The Authority of Love: Sermon for Proper 22

Let’s begin with some review from the last couple of weeks of our lectionary. Jesus has made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, cleansed the Temple, and thereby enraged both the religious authorities and those in secular leadership over his people.

In light of his presumption, Jesus is being questioned about his authority to engage in this behavior by the chief priests and the rabbis. So they ask him:

By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?

Last week we saw the first of three parables that Jesus tells in Matthew’s gospel to explain his authority as the Son of God. Our reading today is the second of those three parables, known as the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. Once again, the subject is about Jesus’s power to criticize and to revise traditional religious teaching. It’s one of the hardest parables to interpret in all of scripture. Lucky us!

It’s always important to remember that the meaning of symbolic stories is tied to their context, and to see if there is any parallel between the context then and the context now. The context here is this: the metaphor of a vineyard being leased to tenants was a very real situation in the time Jesus taught and the time Matthew wrote his gospel. It was also a common image in scripture, especially in the book of Isaiah, chapter 5. Both Jesus and Isaiah are using that image to criticize the leaders of Israel for failing to give God the authority God deserves in their lives and obedience to God’s commandments.

So how can we understand this parable for our situation now, in 21^st century America in particular? Perhaps by viewing this story as being about the struggle for power and authority, especially against claims of freedom and individualism, and the willingness to do anything to gain those things, which is certainly a problem in our time.

How do we respond to God’s claims upon our lives? Do we produce good fruit, and give our share of the glory to God by working for the betterment of this society that we, in our freedom, have built? That word freedom is important—especially as we confront our tendency to elevate freedom over responsibility, which has been a problem from Adam and Eve all the way down to us for a reason.

Unless we realize that the limit of our individual freedom is in its impact on others, and that our personal relationship to God is tied up in our mutual relationship to each other, we will continue to long for real justice, peace, and security. And that’s even the foundation of God’s commandments given to us.

Our reading today from Exodus is one that lays out the foundational laws from God we commonly call the Ten Commandments. We’ve heard them so many times, we may not really examine them closely. But a closer look at them shows us that the first four are about our relationship with God, and the last six are about our relationships with each other. That makes sense, because laws exist because we are in relationship with other people in community. And this is where Jesus gets the answer he gives when asked what the greatest commandment is. He answers, first love God with everything you have and everything you are. Then love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.

These are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is love.

And of course, we all too often fail miserably at both of these things.

And that leads us to the point. This has been a week of unspeakable tragedy. On Monday morning, most of us awoke to the news that a single gunman had managed to kill 59 people and cause injury to over 527 more people in Las Vegas before taking his own life. This alone is beyond comprehension for most of us. If we consider expanding our perception to include the toll on first responders, surgeons, doctors, nurses, and families, as well as those who escaped without physical harm but witnessed the effects of the shooting as shots rang out into a crowd that at one point was as high as 22,000 people, the true cost is both staggering and unimaginable. And then there are people who have been through previous shootings, and events like this can plunge them back into vivid memories of their experiences.

What can we do? How can we respond? After the mourning and the thoughts and prayers have been expressed, how do we find principles from which we can actually try to try to honor all those whose lives have been shattered, and who continue to be shattered?

And how can we gather here to pray and to worship God, and share communion with each other in the wake of such horror?

Perhaps the answer to that is embedded in the question. We can start by grounding our response by gathering together to pray and to worship God, and by sharing communion with each other. We can fight against forces that seek to wound us and divide us by remembering our essential unity as members of the Body of Christ, and then expanding even that outward by insisting on our common humanity as children of God. We start by realizing that we live together, and the health of our communities and our nation is only as strong as our weakest member.

Even as I wept and despaired over the news out of Las Vegas, even as I was reminded that every single day 91 people die at the end of a gun in this country, and twice that many are injured by gunfire every single day, I was looking for something to give me hope.

