response to the servants of God also grew. Christians have made more martyrs of each other than all the foreign persecutions we could imagine. All because we wanted to hold on to the illusion that this world and our lives are ours to control. Our culture is dominated by Christianity, and yet our control-hungry souls have taken us away from the justice and freedom that is imaginatively tangible in “The LORD is my shepherd.”

Left to our own ideas, we sheep would be truly lost. We are not, however, left to the devising of our broken souls. God lovingly, faithfully, brings us back into the fold. "He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” God rescues us and renews our spirits, and we know that we are not lost. Commercials may tell us that we are lost without a particular product, political ads may tell us that we are lost if the election goes the wrong way, but as people of the book we know that those are manufactured crises, they may pull at us for a moment, but God holds us closer, leading us in the paths of righteousness not for our own sake, but for the sake of God’s holy name.

Lest we believe that this psalm is just some naive fairy tale, we are shown that "Psalm 23 knows that evil is present in the world, but it is not feared. Confidence in God is the source of new orientation." "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." There are things in this world that will cause us to struggle, and we will walk through the valley of the shadow of death. One paraphrase of this psalm wrote this line as "when I crawl through valley of the shadow of cancer." That makes it hit home for a lot of us for whom cancer and the stale air of hospitals are the image we have of loss and grief.

Yet we have comfort even in those dark places that God is with us and guides our steps. God brings us from the green pastures and still waters to the valley of the shadow of death, and from there we are gathered in to the table. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over.”

Jesus’s parable of the wedding banquet from the second half today’s Matthew reading does not specify if the wedding feast was a table or a buffet. it only tells us that the slaves were sent out into the main streets to gather and invite everyone they could find, the good and the bad.

That almost certainly means that enemies were both invited. If those same slaves were sent out today in the city of Lowell, they’re probably invite republicans and democrats, duke fans and carolina fans, feuding families whose stories have been lost in memory and only the fight remains, and every kind of division that contemporary culture can thrust upon us.

Perhaps one of them knew that his enemies would be there, and therefore did not dress appropriately for the occasion, accepting the invitation, but not the overwhelmingly inclusive grace that accompanied it.

I’m not satisfied with that interpretation though. One of the lunch bunch folks pointed out that going from the radical invitation to throwing the guy out just for not meeting the dress code seemed uncharacteristically cruel of God. Where’s the grace we have come to know and need from God? Where is the assurance of Psalm 23? When I walk through the valley of the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing to teeth, do we still fear no evil? Is God still with us?

One of the ways to get new richness out of a familiar parable is to change the cast. The obvious interpretation of this parable is that God is the king, the feast is in honor of the Son, Jesus, and the feast is the kingdom of heaven. But Jesus doesn’t say that the kingdom of heaven is like a feast, he said it’s like a king who gave a wedding feast. Perhaps then, we can recast the friend who lacked a wedding robe. Perhaps in the hurry to invite the good and the bad, one person was not told about the dress code, or didn’t have time to go home and get their own.

Perhaps the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ saw someone who was not properly dressed and loved him enough that he gave him his own cloak, and then he was cast out from the party. when I walk through the valley of the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, perhaps Jesus has been there too, and so we still need fear no evil. For thou art with me. comforting us, like a good shepherd, with thy rod and thy staff. bringing us back into table fellowship with both the good and the bad, setting a table before us in the presence of our enemies.

Because the enemies are seated at the table too, and a place is prepared for them as well as for us. God loves us faithfully enough to seek us and protect us in the valley of the shadow of death. God also loves them enough to offer his own wedding robe to them when they are unprepared. God loves us faithfully, but not exclusively. 

One of the reasons that we love this Psalm so much, and one of the reasons we read it from King James today instead of the New Revised Standard Version, which is the pew bible, is the NRSV translates the line, “my cup runneth over” as “my cup is filled to the brim.” I like the NRSV, i grew up with it, it’s a scholarly and faithful translation. But my cup is not filled to the brim, my cup runneth over.

We are given an overwhelming abundance of grace, an overwhelming invitation to the table. So are they. Their cup also runneth over. But we’re not paying attention to who is served what, or when, or why. For our cup runneth over, and we are seated at table with God.

So it’s an opportunity to step out into the world. With all the whirling voices of commercialism and politics and say “Yeah, there’s this stuff, and yeah, there’s this other stuff. But the LORD is my shepherd. I shall not want”

We don’t have to be divided into any camp for long. For we all come together around cups that runneth over, around a table that is prepare before us in the presence of mine enemies, and in the presence of theirs. For the table is big enough for all, and Christ gives us a wedding robe when we’re not prepared for the feast.

Because we’re not going to be well enough prepared. There’s always something new. But when we break free of the bonds of the dominant culture fo commercialism and conflict tells us…

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.




Sunday, October 5, 2014

Vineyards

Vineyards from Joseph Taber on Vimeo.

Isaiah 5:1-7 (776)

1Let me sing for my beloved
My love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.
2He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines:
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yield wild grapes.

3And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
and people of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
4What more was there to do for my vineyard
that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

5And now I will tell you
what to do with my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
6I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

7For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel
and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice, but saw bloodshed;
righteousness, but heard a cry!

This is the Word of the LORD
Thanks be to God

Matthew 21:33-46 (29)

33”Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. 34When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. 35But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, skilled another, and stoned another. 36Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. 37Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 38But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ 39So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. 40Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” 41 They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

42Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes?’ 43Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruit of the kingdom. 44The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”

45When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parable, they realized he was speaking about them. 46They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

This is the Word of the LORD
Thanks be to God.


