God’s Currency: Sermon for the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, October 22, 2023

Readings, Proper 24A:

Isaiah 45:1-7
Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13) 
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

 

When I was a kid, I collected coins. I collected coins because my dad collected pennies—especially wheat pennies and even the rare Indian head. Every few months, he would sit me down in front of the pickle jar where he’d toss his loose change when it would get full. I would sort all the coins by denomination, and look for dimes that were pure silver. I’d separate out the Canadian coins because Dad told me they were junk—sorry, Canadians. Then I’d go through the pennies and look for any that were either wheat pennies or steel or bronze pennies from 1943 and 1944 during the war. I learned about the obverse and reverse sides of the coins, the mints marks, and other features. And voila! A coin collector was born—a skinny little girl reading coin collector books in the library like the little weirdo I was.

My collection expanded when Dad would take me to the flea market at the Fairgrounds. Dad himself didn’t believe in paying money for coins, but I got a paper route when I was 8 and started mowing lawns and babysitting when I was ten, so he’d let me do it. At first, I just collected US coins—buffalo nickels, Eisenhower dimes, Kennedy half dollars, Liberty dollars, and uncirculated sets.

Then I got to collect coins from foreign countries. My dad worked for American Airlines as a mechanic, and even though we were working class, we could fly for practically nothing as long as we dressed up in case the only open seats were in first class, which of course made all the employees stick out like sore thumbs.

So I first travelled overseas at age 7—my mom took my brother and myself out of school a week early that spring and we travelled first to New York then to Rome, where we spent several days, staying in inexpensive penziones, and then we flew to Amsterdam, once again staying in cheap hostels. We didn’t care. We saw the Vatican with its priceless works of art and ancient buildings. We met interesting, kind people who didn’t mock our homemade haircuts or Okie accents but found our wide-eyed excitement to be with them charming, apparently.

And now, besides the historical and sentimental value of coins, I learned about the exchange rate. This is how much each currency is worth in US dollars, and it changed daily. Since we had very little money, the timing of changing our money before each trip was important—you wanted to have the value of the other country’s currency be as low as possible in relation to a US dollar. When we went to Japan, the exchange rate was 300 yen to the dollar, which was shocking. I think the Italian lira was even worse, which is probably why so many people fling their coins into fountains in Italy. The man whose job it was to collect the coins from Trevi fountain on behalf of an Italian charity invited me into the water (which was normally forbidden) and I got to help him pick them up.

We later went to Japan, where I first saw coins with holes in them, and after high school we bummed our way around the UK and Europe, adding marks and French francs and Swiss francs to my collection. When we travelled to Ireland from the UK, I was harshly reminded of how political money could be when suddenly in the middle of the Irish sea the boat stopped accepting British pounds and only accepted Irish pounds.

All along the way, I collected a full set of the coins of each country, and added them to my collection.

My oldest coin was a tiny bronze Roman coin found in the mud of the Thames that I bought in a riverside stall, a reminder that the Romans had founded Londinium. The Romans enforced the use of their currency throughout their empire. And sometimes, they would design the coins in particular ways to remind the subject peoples of their surrender. Their coins became part of the way to grind their subject people under their heels. And so it was with the coin that stars in this week’s gospel.

See, the Romans demanded that every single inhabitant in their conquered territories pay a tribute every year to Rome—a tribute that would be used to pay the soldiers and officials who oppressed the native people. Only Roman coins could be used, and so local money had to be exchanged for Roman money, which further increased the cost of the tribute, because the money exchangers would always skim a percentage for themselves. The entire process was designed to be at the very least humiliating as well as expensive, because the tribute penny, as it was called, was actually worth an entire day’s wages. And when you are living hand to mouth, giving up a day’s wages means you give up food for you and your children for that day. Plus, you are funding your own oppression. And, if you are Jewish, you are doing it with coins that violate the commandment about having no graven images, since the obverse of these coins usually features the emperor’s head with the claim, in Latin, that he was the “son of god.”

It is here that I remind us that the word “politics” itself is NOT a negative word. Politics becomes negative when leaders move from tending to simply administering the benefits of society to all citizens, to using the operation of government in an unjust way, as a way to make people feel powerless. The gospel is political in the best sense. The crucifixion of Jesus is political in the worst sense. And in between these two political axes but definitely on the negative side is the issue of the use of Roman coins and paying that Roman tax.

So when Jesus’s opponents question him about whether to pay the Roman occupation tax or not, they are still asking him about authority, and they have been doing throughout Matthew’s gospel. But they are asking Jesus a political question. And Jesus responds so snarkily, I just love it. Did you catch that. The Pharisees believe the very coin itself is violation of the commandments, and so Jesus makes them acquire one and hand it over. Brilliant! The Herodians are collaborators with Rome, so they are watching to see if Jesus publicly espouses resistance to the empire so that they can tell their boss, the puppet king Herod, so that he can tell his Roman bosses and get Jesus arrested for rebellion. See? Totally political.