I have been helping out at the Cathedral the last few weeks, and one of the things we did was have a prayer vigil for the victims of the gun violence in Las Vegas, and all over our country. Ironically, we coordinated that vigil with many other churches around the country, and that vigil was held on the 4^th of October, which is the Feast of St. Francis.

That day I was also scheduled to write a spiritual reflection for Episcopal Café.com, an Episcopal news and religious site online, and that had led me to ponder at length a beautiful prayer that is often attributed to St. Francis. Do you know it? It’s called the Peace Prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.

O Master, let me not seek
as much to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

The Peace Prayer is about recognizing that, as Christians, there is a bigger claim on us than just our own concerns. The Peace Prayer draws us out of ourselves, and points us toward others. The Peace Prayer challenges us to acknowledge that we not truly free until we remember how bound up we are in each other’s lives, and that we are called to lives of empathy and compassion, not just because it’s the nice thing to do, but because it’s the path to a full, meaningful life in God. The Peace Prayer is founded on acknowledging God as the ruler of our lives, who calls us together to live in a just, peaceful community by acknowledging Jesus’s authority to direct our steps in paths of peace and holiness and compassion.

How much authority do we give Jesus in our own lives?

Are we willing to make him the cornerstone of our lives? For real?

I think the Peace Prayer has much to tell us about where to begin. The Peace Prayer is founded on the idea that the power of love is stronger than the power of hate. The Peace Prayer is not extolling weakness, but strength. It takes real strength to actually go against the ways of this world and break the powers of pain and suffering on the cornerstone of Jesus’s truth.

The peace prayer calls upon us to take hold of a new economy and plant it in our hearts—a new economy of responding to evil as if we really believe in the power of love triumphant. This is an economy based on hope and faith, believing that reconciliation and healing of our selves and our world is possible through grace given, and grace received.

There are forces of malevolence at loose, friends, and we have to decide how we are going to answer them. Those of us who are Christians are not called just to passively acknowledge that Jesus is our savior, but to dedicate ourselves to work to be good tenants in this world God has placed us in.

One of the difficult things we are called to do, and not abstractly but concretely, is to answer the empire that fear and hatred has built in our world with the power of love. Love that we KNOW is the answer and the cornerstone.

Love that has reached out from the cross and saved us.

Love that conquered death, rolled back the stone of oppression, injustice, and violence to bring us to new life and new hope in our risen, living Savior.

Love that knocks at the doors of our hearts and asks to be allowed in.

Love that is based on real peace and abundance for all.

Love that will evict those old tenants in our hearts—fear, treachery, suspicion, the impulse to exploit or dehumanize others—so that new tenants can move in and fill us with the Spirit of Christ. Those new tenants are listed at the end of every line in St. Francis’s prayer:

Peace.

Love.

Pardon.

Union.

Truth.

Faith.

Hope.

Light.

Joy.

Consolation.

Understanding.

Love.

Life.

Jesus has called us and claimed us, not just as individuals but as a community of faith, to take our share in bearing God’s good news out into the world.

By what authority are we doing these things, and who gave us this authority?

The authority is love, calling us to act to heal our world.

Please join me in prayer.

Almighty God,
as we sit here, drawn here by love,

thirsting for peace,
You invite us into your holy stillness.

You are our God, and we are yours.

With every breath,
may we be filled with gratitude, Lord,
and sit in companionship with all your creation.
With every breath,
may our hearts sing, O Creator,
with the music of the angels,
and give praise.

With every breath,
let us cleave closer to You, Lord Christ,
and anchor ourselves more deeply in your love.
With every breath,
let us draw in your wisdom, O Spirit,
and allow it to gentle our fractious ways.
With every breath,
may we be determined to walk in your ways, Blessed Jesus,
and renew ourselves in faithfulness.

With every breath,
may we examine our hearts, Merciful One,
and repent of all that draws us from love.
With every breath,
may we open ourselves to healing, Holy One,
and remember the hurting and the mourning.
With every breath,
may we tend to each other in hope,
embodying Christ’s love for all

as the cornerstone of our lives.

Amen.

(Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on October 7 and 8, 2017.)