The Heart at the Heart of God (Proper 25A; Reformation Sunday)

 

The Heart at the Heart of God

Proper 25A; Reformation Sunday 

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland

8:00 AM Said, 1:00 AM Sung Mass 29 October 2017

Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18; Psalm 1;1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

 God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen 

Five hundred years ago this week, Augustinian monk, Martin of Erfurt, a professor of Biblical studies at a university seminary, took the bold step of challenging an errant and hopelessly corrupt Church hierarchy.  He was disgusted by Ponzi-scheme-like efforts to raise funds to build a new and improved St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican by selling promises of forgiveness of sins, past, present, and future.  

  

The Vatican’s point man in the district selling such indulgences, Dominican monk Johann Tetzel, had infamously coined a memorable little ad jingle for the campaign, speaking of the souls of the beloved departed: “As soon as the gold in the coffer rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs.”  

At least as legend tells it, Brother Martin, whose surname was Luther, chose an appropriate day to post his challenge on the main Church’s door:  October 31, the eve of All Saints’ Day, just before the Feast of the Souls of All the Faithful departed, when most of community would come into Church and be thinking of the dead. 

“Debate me fair and square on this,” he demanded, putting his argument into 95 succinct propositions or theses:  sin was forgiven by God’s grace when a sinner repented, not when someone paid money to the Church.  Faith in Christ was the main instrument of this, not the intercession of the Church and its hierarchy.  Christ himself was displeased when people tried to sell promises of salvation or the priesthood, etc.

Thus did a troublesome monk in an obscure part of northern Europe unintentionally trigger the split of Western Christianity into two warring factions: Rome and the Reformation.  Local leaders, feeling the new nationalism of the age and cynical of a hierarchy that had lost all moral credibility because of the papal schism and the Borgia popes, saved Luther from the fate of those who had challenged Rome even only 20 years before:  burning at the stake as a heretic.  Both Romans and Reformed claimed to preserve the ancient faith given by Christ: the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.  

The Protestants rejected the obvious enormities of Rome:  a legalism harsh on the common people but lax on the rich and the clergy, superstitious practices that obscured the truth of the Gospel found in scriptures, requiring celibacy of ministers not graced with that particular charism, contempt for the laity and the priesthood of the baptized clearly taught in scripture, etc.  But in the process, they, particularly those following ideas put forward in Geneva, themselves fell into enormity:  a fragmented church of atomistic congregations and no great shared common doctrine or standard of worship, a doctrine of a double predestination (some to heaven and some to hell) at the expense of the scriptural teaching that God desires to save all people and that our choices in accepting or rejecting God’s grace actually make a difference, a loss of respect and devotion to her whom the main body of the united Church of the first nine centuries called the Blessed Mother of God, a belittling and mocking of honors paid to the consecrated bread and wine of Holy Communion, what Christ himself said was his body and blood, forbidding images of Christ and the saints as though the incarnation meant nothing, and even a denigration of the cross itself as a symbol of our faith.  The biggest enormity of Geneva and Luther stemmed from the idea that the Bible was the sole source of establishing faith, doctrine, and practice in the Church.  The result was hundreds of little denominations all claiming the follow the Bible, all in disagreement over key things because their interpretations differed from each other. 

This so-called Protestant illness, fragmentation and disorder in the common life of the Church, came from its use of the authority of the Bible to counter the overwhelming power of the Roman hierarchy.  “Sola scriptura” (“Scripture Alone!”) cried Luther.  But the Bible itself is a complex mix of teachings and practices gathered from over a thousand year period by the church itself.  Without some basic principle of interpretation, without what Luther called a “canon within the canon,” it was hopeless as a guide.   But Protestants differed on where that canon lie, or even if it existed. 

In England, the turmoil on the continent led a very catholic King to break from Rome to escape the political control of a foreign power and allow him to secure the peace of his realm by arranging a marriage that might produce an eligible heir to the throne.  But Henry kept the doctrine and practices of the old religion.  In time, the ideas of Geneva and the practices of Luther helped even this limping independent  Catholicism to reform.  In England, the authority of the Pope was replaced by the authority of the state.  But despite Elizabeth’s gentle efforts to settle a peace between Catholics and Protestants in her realm, the violence of the Reformation on the Continent came to England: Mary made protestant martyrs, Elizabeth made catholic ones once the Pope declared open season on her throne, and later a very protestant parliament levied war against and eventually beheaded a catholic leaning Charles I.    