In the translation I first heard as a child for this story, Jesus asks whose image is on the coin. They acknowledge that it is the current emperor’s. But hold that thought of the question of image for a moment.

Jesus’s famous dictum “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's” may have been taken by many to be an indictment of the Roman empire. It was. But more important was the second half of Jesus’s statement: give to God the things that are God’s.

If we think about this statement creating two neatly delineated piles, we are in error. Even that denarius, stamped with the emperor’s face, represented not just the empire, but also the precious energy and time that was expended in earning it. Money is, of itself, neither tainted nor holy, nor are the human systems that money represents. But neither money nor economic systems have ever created the wonder of a single newborn day or created a single life.

So some people ignore the political nature of the situation itself, and take Jesus’s statement completely out of context, forgetting that he is adroitly evading a political trap. Or they focus on the first half of his statement and ignore the second half.

Because here’s the issue: the image of the emperor, and the currency of the emperor, represents more than just metal and denomination. It represents Roman oppression, Roman cruelty, Roman injustice, Roman war, Roman godlessness. That’s the real image of empire imprinted on those coins—scarcity, dehumanization, want. Using people until you use them up.

Pay Caesar in the coin of the realm. But give to God in God’s own currency.

But what is God’s currency? It’s the opposite of Rome’s. God’s currency is grace, reconciliation, peace, justice, community, and love. It is all the blessings and goodness that is woven into creation—and into every gift God gives to God’s children. And God’s currency can be found in the image of God that each and every one of us bears from the time of creation onward—when we seek to live holy, faithful lives, guided by the summary of the law that Jesus repeats and exemplifies over and over: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. ALSO the opposite of the Roman currency of stealing from the masses to fund their gigantic war machine.

We cannot forget that we ourselves belong to God, and that everything we have comes to us from God, given to us out of love by God for not just our survival but for our flourishing. God’s currency is a currency of fearlessness because it is a currency that proclaims the profligate presence and love of God in all of creation. And the exchange rate is ALWAYS in your favor.

Holding a day’s wages in his hand, Jesus reminds us that the abundant, profligate, priceless love of God brought creation into being, and traced its way down to me and you and every living thing, binds us together and calls us into flourishing and well-being. Jesus calls us to remember whose we are, and how we use that knowledge to set the priorities in our lives. If that priority is not love, rooted in abundance and faithfulness, the love that makes us part of something greater than ourselves, all our striving is empty and our lives risk being hollowed out like a drum lying forgotten in a corner.

God’s currency is the foundation of all stewardship. We belong to God, and when we live according to God’s values, we are signs of and testimony to God’s currency in the world. A currency of more value than any dollar, mark, pound, ruble, Euro, or denarius. A currency that never loses value but remains precious and in mint condition the more it is passed around from person to person.

Whatever we give—love, forgiveness, compassion, empathy, justice, mercy, grace-- will be returned a hundred-fold. We may need to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. But let us never fail to render unto God the things that are God’s. Which is—everything that matters.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on October 21, 2023 and at the 10:30 Holy Eucharist on October 22, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Prayer 3885: For Peace and Compassion

Most Holy God,

we turn our eyes to the rising sun,
and our hearts to your commandments.

May we dedicate ourselves to your instruction
to love one another as You love us;
to turn aside from war to be makers of peace;
to seek reconciliation and healing
in our relationships with God and each other.

Strengthen us in compassion and mercy;
give us a delight and awe at your handiwork all around us;
help us to tread gently upon this earth
and as companions in your Way of Love and Justice.

Spread the canopy of your protection, we pray,
over all who turn to you for help, O Most Holy,
especially for those we now name.

Amen.

No Dress Code: Sermon Proper 23A October 15, 2023

Ah, another Sunday, another gospel reading that seems to portray God as vindictive and violent, and uses religious differences to back that up.

Another Sunday where we misunderstand parables and their symbolism. So let me start out asking these questions:

Do we believe that God is a slave-owning king willing to slaughter anyone who offends him?
Do we believe that scripture portrays God that way, and do we ourselves experience God in that way?
Do we believe that people are FORCED into the kingdom of heaven, measured, and then found wanting?
To be specific, do we believe God would condemn to eternal hell people who do not wear the right clothes to a party to which they were not initially invited? And if so, should we put that on our website in the section for visitors under “What to expect?”

Once, again, NO. And for those of us who are survivors of the kinds of Christianity that DOES promote ideas like that, let me say this: HELL NO.

Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says this about hell:

“I am among the 78% of American Jews who do not believe in hell. On the other hand, I do like the idea. In my less generous moments, I have delightful thoughts of sentencing people there. Then I stopped, both because I realized such thoughts are ungracious and because I do not believe that eternal pain helps any one. To whether there are postmortem punishments in hell, or rewards in heaven, that I do not want to know personally for a very long time: getting through each day on earth is complicated enough.”[1]

And yet, some of us WANT a God who smites sinners and leaves people we don’t like to roast in hell for all eternity. We especially want that when we ourselves feel victimized or powerless. But I wonder— is this a case of making God in our own image, rather than allowing God to remake us in God’s own image?

We know that this parable has been especially misused by a whole lot of people who like to imagine God to be vindictive and violent to justify their own vindictiveness and violence, which is usually tied to a toxic masculinity and patriarchical model of Christian leadership. This has become, in particular, a deeply dangerous political idea.

To be frank: I am persuaded that this parable has been misused historically when it has been about who is thrown out into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. We gloss over the images of abundance and welcome that are embedded in this story, and in the readings we heard before this gospel in our lectionary. And we may be allowing our resistance to real gospel values to suppress the growth of our spiritual understanding.

First of all, we need to stop believing that we can separate our spiritual lives from our daily lives. We modern Christians keep wanting to separate our daily lives from our spiritual lives—to think about the kingdom of God only on Sundays—and not even every Sunday, since our lives are overscheduled and there are other things to do.

But here’s a truth: your spiritual lives ARE your everyday lives. It is how we live outside these walls that truly reveals our spiritual values and our spiritual compass. And so we are being urged here to understand that we are being called to spiritual renewal.

We overlook the fact that the king invites EVERYONE in, and asks only that they put on the clothing of abundance. I wonder if a more fruitful interpretive lens to hold up to this passage is the universal abundance and universal grace we hear in our first three readings.

In our passage from Isaiah, we hear of rich feast prepared by God for those who live in exile and oppression. Hardly the image of a God who seeks our everlasting torment.

Then, there is the 23rd Psalm. Is there any more beloved and precious depiction of God’s determined love, care, and protection in scripture than this beautiful poem?

And then Paul’s closing thoughts to the Christians at Philippi, urging them to not let a disagreement between two of their members to keep them from embodying the “mind of Christ”—specifically describing the mind of Christ and therefore the mind of God, as being true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise.

The three parables that we have heard the last three weeks about Jesus’s authority make it clear that those in power had rejected Jesus’s invitation. This third parable makes it clear that Matthew’s community believes that because the leaders and now Jerusalem itself have rejected God’s message sent to them through numerous prophets and finally God’s own son, as last week’s parable made clear, the invitation is going to be extended to people that powerful people usually wouldn’t associate with and denigrated: the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the riffraff, the nobodies, the blind and lame, the people who thought they’d been forgotten. People just like us, just as broken as us, just as in need of grace as us.

When we start trying to exclude people from entering our doors, from sharing in communion with us, from hearing that they are beloved by God, we are behaving EXACTLY as those Jesus is shown here as criticizing.

There is no dress code for God’s kingdom.

When God invites us into the wedding feast, God provides everything that is needed—including the robes. But the robes are not something external. The robes symbolize the inner transformation of living by embodying that same grace and mercy we have received for others.

What if the person who is found without a robe does not symbolize not being the right sort of person by birth or ancestry, but by refusing to be transformed by the banquet? What if that lack of robe is actually a refusal to adopt the mindset of community and gratitude that Jesus makes central to one’s ministry in the world?

Once you’ve come in to the feast, you are expected to put on the garments of love—the same characteristics that Paul lists as necessary to living the faithful life: whatever is true, honorable, just, and pure—and this is about internal purity in the sense of allowing love, not condemnation, to shine out of us.

The Church may bill itself as the representation of God’s banquet—the kingdom of heaven in Matthew’s terminology on earth. That’s beautiful—except for the times when the Church falters in living up to the ideals espoused in the gospel. The fact that we fail as the Church should surprise no one, since the Church is made up of fallible human beings who do not shed their pain, wounds, or sins at the door, but bring them right on in. After all, this community is where the healing can take place. Jesus’s healing of people’s physical ailments throughout scripture was all about restoring people to relationship. And that is necessary work today as much as it was in Jesus’s time.

We as the Church can start to embody the kingdom of heaven rather than mirroring the wounds of our society--IF we are intentional about recognizing that fact, and become very intentional about how we respond to each other and treat each other as we learn this new language of love and life that Jesus’s gospel calls us to. IF we start by constantly examining the way we treat each other here within our communities of faith, and try to change the ways we relate to each other so that we put on those wedding garments.

