Partners

I was half-listening to the radio the other night while cooking supper, and I began to catch bits of an argument, as petulant, accusing voices swirled around my ears. Political commentators, the voice of the people, were arguing passionately about the causes of and solutions to the present financial crisis. The various voices quite clearly did not agree on anything, but there was a tense undertone of fear in all of them, a desperate, urgent tension that sliced into my consciousness like a knife blade. In my day-dreaming state, I thought for a moment that I was off in the desert with the children of Israel. This desperate thirst, this constant scrounging for food and water, this is not what we bargained for, we complain to Moses, as we bring our indignant claims to justice before God. If this is freedom, we want to go back into bondage, where the problems were at least familiar ones. Could it be that God has abandoned us or led our people here to die?

In our country, in our diocese, in our parish, perhaps even in our homes, it seems as if scarcity is eating away at us from without and within, as if we are scrounging our way forward in a dry, hostile landscape. How easy it is, in such a landscape, to freeze with anxiety, to turn on one another, to turn on our leaders, and to turn inward, hugging our meager resources close to our chests. It is interesting that in our text from Exodus, the Hebrew of verse 3 really has the angry people cry out to Moses, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill ME and MY children and MY livestock with thirst?” Scarcity is always all about me.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul asks the Christians in Philippi to turn away from an absorption with their own interests in order to lavish their interest upon others, to take into themselves the mind of Christ—that is, a mind committed to others, a mind whose power lies in humility and obedience to God. Paul asks us Christians to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in us.” Contrary to what you might think, scholars point out that the salvation, the healing, that we are working out is not our own private ticket to Heaven (“as in, if you aren’t saved, you are going to hell”) but, for Paul, this salvation is the quality of the life that we live together as Christ’s Body, a life of love, of sharing in the Spirit, of compassion, and of sympathy.[1] The salvation for which we are all to be working is a “public salvation;” it leads to a transformed community; to a world of abundant love and generosity; to the Kingdom of God. And, as David Lose puts it, we “work it out” by living the way that Christ lived, not seeking our own good, but instead looking out for others, trusting our fates and lives to God.[2]

There is a wonderful children’s book by Rabbi Marc Gellman in which he retells the Creation story. In Gellman’s book, each time that God creates a part of the universe, the angels ask, “Is it finished yet?” And God answers, “Nope, not yet.” After awhile, God makes man and woman and sighs to them, “I am tired now. Please finish up the world for me … really it’s almost done.” The man and woman say, “We can’t finish the world on our own! You have the plans, and we are too little!”“You are big enough,” God answers them. “But if you agree to keep trying to finish the world, then I’ll be your partner.” God then explains, “When you have a partner, it means you can never give up, because your partner is depending on you. On the days you think I’m not doing enough and on the days I think you’re not doing enough, even on those days, we are still partners and we must not stop trying to finish the world.” Later, the angels ask God again, “Is the world finished yet?” and God tells them, “I don’t know. Go ask my partners.”[3]

The only reason that I can stand before you with any credibility and ask you to give away your hard-earned money and time and very selves to this piece of God’s Church, is if this Church is an agent of transformation, a partner with God in Creation, and a rock from which God’s abundant water will flow forth into the desert. We no longer live in a comfortable time (by the “fleshpots of Egypt”) in which the Church is just another club where we pay our dues to enjoy good company, good music, and good food. I cannot ask you for your money just to pay my salary, or to fix up the building, or to provide programs for your children, no matter how much I want all of those things. It is urgent that we find our way to be a clear conduit of water to a thirsty world, that our main purpose be to partner with God in God’s transformation of the desert into a place that sustains abundant life. Just last week, the House of Bishops met and decided to restructure the administration of our National Church to be less “self-focused,” and more mission-focused. I am sure that we will be hearing more about this Spirit-led call from Bishop White soon. We here at St. Thomas are also going to spend some time and energy finding new ways to turn ourselves outward as a parish, not just as individuals, becoming a community focused on being a partner in mission with God. It won’t happen overnight, for it will require us to learn to see water where we now see rocks, but it is the only way out of the desert and into the promised land. It is for this saving journey that I ask for your offerings this stewardship season.