Many see this 500^th anniversary as a cause of celebration, but many of us also see it as a cause for mourning the sad divisions that have split the body of Christ and made enemies of those who share a common confession that Jesus Christ is Lord. 

At the end of Johann Tetzel’s life, as he lay alone dying of degenerative illness, rejected by the hierarchs he had served and the public he had milked, Luther wrote him, offering his prayers and sympathy, and reassuring him that the great schism they had started was not the fault of either of them:  “there were forces at work much larger and stronger than either of us.” 

How can we make sense of such discord, and disagreement about what God’s word teaches?  Everyone points to one passage, while opponents point to another.  But where is the center of scripture?  Where is the canon within a canon?  Where is the heart at the heart of God?  Today’s Gospel gives us a glimpse. 

A lawyer asks Jesus, “Of all the 613 commandments in the Torah, (365 “Thou shalt nots” and 248 “Thou shalts”), which is the most important?  What is the heart of the Law?”

Jesus starts his answer with the Shema‘, the credo of Judaism recited every morning and evening: “ Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”   Most rabbis had also pointed to this passage from Deuteronomy as the heart of the Law. 

But then Jesus adds, “and another commandment is on par with this first one,” citing an obscure portion of the Leviticus Holiness Code: “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments depend the entire body of scripture.” 

This juxtaposition is something completely new, first made by Jesus. 

He puts these two commandments using the verb “love” on par with each other.  In so doing he bridges a great divide in the Hebrew tradition:  the contrast between holiness and purity on the one side and social justice and fairness on the other, between Priests and prophets, or ritual and ethics.

Why love?   Why not fear, or obedience, or respect?  Why not honor, or duty?    Jesus is saying the openness and vulnerability of our hearts is where we find the ability to find the right path to faithfulness to a holy God and taking care of one’s fellow human beings.   This is what it means when he says the link between the two is love. 

Love here is not just a feeling, but a disposition of the will, a lifetime of benevolent acts.

Maybe it’s the loss of self-regard we experience in love.   Most of our other emotions and habits can be pursued while manipulating and being manipulated by others.  But if love starts doing that, we no longer consider it love.  

Think about it:  your best loves—whether a partner, or friend, parent, or child—what is their essence?  Loss of concern about yourself and focus on the beloved.  That’s one of the reasons that finding right ways to set boundaries in love relationships is so tricky, and so necessary.  

The two are on par with each other.  Holiness must be bound by justice.  And Justice must be driven by holiness.  

Mindfulness and being present must find expression in compassion.  Our concern for decency and fairness must never descend into mere self or group interest.

Love is the heart of Christian community, of our common life.  Differences about things that matter deeply to us should never touch our mutual affection.

Love is the ultimate reformation, and the ultimate expression of catholic faith.  Let us love, beloved, as Christ loved us.  Amen. 

Looking Forward as a Spiritual Practice

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

October 25, 2017

“O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” (BCP Solemn Collect for Good Friday and Ordinations, emphasis added)

One of the comments I have heard repeatedly about our newly invigorated youth acolyte program is, “I am so happy to see the young people take a more active role in church.  I feel their energy and it makes me feel more energetic.”   Given our generally aging demographic at Trinity, being in touch with people whose futures and lives lie ahead of them with wondering expectation is indeed energizing. 

We are often ridden and plagued by the past.  If we have unresolved issues in relationships or failings in our lives that we have not yet amended, the past can cast a long shadow and be a burden.   If the inevitable decline brought on by elder years has constrained us and limited our choices and activities, the past can be the source of regret for things lost. 

But this need not be so.  Thankfulness and enjoying the things we are still able to do drives out regret for things lost.  Active reconciliation helps mend relations; confession and active amendment drives away guilt and shame.   Focusing on the present and even looking to the future exorcize the haunting specter of too much past and too little future.

C.S. Lewis wrote this in a private letter in 1961: 

“We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past. Not so the saved. This is one of the dangers of being, like you and me, old. There’s so much past, now, isn’t there? And so little else. But we must try very hard not to keep on endlessly chewing the cud. We must look forward more eagerly to sloughing that old skin off forever—metaphors getting a bit mixed here, but you know what I mean” (from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. III). 