When we align this parable with the epistle and the gospel, we are led to a reminder that our spiritual life and our daily lives must align within a joyful embodiment of sharing what we have received from God with those around us.

We are led once again to awe at the abundance of God’s mercy and provision in all four of our readings. We are also led to an understanding of the way that God calls us into true community with each other, regardless of our differences. If God can prepare a rich feast for us even while we are inclined to fear and anxiety with our enemies surrounding us, and if God invites EVERYONE to the wedding feast of the kingdom, who are we to harbor hatred, division, or defeatism ESPECIALLY in our spiritual lives OR in our daily lives when we are confronted with the opportunity to toss people out or condemn others?

I have known people throughout my life who were angry, judgmental, and unkind. I have known people who have held others to impossible standards of behavior that they themselves did not meet, but were always searching for some pretext to feel superior to others and to cast others out with curses and condemnation. And all too often, they justified division and cruelty and even aggression in the name of Jesus. And the worst part was, many of these people call themselves “Christian.” And in doing so, they have tarnished the gospel of Christ in the eyes of thousands. We hear actual statements of this from people who have left the church—especially young people—because not only were they not welcomed, but they saw people who claimed to believe in Jesus acting absolutely opposite of Jesus’s example.

What if this parable is meant to remind us that God does not call the perfect, but God asks the called to work toward perfection—and by perfection, I mean those hallmarks of Jesus that actually imitate Jesus: being true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise, as Paul puts it in our epistle.

Grace is grace because it is not only generous, it is unexpected and unearned. Grace goes against everything for which our human-made systems stand. As Rachel Held Evans writes in our book study book, Searching for Sunday:

The church is positively crawling with people who don’t deserve to be here…starting with me. But the table can transform even our enemies into companions. The table reminds us that, as brothers and sisters adopted into God’s family and invited to God’s banquet, we’re stuck with each other; we’re family.[2]

We all are invited to the banquet, and we bring with us our anger, our flaws, our fears. But just as we are accepted as we are, we are also invited to allow the grace of the sacraments and the community to change us and heal us. Putting on the wedding garment means allowing yourself to be transformed by the miracle of community that the wedding feast is, that we are called to truly re-enact every time we worship together. The point is not to just sit and observe and then go back to our business. The point is to be amazed and transformed by the abundance God places before us in every moment—and to take that into our hearts and souls and share that good news with the world.

Come in to the feast—and let the feast change you. Let the feast change our communities by changing us. And by that, we change the world. No dress code required.

Amen.



Preached at the 505 on October 14 and the 8:30 and 10:30 am Holy Eucharists on October 15, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

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


Citations:
[1] Amy-Jill Levine, The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings, p. 101, Kindle edition.
[2] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving Leaving, and Finding the Church, p. 152.

From Tenants to Tenets in Action: Sermon for Proper 22A

I have a pet peeve: I hate it when people use the word “tenants” in place of the word “tenets.”

Tenants are people who temporarily rent a place. Tenets are ethical beliefs or guiding principles.

And in the parable we just heard, too often we ourselves get confused not just about who the tenants are, but what tenets we are called to embrace as followers of Jesus. So please hold that thought while I explain.

I am also not fond of today's readings- or perhaps the baggage they bring with them-- either as a Christian, as a historian, or as a preacher. As a Christian the casual violence seemingly endorsed in the story sets alarm bells off in my head and heart.

As a historian, I know that, for centuries, this parable has been used to justify rampant hatred of Jews by the Church in its official teachings and by people who call themselves Christians-- all through misunderstanding who the characters are in this parable, and how the original listeners received this story and why.

Historically, the parable in today’s gospel has been broken down this way: God, despite acting wildly un-God-like, is the vineyard owner. The evil tenants, supposedly, are the Jews, and they are painted as a threat to the greater community and even to God's order in a way that would have made Hitler happy: Trying to get something for nothing, substituting ruthlessness for the obligation to anyone beyond themselves. The servants sent to the tenants who are beaten and killed? Those are the prophets, just like John the Baptist had been executed by the pseudo-Jewish King Herod. And when the vineyard owner's son is killed? And then, the murdered son is Jesus.

This parable, cut free from its context, reinforces the claim that lives on to this day among some Christians that the Jews were the ones who killed Jesus, ignoring the fact that crucifixion was a Roman punishment. It was the way the Empire dealt with rebels and resisters. The gospel writers, of course, dared not name Rome as the culprit. For the people of Israel in the time of Jesus, ROME was the ruthless claimer of each and every vineyard, LITERALLY. That’s how Empires operate: they take what isn’t theirs by threat or by violence, and use what they take for themselves and their murderous machinery. 