Isaiah and God have a very different relationship than the discipleship we normally imagine. In a world where we often keep God at arms length by talking about the god of all heaven and earth, who spins the whirling planets, whose majesty is without end, there's something scandalous about beginning a prophetic passage with "Let me sing for my beloved." I have not found that level of divine intimacy in many of the churches in which I have worshipped.

The divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were accustomed to the grand language of Temple worship, where God was enthroned in the heavens, and the earth was his footstool. God was always accessible for the divided kingdoms, but as also kept distant by the pomp and ritual of the temple. It was the kind of difference between shaking hands and holding hands.

God held Isaiah's hand. God wanted to hold Israel's hand, and Judah's, as he had when they wandered in the wilderness together. But the divided kingdoms kept God at a distance.

Perhaps God's covenant peoples kept God at a distance because an intimate relationship with God means living a transformed life. Reformed and always being reformed, as the saying goes.

Yet God is not satisfied with a handshake and an unchanged life. Isaiah's love-song on God's behalf portrays a vineyard owner who tirelessly and diligently does everything right. "My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines: he built a watchtower in the midst of it," The land is ready, the best vines are selected, a watchtower is built to defend it from any pest that might threaten the vineyard. This is not the act of a creator who can be held at a distance, this kind of loving cultivation shows that God cares deeply about our response in faith.

God carefully collects us and prepares a place for us as a long-term investment, even hewing a wine vat which would not pay for itself for many harvests. Truly no vine could hope for better circumstances in which to grow. "However, it is not our self-interest that God is cultivating...God's love, care, and protection come with an expectation: justice and righteousness. These are the fruits God longs to see flourish in us.”

When those fruits do not flourish, things take a darker turn. Isaiah’s love-song changes voice, and we find ourselves feasting on the bitterness of wild or rotten grapes. God is deeply hurt by the failure of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. “For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”

For all the work God has done establishing a covenant people, guiding them from slavery to the promised land, preserving them through the centuries, one would expect unfettered faithfulness. Yet the chosen people cannot keep the covenant, and the consequences for their crimes are vivid.

”The threat of judgment may be thunderous here, but the parable also invites us to glimpse the potential for abundant fruitfulness in the lives of those who are faithful." Everything is set up for our success as servants of the living God, who redeems with a strong arm and who holds our hand throughout all our struggles. God’s reaction to Israel and Judah’s failure is not that of a distant God, but of the intimate beloved on whose behalf Isaiah sings.

God cares about us so much that God cares how we respond to the intimate intervention in our lives. God longs to see us live righteously, to Do Justice when we interact with one another. Justice and Righteousness in scripture are more than just finding what is fair or living according to some expansive ruleset.

In scripture, Justice tears down oppression and liberates both the prisoner and the jailer. Justice and righteousness reach beyond the boundaries we draw between people and show hospitality to the ones we might consider “other.” Justice and righteousness always point to God as the source of all authority and reject and subversion of God’s sovereign love. Justice and righteousness shine through loving your neighbor as yourself, as commanded in Leviticus 19:18, and through loving the LORD our God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength as commanded in Deuteronomy 6:5.

We all know the passage where Jesus quotes those two laws as the greatest commandments. They were nothing new, and yet the people of God then, as now, struggled to live the covenant fully. When God expected the fruit of his vineyard, he instead found violence.

When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, skilled another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’”

"This is the heir, let us kill him and get his inheritance!" I don’t have much experience with estate planning, but I don’t imagine most people write their wills to include leaving something to the one who murders their heirs. But it's exactly how God worked at the cross. We killed the heir of heaven and earth, and through the resurrection we were also made heirs! None of the chief priests and elders of the people to whom Jesus was speaking had this radical grace in mind when they were asked to predict what happened next:

Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

“Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes?’ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruit of the kingdom. 

Where we expect, and deserve, a miserable death for our failure to produce justice and righteousness, God instead responds with unyielding grace. There is still kingdom work to be done, and God cares about creation enough to see it done, even if it means having to find new hands with which to do it. "[The kingdom of God] refers not to the age to come but to a special relationship to God's sovereignty.” When we fail to be faithful, God’s work will still be done, we just lose the joy of having God work through us. God plants new vineyards, God hires new workers.

And yet neither of these texts are hopeless. There is judgment to be sure, but God’s judgment, like God’s justice, restores and invites us back into relationship with the Holy One. “The transfer of stewardship to a ‘people that produces the fruits of the kingdom’ is a restorative act, not a punitive act.”  God is intimately involved in creation, will not wait for us to figure it out on our own, because we’ve shown we can’t get there by ourselves. So at the same moment he is pronouncing judgment, God is already working in both of these passages to bring God’s people back into the joyful relationship which God intends for them. For the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, that meant prophets and catastrophe, and eventually restoration. For the people to whom Jesus was speaking in the temple when he told his parable, that meant that he would be led to the cross, and that the cross would lead to the resurrection, where the power of sin and death would be forever broken.

We believe that in Communion, by the power of the Holy Spirit we are elevated to dine with Christ at God's table. Our whole selves are nourished by Christ's real presence among us, and we are reminded of how far God went to restore us to the intimate relationship where we can share a meal with God and with one another. Every time we break bread or drink of the fruit of the vine, we proclaim Christ's saving death until he comes again.


Until then, we have the responsibility to bear the fruits of the kingdom of God: justice and righteousness. God cares deeply about us, and holds our hand throughout the whole of human history, and cares about how we respond in faith to what God has already done. We can try and hold God at arms length, like the divided kingdoms did, like the chief priests and the elder of the people did, like the church still sometimes does. But it is better to embrace the transformation God has already accomplished in us, and sing the songs of our beloved, and to bear the fruits from this table, where we are fed, out into the vineyard of all of the peoples of God.