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[1] Susan Eastman, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=9/25/2011.

[2] David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=9/25/2011.

[3] Marc Gellman, Does God have a Big Toe? (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1989), 1-3.

Not Graceful Games but Games of Grace

     

            I smiled when I read our Gospel lesson this week, because last Saturday at the Parish Retreat at All Saints’, one of our clever teens happened to have spontaneously quoted verse 16 during our “Silly Olympics” games! Adults and kids had all been divided up into teams to compete in such demanding feats of skill as pushing a candle across the floor with your nose or racing to wrap a team member up in toilet paper, and there was good-natured cheering and bragging and ribbing throughout. Finally, when one team had been declared the “winner,” this quick and clever teen (who was not on the winning team) cried out: “Well, it says in the Bible that the first shall be last and the last shall be first! So there!” Everyone was very impressed that she had had the last word. I don’t think that I was the only one of us, though, who, after having had a good laugh at the put-down of the winners, was struck by how completely ridiculous this concept sounds in our competitive world. What’s even the point of playing games if the losers are the winners?

            The reversals that God makes in the status quo are well-known throughout the Bible. Our God is a God who frees the Hebrew slaves and drowns the proud Egyptian army in the sea. Our God is a God who makes tongue-tied Moses the leader of his people, who uses slim, young David to fell the mighty Goliath, who picks a humble stable as the birthplace of His Son. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek,” we say with Mary in the Magnificat. And of course, we all know that Jesus’ teachings are all about turning the world upside down—doing crazy, counter-intuitive things, like loving one’s enemies and giving away all one’s possessions. Matthew also has Jesus telling us that “the first will be last and the last will be first” before today’s reading, in Chapter 19, in order to make clear that everyone who gives up his or her family and livelihood and possessions in order to follow Jesus will win eternal life.

            Today’s parable, however, seems to be making a different point than the topsy-turvy reversals with which God seeks to topple social injustice and to cure us of our grasping ways. Today’s parable doesn’t take the losers and make them the winners; it doesn’t make the poor rich and the rich poor; it doesn’t kick out the workers who have worked hard all day and replace them with the 11^th hour workers; neither does it say that the losing team will replace the winning team as first in line for lunch at All Saints’. Jesus’ message in our parable is even more radical than that. If Jesus’ words in verse 16 were truly to fit our parable, he would say instead: “the last will be like the first and the first like the last.”[1] Somehow, says our parable, categories like “first” and “last” have no place, no meaning at all, in God’s Kingdom.

            Let’s look at the story.[2] In ancient Israel, landowners would often go out to a common gathering place and hire day laborers to work in their vineyards, especially at harvest time. Day laborers were cheaper than slaves, because landowners didn’t have to feed and house them. A denarius was a common daily wage for such a hired laborer: it was a subsistence wage, but it would have been considered “fair” pay for a day of work. The relationship between the landowner in our story and the workers whom he hires is this kind of formal relationship between a patron and the lesser men who work for, and depend on, him. As the story progresses, with the landowner going back every 3 hours or so to hire more laborers, our imaginations assume a hierarchy among the workers based on the time of day at which they are hired. Because we think in hierarchical terms, in listening to the story, we assume, like the workers, that the ones hired first are going to get more money than the ones hired later in the day. When the landowner ends up paying the workers hired at the end of the day a whole denarius, the amount that he had promised to the first workers, we automatically assume that we are dealing with a super generous lord who is going to give a “bonus” to those workers hired early in the morning, too. Surely they are about to get at least 2 denarii for their work, if the people who only worked for an hour or two have been paid one denarius. At this point in the story, though, the landowner speaks up. Instead of addressing the complaining workers as a group, lumping them together impersonally like he had done up until this point, he addresses just one single worker, one who feels as if he has been cheated. “Friend,” he calls him, reaching out in a personal way. “Friend, I am paying all of you the same thing. You assume a kind of fairness based on a hierarchy of labor that simply does not exist in my vineyard. Every laborer is needed at every hour, and every laborer is rewarded in the same way.” The landowner sighs. “Take what belongs to you and go. All along, you have been in my presence, on my land. You were invited. You were welcomed. But if you insist on your own version of justice, then your justice demands that you must go. Justice here has been leveled. In my vineyard, the last is like the first, and the first is like the last.”