In Jesus and Matthew’s time, it was ROME that had unjustly claimed the vineyard, and extracted the produce not for the benefit of the people of God, but for its own greed and power. If Matthew’s community had written that into this parable, though, they would have been exterminated. When we forget that, we lose sight of the implications for us today in asking ourselves who the Roman Empire is for us today, and whether we really, in actual deeds, serve God or that empire.

One of my seminary professors once gave us a very important piece of advice about our interpretation of scriptures like this: if you constantly see yourself and the position of the underdog in every story, you need to stop and ask yourself to stand in the shoes of the other characters in the story, and see how that changes your perspective.

It's human nature, of course, to want to hear of your enemies getting what you think is coming to them. But since we are commanded to love our enemies, if we fail to love them, aren’t we acting just like the “evil” tenants?


The evil tenants, we are to understand, committed the great evil of taking what God had provided to them and using it for their own pleasure and advantage, to feed their own greed at the expense of the people. First and foremost, the tenants are everyone who ignores that they don’t own the vineyard, and thus not free to do what they wanted with its produce. They were only given use of the vineyard while they used its produce to advance God's Kingdom.

It's always tempting to see ourselves and biblical stories as the character that's the underdog. It's tempting because so often in scripture it is the underdog who gets favored: the younger son over the elder son; the second wife over the first; and, especially with Jesus, prostitutes and tax collectors over the religious leadership. But Jesus, himself a Jew, wasn’t criticizing all Jews—he was still in the process of answering the question asked at the start of Matthew chapter 21 three weeks ago—the question of the source of Jesus’s authority to come in to the Temple and start flipping over tables and criticizing those who encouraged those tables to be there in the first place. He was acting as a prophet to call all to honest self-examination and repentance so that they could embrace a new status, not as tenants, but as children of God. ALL of us.

So, if I hated thinking about how to put this parable into context for 20th century Americans at the end of last week, I am especially concerned about how it might be used on this particular day, as we hear of the attacks on civilian targets in Israel yesterday morning by Hamas, which is a proxy for Iran, and then of Israel’s responding rocket attacks into Gaza and the West Bank. And so the historical misuse of this parable by the Church for centuries to justify its ascendancy and claim to having displaced all Jews as God’s chosen people, a hateful philosophy known as supersessionism and triumphalism--must be admitted, and denounced in the strongest terms. Any attempt to kill each other over the vineyard must be denounced today and every day.

We must remember that each generation is called to read these parables in light of their own situation—and thus far, each generation has failed to consider that they themselves might be the tenants willing to do anything to avoid acknowledging that they there are times when they themselves forget that we are ALL tenants.

I say this as I lay alongside this parable not only the terrible genocidal bloodshed going on right now in Israel and Palestine, but also as on Monday, we will hold in tension the remembrance of Columbus Day and the push to reconsider tomorrow instead as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

In the case of our Indigenous kindred, too, the word “tenant” has actual historical meaning. Let me explain: when the conquistadores representing European kings came to these shores, they did not encounter an empty country, but rather a fertile vineyard, if you will, that they saw being occupied by evil tenants. And legally, they referred to Indians as tenants, rather than owners of the land.

What made Natives tenants worthy of being displaced? Two things: first, that those tenants we supposedly “godless,” since they had never been exposed to Christianity. But second, that to the invaders’ eyes, the lands which the indigenous peoples occupied had not been improved and harnessed for economic exploitation. They believed that God’s command to dominate the Earth in the first chapters of Genesis meant that only those who turned wilderness into cropland and mines had a full right to the land. Because, to their eyes, the “Indians” had not improved the land, they believed the Indians had violated God’s will and therefore forfeited their right to it.

That’s right-- they believed that to be Christian, one had to act as the wicked tenants we just condemned. To take fertile land that did not belong to them and use it for their own selfish ends. Talk about ironic. They substituted their own tenets justifying theft, just like those evil tenants did.

Do not think that I am kidding—this is the actual legal justification for the enslavement of native peoples and death of 90% of them within the first fifty years post-contact; the further removal of the surviving native peoples over the next 250 years, for supposedly impeding white settlers’ “progress” with their continued territorial claims; the confining of the survivors of THAT removal effort, one that moved right through this diocese in several cases during the Trail of Tears, onto tiny reservations on the most unproductive lands; and the eventual further fracturing of even those tiny holdings left to them if anything of value was found upon them. 

We see this in what happened to one of Missouri’s own original nations—the Osage—when, after they were removed from Missouri and Kansas, the county-sized reservation they received in exchange in Oklahoma was found in the early 20thcentury to be sitting atop some of the richest petroleum deposits in the world—a story so heinous it is now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and opening later this month.