St. Paul says that our trust in the resurrection of our Lord is the ultimate cure to any sense of futility we may have due to an unhealthy relationship with our past: 

“Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.  … [T]hanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!  Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:51-58, emphasis added). 

Grace and Peace. 

--Fr. Tony+

The Cross and Social Justice (Midweek Message)

The Cross and Social Justice

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

October 18, 2017

Walter Brueggemann, in his magisterial Theology of the Old Testament, points out that throughout the Hebrew scriptures, one finds two great thematic threads. On the one side, there are the priests, concerned above all about the holiness of God, the separateness of God, and the need for God’s people to strive for purity and ritual holiness, to be special and set aside for God’s service.  “You shall be holy for I am holy,” we read in Leviticus, and there follows hundreds of detailed rules setting boundaries and defining categories to help achieve holiness.    On the other side there are the prophets, who stress above all God’s demand that we strive for justice and treat people, especially the marginalized, decently and fairly. 

The two themes often seem in opposition.  The priests and the Law talk a lot about purity and holiness.  The prophets tend to talk about dealing with others justly, especially the poor, widows and orphans, and the foreigner. For Samuel, Amos, Isaiah, Micah and others God says things like:  “I expect obedience, not sacrifice.” “I hate your sacrifices because you mistreat the widow and the orphan.”    “All I really ask of you is to treat the poor fairly, and to walk humbly with me.”  For the priests and teachers of halakhic law, however, God say things like, “You will be Holy for I am Holy, says the Lord.”  “You shall not pollute the land with impurity, or I will destroy you.”  “You shall drive out pollution from among you and separate yourself from uncleanness.” 

Brueggemann says that the two traditions are both important and mutually corrective. The boundaries established by the Law are what define and preserve the People of God, and allow ethical monotheism to flourish.  But if holiness is not tempered with the call for social justice, it becomes empty ritual, mere ceremonialism and obsessive-compulsive concern with purity.  It becomes a tool for oppressing others.   On the other hand, calls for social justice in the absence of an authentic call to holiness rapidly degenerate into the most obvious self-serving form of interest-group politics. 

This last week while I was in Chicago, I heard the Rt. Rev. Daniel Gutierrez give a presentation on the evangelism of social justice witness.  He made much the same point, casting it within the context of our Christian faith and experience and expressing it starkly:  without focusing on Jesus on the Cross, there is no social justice. 

“We preach nothing else but Christ, nailed to the Cross,” said St. Paul.  The great mystery of the incarnation, of God Almighty becoming one of us, sharing our human nature and frailty, and suffering along with us, is at the heart of our faith.  God on the Cross, God suffering along with us, taking all the evil the world can throw at us, is the basis for our hope, since after Calvary’s dark night comes Resurrection morning.  “Time on the cross” was thus one way black slaves in American history described their suffering, and expressed their hope for liberation. 

When we call for social justice, we should have a clear understanding that this is required for preserving the dignity of all of God’s creatures.   We should have a deep understanding that it was Imperial force and the privilege of the powerful that put Jesus to death on the Cross.  Without such an understanding, our efforts quickly are reduced to the worst sort of interest group politics.  It all becomes who gets what piece of the pie and no more.  It slouches into “hurrah for our side,” and targeting our opponents, sometimes with the very unfairness that we have suffered.  This degenerates all too easily into the very power politics, interest group wrangling, and politics of identity that put Jesus on the cross.   

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

The Parable of the Party Invitation (proper 23A)

The Parable of the Party Invitation

15 October 2017: 8 a.m. Said, 10 a.m. Sung Mass  

Proper 23A

Parish of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

8:00 am said; 10 am sung Mass

Isaiah 25:1-9 Psalm 23 Philippians 4:1-9 Matthew 22:1-14

God, give us hearts to feel and love. 

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. 