All of this based upon the same kind of misapplication of notions of God’s justice that occur when we fail to use this parable for anything but a self-examination of our own actions and the way WE fail to understand the values of God’s kingdom that we ourselves are called to embody.

So let’s back up.

Can we start from the understanding that, in imagining the vineyard, we are ALL being reminded that all that we are and all that we have is NOT actually ours, but is a gift from God? We are ALL start with just being tenants on this Earth, and in this life. This understanding is one of the main tenets of scripture. Do we acknowledge God’s ownership of everything in our lives, or do we serve the empires that come along and encourage selfish misuse of the resources God has given us?

Do we instead remember and take seriously what we proclaim every single Sunday—that in every single thing Jesus did and does, Jesus calls us to joyfully take up the offer to be not just tenants, to not be assisters of Empire, but children and heirs of God in God’s vineyard. We are given the opportunity to exchange our tenuous tenancy for the status of God’s children—a matter of choice and not mere accident of birth.

Rather than making us feel vulnerable, however, if we understand God as loving us so fiercely as to only desire our flourishing—the very God Jesus repeatedly described and came to earth to make visible before us in human flesh—that should be a reminder that we are called to abundance—and to care for the flourishing of one another if we truly want to be not just God’s tenants, but God’s children. God’s ways of abundant generosity and grace must become our ways too, if we want to truly inhabit the vineyard rather than murder each other over it. That means we must be good stewards in every aspect of our lives—starting with stewardship in our faith communities, yes, which we have been talking about up her from this pulpit for a month now. But even more importantly, in the care of those around us.

For instance, in ancient Israel it was absolutely forbidden for a landowner to harvest from edge to edge in their fields, leaving nothing behind. Instead, it was an actual law that harvesting should leave behind some of the produce, so that the poor, the widowed, the foreigner, and the destitute could come into the fields after the harvesters and take provision for themselves from what was left deliberately behind. The idea of the super-rich 1% of the landowners taking everything for themselves from resources that belonged to God and therefore to the entire community was considered to be an outrageous violation of God’s call to care for everyone in the community.

Being not just tenants but good stewards and heirs in God’s kingdom means examining how our actions—and especially the actions from the past from which we still benefit today-- affect the most vulnerable and most oppressed among us. To make sure the produce of the vineyard is used for the care and flourishing of EVERYONE. We are meant to produce good fruit by embodying God’s generosity and compassion with one another, rather than attacking and killing off anyone who stands in the way of our insistence that we can do anything we want, even hurting other people directly or indirectly, in the name of our own freedom.

Being not just tenants but good stewards and heirs in God’s kingdom similarly means to take seriously the care and protection of this beautiful and precious planet, the only one we have.

Here is the good news: God gives us all that we need, and more besides. Everything we have comes from God, and comes from God abundantly and without qualification. In giving us everything, God only asks that we follow God’s example in making sure that everyone is cared for, that our resources are dedicated to God in response to God’s own gifts to us. That we live not by what we can hoard and keep for ourselves, but by how we can do good and live blessed lives that celebrate abundance with what we have, and how we care for each other.

We move from being tenants to being children living by God’s kingdom tenets when we decide, through real faith, to align our entire lives upon the cornerstone values of Jesus. We follow that example when we make Jesus the true cornerstone of our lives both inside these walls and how we live outside them—because the point of a cornerstone is to set the orientation for the entire building that symbolizes our lives.

The good news is that Jesus calls us, right now, to turn away from the embrace of division, oppression, and violence that makes up the tenant life, to embrace the tenets of true flourishing: abundant grace, abundant stewardship, abundant mercy that is our true inheritance as beloved children of God, with Jesus as our cornerstone, right here, right now, in our lives and the lives of St. Martin’s. May we make that proclamation of abundance not just a tenet, but a cornerstone on which to build a faithful future.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on October 7 and the 10:30 Holy Eucharist on October 8, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:7-14
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

Open to Abundant Grace: Sermon for Proper 21 A

Readings:
Ezekiel 18:1-4,25-32
Psalm 25:1-8
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

In all of the readings for today save the psalm, grumbling plays some part. Paul’s letter to the Church in Philippi is grounded in the same issue. Unfortunately, we might miss that if we stuck to the verses we see here.

There is discontent among the Church at Philippi. This would become clear if we were given the two verses right after our reading today, for there Paul admonishes: “Do all things without murmuring or arguing, so that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, in which you shine like stars in the world.”

This might be where we see a tie-in with our gospel. People often see the gospel portion for Sunday as a straightforward criticism of the son who says yes to his father’s command but doesn’t go—a potshot aimed directly at the Pharisees who are questioning Jesus about his authority. Yet it is the son who grumbles “no” but later goes ahead and obeys his father who does his father’s will.

In this hymn we are being urged to be of the same mind as Christ—and Christ’s mind is not centered on empty shows of power, but on doing the will of God for no reason but out of humility and love, wanting to please God by doing exactly what we pray – probably with our fingers crossed behind our backs every single Sunday if we really think about what we are saying—when we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven.”

To have the humility to not place what we want, but what the Beloved wants at the forefront of our minds.

Oh, no, we think. Here we go with thinking about doing what we don’t want to do. To sacrifice. To give up things we value. All those fears that cause us to clench our fists around everything we’ve got because we think someone is trying to take it away from us.

What an interesting thing to bring up in the middle of our stewardship campaign.

Yes, I’ve said it. Especially when it comes to stewardship, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And since fear is all around us every day, Houston, we have a problem.

Because fear is EXACTLY what Jesus came to free us from. Fear that there is not enough. Fear that someone might want what we have. Fear that we won’t HAVE enough unless we keep a death grip on what we have. We have to keep score. We live by the dictum that those who die with the most toys, win.

Two thousand years later, we are reminded that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Two thousand years later, therefore, the message of Jesus is just as radical, just as, um, strange, and just as challenging.

Listen to the introductory command in our reading from Philippians again: “…be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

Well, this just about sums it all up, doesn’t it? If we want to be Christ-like, we start by being humble and outwardly focused, turning our hearts toward the needs of others. It’s in the very nature of who we understand Christ to be, especially Christ as the Incarnated One.

Jesus faced rejection again and again, even to the point of being accused of being a rebel and blasphemer and dying for it. He spoke of a love that sustained the world, a love that challenged the calculus of exploitation and injustice, and that made him an enemy of the state and a threat to those who thought themselves righteous. A love based not on grasping, but on grace.

At verse 7, Paul speaks of Jesus “emptying himself” of all his rightful honor and glory due to him as the Son of God, and choosing to be born lowly as a human. The Greek term for this is “kenosis,” and this section of Philippians is known as “the kenosis hymn.”

The problem is, as consumers in a consumer-driven culture, we have been taught to fear being empty. Emptiness equals hunger, desires not met. Emptiness goads us by reminding us of scarcity—scarcity of goods, scarcity of time, scarcity of real and lasting relationships. Emptiness, we believe, is the opposite of fulfillment. And let’s face it, if following Jesus means being empty, it’s no wonder that churches, too, are getting increasingly empty.

The problem is that we have gotten to be so afraid of emptiness that we are sometimes tempted into pre-emptively consuming—we eat when we are not really hungry, but to fill emotional needs or soothe old hurts. We buy a certain car to claim a status—whether we can afford it or not, whether that status is being sporty or powerful or environmentally hip. The wearing of logoed clothing has now gotten so ubiquitous that the trend among the truly wealthy is to wear luxurious but unlogo-ed clothing, a trend called "quiet luxury." I wonder if this latest trend is a way of standing out by saying, “I am so wealthy and gorgeous I don’t need to stand out.”

And yet there is a hollowness to these vain strivings. It’s like trying to fill a bucket in the center of our souls that has holes drilled all in the bottom. That’s not the kind of emptiness Jesus embodies.

So here’s a key question: what if the emptiness Paul imperfectly describes isn’t something to be feared, but something that declares our union with God—the God who seeks to plug the holes in our bucket so that we can feel truly safe and at ease?

Instead, let me suggest that the kenosis, the emptying of himself, that Jesus embodies and calls us to emulate is instead something quite different—it’s openness. The openness that is a posture so alien to the world in which we live—the tribalized, fear-based, insatiable world that we breathe in in every moment. The world Jesus came to free us from by showing us something better: being rooted in a certainty of abundance—what is known as grace-- rather than a certain of scarcity and lack and need and hunger.

Because here is a fact: a clenched fist cannot hold anything. When we clench ourselves up, it is out of fear that we are vulnerable. The driving fear that runs this world, the fear of vulnerability, is a self-fulfilling prophecy though. The more you proclaim you are invulnerable, the more you realize it’s all a lie. Fear of vulnerability closes us off to others, to real relationship, and therefore to real fulfillment.

So how can we change the mindset? I want to suggest to you that it has been right in front of us, here at St. Martin’s, every time we gather to worship together. There is something at the center of our time together that is meant to illuminate the grace that is enacted at the center of every gathering for worship, praise, and encouragement we share every Sunday.