I had a nightmare this morning as I was waking up.  In fact, it woke me up.  I was getting ready to lead worship here at Trinity.  I got on my cassock, and then put on my alb, in the dream a high collared one with lots of lace.  But it had somehow become stained, with a bright yellow-orange splotch, almost like hunter’s orange!  It was in the places that would not be covered by the stole and chasuble.  I couldn’t wear it, so looked for something else in the sacristy’s closets.  But none fit—they were too small for my “Friar Tuck” frame. I tried this one and that, all to no avail and greater and greater anxiety.  Anne McCollum came in to ask if anything was the matter holding up the start of Mass, and suggested that I wash the stain out and wear the alb wet.   John Garver then came in asking if he could help.  10 o’clock having come and gone, all I could do is ask him to go out and announce that things would be 10 minutes late.  I could hear him through the door, “Father Tony has had a major wardrobe malfunction and we’ll start late this morning.”  As I put on the wet alb, knowing this was not going to work, I woke suddenly, with all the drama and anxiety unresolved, in a sweat that the soaking wet alb in the dream mirrored.   

We all have at one time or another anxiety about our clothing: not going to a social event in proper attire, a run in a stocking, things mysteriously suddenly becoming too small for our stealth-increasing girth, an unclosed zipper after a trip to the loo, perhaps wearing unmatched shoes. 

You are all sitting there wondering—what in the world was that Gospel reading about?  If a king invites a whole lot of people to a party and he’s so scary that everyone finds a polite excuse to get out of it, there’s something wrong with that king.  And if you give me a last minute invitation only to humiliate and shame me for wearing the wrong clothes, and then throw me out, there’s something the matter with you. 

Matthew’s Jesus starts it with “the kingdom of heaven is like….”  But remember that this isn’t saying that king is somehow God.  The phrase means something more like “Let me tell you a story that will help you see how God rules over us.”   

The king here is clearly a psycho.  It is more a story about how Caesar or some dictator in a banana republic throws parties.  By seeing how bad such “hospitality” is, it helps us see maybe what God’s invitations are like by contrast.   Remember—Matthew was written just after Caesar destroyed the Jewish homeland and its Temple.  The Gospel writer suffers from serious post-traumatic stress syndrome.  And he is the only Gospel that pictures Jesus teaching clearly “from John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven has been suffering violence and the violent continue to take it by force (Matthew 11:12)

Once again, Matthew has taken a parable from Jesus and added all sorts of details to turn it into an allegory, changing its meaning in the process.  Like last week, the earlier form of the parable is preserved in the Gospel of Luke and the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas.

It originally ran this way:

A rich man gave a great dinner to which he invited many guests. When all was ready, he sent his servant to summon the guests. But one by one, they all gave excuses for not coming. Hearing this, the rich man commanded his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys and bring in anyone you find. I want my great hall to be filled for the banquet.’

Most of Jesus’ audience knew that a great banquet was a big scriptural image for God’s future saving act.  Even though many passages said, like today’s Isaiah reading, that this banquet would be for all nations (Isaiah 25:7), many teachers said that it would be an exclusive event limited to God’s people only. 

Jesus replied to such a stingy image of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45).   He points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion, or when a fish, not a snake. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

And Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people declared contagiously unclean by his religion.   He welcomed them.   He tells people to accept God’s invitation without fear or anxiety.  He tells Martha, worried about getting every little detail of her dinner for Jesus just right, that maybe she needs to relax a bit more, and perhaps listen to joy like Mary.  “Don’t worry about how you’re clothed,” he says, “the wild flower are prettier than King Solomon all decked out, and they don’t worry a bit.”  When he sends the apostles out, he tells them to just take one change of clothes and no more, to accept people’s hospitality, not be picky about their food, and eat whatever their hosts give them.

Jesus’ original parable of the RSVPs tells the story of the host forced by RSVP “regrets” to drag in people from off the street to say God’s banquet is open to all.  It’s all about grace.  But Matthew adds all the nasty details about a psychopathic king and invitees scared to death of getting things wrong, and that poor guy without proper wedding clothes thrown out into the street bound hand and foot.  He is trying to explain that no matter how gracious God’s invitation, we need to be attentive to properly  accepting it.  Matthew’s image of having proper clothes for the wedding becomes in the Gospel of Thomas a symbol of whether we have actually truly accepted God’s gift. 

At Caesar’s party, where all is fear and stress, if anyone is like that guy thrown out it is Jesus himself.   Jesus was taken outside the city wall and nailed to a cross because he just was not up to snuff when it came for giving proper respect to Rome. 

God is a kind and loving host, and invites us all.  There is no need for stress or anxiety.  The good news in this is that God’s invitation is not like Caesar’s.  God is not a psycho killer.  We need not fear. 

But in order to accept God’s invitation, we have to be open to receive it. St. Augustine says, ‘God gives where He finds open hands.’ You can't receive the gift if your hands are already full, or are clenched tight.

In yet another parable, Jesus compares God’s kingdom to a narrow path and a tight gate, which at any given time only a few can manage to squeeze through (Matt 7:13-14). This is because in order to get through such a tight fit, people have to be willing to abandon all the baggage they are carrying, whether riches, resentments, self-will, sins, or even what appears to be good things if they are getting in the way. 

What does accepting grace, freely offered, look like in practical terms? 

It looks like me admitting that I am helpless and hopeless. It sounds like the sincere phrase “I am sorry and I humbly repent.” It feels like Martin Luther’s heartfelt cry, “I am yours Lord, save me.”  

I myself have known God’s grace.   All was hopeless and helpless, through my own “thoughtlessness, weakness, through my own deliberate fault.”   I found that I had to accept my own powerlessness and turn it all over to God. And keep doing that, each day.  Gradually, steadily, God worked wonderful changes. I am still far from what God wants. But I live each day in gratitude.

I know that many of you have had similar experiences. You have told me your stories.   We need to continue in faith and gratitude, and share the invitation to the party through our actions and words.

If you have not had such an experience, then please listen to this call to God’s banquet, you random passerby on the street.   The tickets are free. But they are not cheap. And neither is the celebration. The banquet is priceless, the bread the finest, and the wine, a vintage that makes our hearts gladder than any other.

Come to the banquet, don’t be afraid.  And, without sinking into fear or anxiety, let’s try to wear the right clothes.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Two Left Shoes (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

October 11, 2017

Two Left Shoes

I am writing this from Chicago, where I am on retreat and attending the annual conference of my religious order, the Society of Catholic Priests, an international group of Anglican and Episcopalian clergy and vowed religious who follow a rule of life focused on the spirituality of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a life fully supported by the sacraments of the Church (including giving and hearing confession), and mutual prayer and support in our lives and ministries.   I went to the airport in Medford early Monday morning to catch a flight through Denver; trying to save a bit of sleep before I left for the 5:30 a.m. flight, I arrived at 4:45 just in time to check one piece of luggage filled with vestments and worship bulletins.  But I had not counted on the unusual scene at the airport early on a Monday morning starting the work week:  there were over 150 people in line for security!  And for the first time in years, I had to take off my belt and shoes in the TSA checkpoint.  When I looked down, I realized that in the early morning darkness (trying to let Elena sleep undisturbed as I prepared for the flight) I had inadvertently put on two left shoes from unmatched pairs of black shoes.  I had brought no other pair and was in for an uncomfortable and embarrassing week among, at least in part, some of the most sartorially demanding clergy of the American Church! 

But by the time I got to the gate, the flight had already left without me, taking my checked bag along with it.  “What a miserable start to a week!” I thought to myself.  The United agent helpfully booked me on the next available flight that would get me to Chicago, one through San Francisco about 6 hours later.  So I had time to return home (my daughter-in-law uncomplainingly making an immediate second trip to the airport to pick me up).   But there was a silver lining to the dark cloud of the missed plane:  at least I could catch a little more sleep and get a matched pair of shoes!   And when I called my Society convener to say I would be late and miss the first day of Provincial Council Meetings, he graciously said it was no problem since the first day was not a business meeting of the council.  At home, I was also able to accomplish a couple of tasks at home that I needed to do before my departure but had run out of time for in the rush to get to the wee-hours plane I had missed.  So by the time I actually arrived in Chicago later in the day, easily recovering my errant luggage, I felt like maybe God was looking after me: helping me to get a matched pair of shoes on my feet for a week’s retreat. 

It is often like that in life, I think.  We rush about in the dark, fearful of deadlines and lost opportunities, making bumbling and embarrassing errors.  We sometimes run into the very disasters we hope to avoid at all costs.  But if we just keep on going, and doing the next thing required of us, things work out.  God provides, and sometimes the very thing we hoped to avoid turns out to be a blessing. 