Smack dab in the center of the book we will be discussing in adult forum at the end of this month, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving and Finding the Church, Christian seeker Rachel Held Evans speaks about how Jesus comes to us over and over again by describing how approaching the altar rail at communion—a practice that was not central to her worship experience before leaving evangelicalism—reoriented her spiritual journey. With brash honesty, she admits in the chapter entitled "Open Hands:"

I resist it every time.
   All the way down the aisle and up the steps to the altar I fidget, folding and unfolding my arms, clasping and unclasping my hands, forcing my mouth into a pleasant, inconspicuous smile as my eyes greet the faces of the congregants who have gone before me.
    There is organ and choir and stifled coughs and babies’ cries.
   There is incense and hairspray and old church and cheap perfume.
   My knees hit the pillow beneath the altar rail and light from the stained glass dapples my skin. It's as vulnerable a posture as a body can assume: kneeling, hands kept together and turned out--expectant, empty, exposed-- waiting to receive. I resist it every time, this childlike surrender, this public reification of need.
   Prayer, at least, offers some protection with its clasped hands, bowed heads, closed eyes. But here at the table I am open, unsheltered. The lines of my palms are dry creek beds and a basin awaiting water. I am a little girl crouched beneath the spigot.
   The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.
   Jesus descends into my open hands.
   The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation.
   Jesus slips in, through my parted lips.[1]

This giving, and its unspoken expectation that we be willing to receive, is at the heart of the life of a Christian, which is to say, the life spent emulating Jesus. Over and over, we remember, Jesus never asked for worship. Jesus asked us to follow him—to open ourselves to doing God’s will. Not our own. And the scariest thing is that God’s will is based not on taking from us, but giving to us. If only we will be open to that radical grace that Jesus embodies—the same one that throws away our ledger sheets and encourages our own radical generosity and receiving of God’s abundance so that we may share it.

Rachel notes how radically counter-cultural this posture of receiving is to us. She continues about how a friend’s gift of orchids when Rachel was being attacked and criticized by those in her former branch of Christianity made her feel vulnerable for its generosity:

   I was in possession of my friend's gift long before I received it, on a gray day when its stubborn, irresponsible beauty could no longer be ignored period until then I didn't want to admit how badly I needed her kindness, how helpless I was at sorting all this out on my own. I didn't want to see myself in those fragile, thirsty orchids, fighting against the gloom to trestle toward the light.
   My friend knows better than most the nature of eucharisteo—thanksgiving-- how it enters through our soft spots and seeps in through our cracks. She knew God would then clench my fists and unfurl my fingers and that grace would eventually get through.
   And so it did, when I finally opened my hands, when I received grace the way I received communion, with nothing to offer back but thanks.
   “Grace cannot prevail,” writes Robert Farrar Capon, “until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.”
   This is why I need the Eucharist.
   I need the Eucharist because I need to begin each week with open hands.
   I need the Eucharist because I need to practice letting go and letting in.
   I need the Eucharist because I need to quit keeping score.
   … It's a scary thing to open your hands. It's a scary thing to receive, to say yes. I resisted every time period but somehow, whether it sneaks in through a piece of bread, a sip of wine, or a hatching bud, grace always, eventually gets through. And finally at long last, I exhale my thanksgiving.”[2]

Come to find out, God’s will begins with feeding us—an act of grace that starts us from the presumption that there is not only enough, there is more than enough. But the only way to know there is enough is by discarding our transactional notions of control, to let go of the cheap trinkets of this world we so desperately cling to in an illusion that we can be in charge of our relationships with others by demanding they fit our rules of behavior—and also to admit that we cannot control our relationship with God by thinking that God has some great ledger in the sky that we can earn our way onto. That illusion of control is as useless as a closed fist at the communion rail.

Jesus, in living among us as one of us, urges us repeatedly to open our hands and hearts so that we are able to receive and to hold to something infinitely better, infinitely precious: the grace and love of God. This mystery that we CANNOT earn, cannot achieve, cannot buy, cannot hoard. The mystery that comes only from being truly open to God and to each other the same way the roots of a tree open and spread out to hold onto the soil, for nourishment and stability and growth like we want to enable here at St. Martin’s through our financial generosity.

This sharing of communion—open to all, no background checks required—is the radical center at the heart of our Episcopal faith that broke me open as I, like Rachel, felt like I was a lover of Jesus but a hostage of the score-keeping Christianity in which I had spent several years in childhood—that same Christianity which makes a mockery of the radical grace at the heart of Jesus’s message and very life.

Come one, come all. Open yourself to receive the Body of Christ. Open yourself to receive God’s abundant grace. Let go of fear, and in a sacrifice of praise, receive the best God has to offer.

And go and do likewise.

Amen.


Preached at the 10:30 Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on October 1, 2023.

Citations:
[1] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving Leaving, and Finding the Church, pp. 142-143.
[2] Ibid., pp. 144.