There is a traditional Chinese story that tells of accepting the way things are, the Tao:  A farmer had only one horse.  One day the horse ran away. The neighbors came to commiserate over what they saw as his terrible loss. The farmer said, “What makes you think it is so terrible?”  Later, the horse came home--this time bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors became excited at the farmer's good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said, “What makes you think this is good fortune?”  The farmer's son was thrown from one of the wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad luck! The farmer said, “What makes you think it is bad?”  A war came, and every able-bodied man was conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer's son, because he had a broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. “What makes you think this is good?” said the farmer.

Trust in God means accepting what life throws at us.  As St. Julian of Norwich said, “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.” 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+ 

Desperate Farmers (proper 22a)

Gala Sobol, Gospel Parable of the Wicked Vinedressers. 2008.

Desperate Farmers

(Proper 22A)

8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

8 October 2017

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80: 7-14 Philippians 3:4b-14 Matthew 21:33-46

God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

We have seen in the last few weeks several parables of Jesus that have been re-interpreted by Matthew’s Gospel:  Matthew regularly takes a parable that has a single major point of reflection and turns it into an allegory, a story with several points of comparison.  Last week, it was the parable of the two sons, the big talker and the big doer (Matt. 21:23-32).  Jesus meant this as a simple contrast between saying and not doing on the one hand and not saying but just doing on the other; Matthew turned this into an allegory about the religiously orthodox (Pharisees and scribes) and repentant notorious sinners (tax-collectors and whores).   The week before that, it was the parable of the bad personnel policy (Matt. 20:1-16), which Matthew understood as an allegory about the grateful ones come lately to faith and the resentful ones who have been here a long time.  On Jesus’ lips, as we saw, it was a critique of the unfairness of the marketplace and the careless ways of the wealthy, where what they see as an act of kindness can be seen as corrupted by the unfairness of the larger system.  The week before that, it was the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matt. 18:22-35).  Again, what for Jesus had been an edgy critique of the careless rich, great and small, had become for Matthew an allegory about the need for us to forgive others if we expect to be forgiven ourselves by God. 

The images in today’s readings, the parable of the vineyard in Isaiah, and the parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew, both use the rich images of viniculture to talk about our relationship with God.  We must bring forth sweet and juicy grapes, acts of compassion and service, if we are to truly be God’s vineyard, lest he clean up the garden, toss us out, and start again with another vine stock more prone to fruit. 

That much is obvious from the Lectionary’s juxtaposition of these two passages.  But what is not so patently evident is how Matthew, once again, has reframed and reinterpreted Jesus’ parable.   When you compare this parable with how it is preserved in Luke and in the Gospel of Thomas, you see what Matthew or his tradition has added:  all the little details that lead us to see in the parable a complex story with many points of comparison s an allegory: the direct allusion to the parable of the vineyard in Isaiah, the complex narrative about different slaves being sent and some getting killed and others just beaten, or the detail of the murdered son’s body being tossed out outside vineyard.  Even the concluding question, “what do you think that landowner is going to do to those tenants?” is missing in the original form. 

Matthew, writing after the Roman army’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., believes that Jesus’s parable is about that earth-shattering event, the end of Second Temple Judaism and the Temple cult with its legal practices.  He sees it as being replaced by Christianity.  In this supercessionist understanding of the parable, the Landlord is God; the tenants, the Israelites and the Jews; the agents sent and then abused, the prophets; and the “only son, the heir,” Jesus Christ.  The idea is that Jews over the centuries rejected the prophets, and abused and killed some, and finally rejected Jesus, who was killed outside the city wall.

This understanding of the parable, as much sense as it would have made to Matthew, is deeply problematic if you take it as what Jesus intended.  St. Paul never believed that God had rejected his people, or had changed his deal with them, only that God had included Gentiles in the scope of grace and election.   And the violent and dark history of Christian anti-Semitism, with pogroms and massacres regularly happening on Good Friday over the centuries, demands that we not encourage or mimic supercessionism or any narrative that would blame “the Jewish people,” for deicide.   Such ideas should be recognized as a negative, anti-gospel foray of the mind, just like the Psalmist’s murderous prayers that his enemies’ babies’ brains be smashed against the wall. 

The story as originally told by Jesus is a shocking tale of how desperate tenant farmers in first century Roman-ruled Palestinian had become.   Like the parable of the dishonest manager, or the parable of the bad personnel policy, its original point was to contrast how wrong the world was in this system of things with how things might be if God’s reign were here in full power.

Just look at the landowner here:  he is not sending those servants out of any concern for the tenant farmers.  He is sending them, probably with strong-armed goons, to pick up the latest installment of squeeze.  The farmers, desperate, resort to strong-arm tactics to defend themselves, not once, but twice. 

Think about how such a parable would have been heard by the crowds of peasants and day laborers following Jesus.    He starts the story of an absentee landowner.  He sends his henchman from the city to the farm to get the produce for this season.  The farmers have had enough!  They rise up and send the goon packing!  I can imagine that Jesus’ audience here probably cheered.   The landowner sends another, bigger, goon with more “motivation” to come back with the goods.  But again, the poor tenants send him away empty handed!   The crowd at this point is going wild at this story where things are finally going as they ought to!  But then the landowner sends his own son—an only child—to make sure the tenants haven’t been secretly paying kickbacks to the goons to get them to go back empty-handed.   The crowd becomes silent in anticipation of how this interesting story will end.   But the tenants, seeing the son, misunderstand what’s going on.  They think that the landowner has died, and that the son is making an inspection tour to make sure his inheritance is in order.  And so they kill him, thinking that they will get squatters’ rights on unclaimed property if the son himself has not left a will.   The crowd is in doubt now; they don’t know who to side with.  They see the twist in the story, the unexpected fact that the Landowner is not dead.  And they know what he is going to do at the murder of his son by these lawless tenants.  He will wreak a terrible vengeance, slaughtering the farmers and their families, and replacing them with docile, productive ones so he can go back to city to enjoy the high life off the proceeds of the farm. 

I doubt that there was any cheering now.   The poor people in the audience have just heard a story that reminds them of how they simply must mind their own business and play along with the oppressors lest things go totally wrong.  The rich in the audience, the religious leaders, the lawyers, know that Jesus has just blasted the system of oppression that has made them wealthy and powerful.  No one cheers, but everyone wonders at the story. 

This story should make us wonder as well.  How much of the good life we enjoy comes from work of others, and that unfairly?  How much is gained by the exploitation and violation of an already fragile natural environment?  How is it possible to address unjust systems of power and wealth?  Is it right to do so, and if so, what means are just and right to do so?   The Landowner and the tenants in this story have clear ideas of honor, fairness, and law.  I wonder how our ideas of such things fare in such a world as seen in Jesus’ story.    This week, I invite us to let this story work in us, and make us wonder a whole lot.  

In the name of Christ, Amen

Francis of Assisi (Mid-week Message)

Francis of Assisi

October 4, 2017

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Today is the feast day of Francis of Assisi.  Donald Spoto, in his wonderful book Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi, writes: 

“The life of Francis of Assisi and the journey of his progress toward God had meant accepting a series of corrections and simplifications, a refining of his understanding about what God had wanted of him.  We might even say that Francis had constantly to revise what he believed would honor God.  Hence, Francis; conversion was the work of a lifetime, with all its autumns and winters; it was not the achievement of an afternoon in springtime. 

“Like Jesus, Francis had been a seeker in the world.  He had not fled to the desert or a monastery but rather believed that God could be found in the crowd.  As God’s knight, he had been willing to sacrifice his life; now, his share in the cross was the illnesses contracted in the service of him who had been nailed to the cross once for all, and who now lived beyond death forever.

“…Francis learned that he had nothing he could call his own except his utter dependence on unimaginable mercy.  The daily process of turning to God, of allowing himself to belong to God, reveals the deepest logic of Francis’ ever more serious insistence on poverty—which did not primarily mean having no possession but rather not being possessive about anything or anyone, not acting as if he were the proprietor of anyone or anything. 

“Every day, he tried to have no single thing as his own property so that he could rely on nothing, so that nothing would become a wedge between himself and God.  Hence he could paradoxically sing—quietly in his troubadour heart, and aloud in the songs he composed and sage—that everything in creation belonged to him: the sun, the moon and stars, the water and wind and fire, the earth and trees, birds and meadows.  Everything was his sister and brother. 

“The divine paradox was that poverty had enriched him…  With him, as Evelyn Underhill wrote, ‘mysticism comes into the open air, seeks to transform the stuff of daily life, speaks the vernacular, turns songs of the troubadours to the purposes of divine love.’”   (pp. 210-11)

Francis is a saint because he took Jesus at his word: sell everything and give it to the poor; care for the outcast and the leper; take up your cross and follow me.  He is a saint because in the face of repeated failure and disappointment, he simply kept on picking himself up and resumed following Jesus, again and again.   He followed Jesus and did not judge those who did not follow the same path as he.  Francis and Claire stand as great examples that following Jesus is a real possibility in the world, not simply high-minded gas.    It is costly, but the joy of sharing with Christ—even if only his suffering and the opprobrium of others—more than justifies the cost. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+ 

Consecration (Trinitarian Article)

 

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

October 2017

Consecration

Often when we offer the gifts of bread, wine, and plate receipts in Eucharist, we recite together a line from 1 Chronicles 29:14 (and the 1928 Prayer Book), “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”  The idea is that whatever we offer as thanksgiving gifts to God are in fact already God’s, since God gave them to us.  The more general idea upon which it is based is that all things belong to God already, including us.

Jesus tried to make the point clearly when he taught the rich young man to go, sell everything (not just some) of he had and give the proceeds to the poor.  Jesus lived what he taught.  He perfectly submitted to God, and wholly aligned his will and actions with God’s ultimate purposes and love.   In the words of Celtic spirituality, he was the thinnest of “thin places” between our world and the Ultimate. In “emptying himself” to God (Phil 2:1-13), and submitting fully to God, our Lord is an exemplar for us.

Seeing such emptying of self as the heart of growth toward God, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of The Society of Jesus, wrote the following prayer as part of his Spiritual Exercises:

“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I have and call my own, you have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me. Amen.”

This expresses clearly the Christian spirituality of offering and consecrating our lives and labors to God.   It is the polar opposite from the trope popular a few years ago among detractors from Barack Obama: “I built this!”   Loyola teaches that we ourselves are the product of God’s creative work, and all that we create and produce thus ultimately come from God.  There is nothing that we and we alone built ourselves, because we ourselves are not our own.   

Returning God’s gracious gifts to God, through generosity of time and wealth to God’s other creatures who happen to stand in need, or to God’s Beloved Community, is at heart an act of offering and an act of consecration.  Offering is giving up what appears to be ours and renouncing further claims to control it.  Consecration is taking the ordinary, the daily, and pedestrian, and making it holy by putting it to God’s purposes. 

The prophet Malachi too teaches the blessings of the spiritual practice of offerings and consecrating our labor and its fruits: “‘Return to me and I will return to you’ says God  …  Bring your full tithe to the Temple treasury so there will be ample provisions in my Temple.  Test me in this and see if I don’t open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you won’t have room to store it” (Malachi 3:7-10). 

Despite its agricultural imagery of adequate rains for a bumper crop, I wonder whether the promise here is more about our sense of having enough when we consecrate than it is about gaining wealth per se.  The point is that if we exercise faith in being generous, we will be blessed with a sense of gratitude and sufficiency in God. 

The idea is also expressed in a poem by Frances Ridley Havergal, the text of number 707 in the Hymnal 1982:

Take my life and let it be
consecrated, Lord, to thee.
Take my moments and my days;
let them flow in endless praise,

Take my hands and let them move
at the impulse of thy love.
Take my feet and let them be
swift and beautiful for thee.

Take my voice and let me sing
always, only, for my King.
Take my lips and let them be,
filled with messages from thee.

Take my silver and my gold;
not a mite would I withhold.
Take my intellect and use
every power as thou shalt choose.

Take my will and make it thine;
it shall be no longer mine.
Take my heart it is thine own;
it shall be thy royal throne.

Take my love; my Lord, I pour
at thy feet its treasure store.
Take myself, and I will be
ever, only, all for thee.

If we would be followers of Jesus, we must consecrate all we have and are to God.  Giving up all, intentionally getting rid of the attachment we have to things and placing them in the service of Jesus, is at the heart of Christian spirituality.  It is only by giving all to God that we find our true selves and anything becomes truly our own. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+