            Paul Ricoeur calls our insistence on “fairness” in this world, “a logic of equivalence.” Certain illegal actions receive certain punishments in our penal system. Our productivity in the workplace is weighed, measured, and rewarded; and deep-down, we expect to receive benefits in life according to our merit. We want God’s justice, too, to work with the clear reciprocity of a vending machine: you put in the right number of tokens and your reward plops out into your waiting hands. Such a logic of equivalence certainly promotes and rewards hard work and success in our world. When we are the workers hired first, we whistle with contentment as we head off to our labors, secure that we will be rewarded well at the end of the day. We guard our place at the top of the hierarchy warily, keeping a keen eye on any circumstances that might threaten it. When we are the workers standing around all day waiting for a job, though, watching our brothers and sisters move with purpose and pride, we can feel forsaken by God and by the unfairness of life, lashing out in anger or curling up in resignation. The good news of our parable is that this “logic of equivalence” is a man-made logic, not a divine one. For Jesus, God’s justice has nothing to do with a hierarchical relationship between individuals, some of whom are more worthy than others. Consequently, our attempts to keep track of where we are on such a ladder are totally futile and a waste of our time. In God’s eyes, our worth does not depend on where we stand but on God’s acceptance of us and on God’s generous invitation into the Kingdom. God’s Kingdom functions on a “logic of hope,” rather than a “logic of equivalence.” For God, we are made right through God’s open-ended giving, even through the gift of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ, and not through any closed-off standard of justice.

            Often, interpreters of our parable understand the denarius paid to every worker as a metaphor for God’s grace, given to each of us, equally. I prefer Bernard Scott’s interpretation, however. He sees the call to work in the vineyard as the metaphor for God’s grace. Grace is in the need for workers, in the invitation to join in the essential work of God’s Kingdom. There is no unemployment in the Kingdom of God. There are no job qualifications. There are no workers who are better than others, none who are rewarded more than others. Just as the landowner is generous in his need for workers, hiring more and more and more, God is generous in God’s never-ending need for us all to join with him in transforming Creation in hope and love.

            If God’s grace is pure invitation, I think that, as the Church, we need to be sure that our invitations are pure grace. Martin Smith writes that "God claims from us our purposeful engagement, our attentiveness, our intentionality ... for opening ourselves through desire to [God's] rich possibilities. [Our right response to a wildly generous God] is active receptivity, hope expectant of undeserved and surprising gifts."[3] As we follow God’s example to invite others to join in this piece of God’s Kingdom here on Westport Road, our parable would teach us to work at abolishing any hierarchies among ourselves. Old members, new members, “real” members, Christmas and Easter members: all are invited equally to labor among us. Priests, deacons, and lay members, all are invited equally to share in ministry. And as stewardship season approaches, does our giving to God of our tithes and our time reflect a logic of equivalence, a logic in which we give to God’s Kingdom based on how much we are getting back from life or from our community (or not!), or does it reflect a logic of hope, a logic of joining in the work to which we are called?

            Let’s return to our games at All Saints’. If Sheri, who planned and invited us to the games, were God, she would not have carefully balanced each team with young, agile kids and old parents. She would have grabbed us up as we arrived at the play shelter. Some would have started to play the games at 10 and others at 11 and still others at noon. “Go on out there and play,” she would have said to the first groups of players, “and it will be great.” At noon, she would have looked over at everybody who was late to the retreat, at those of us hanging back and looking down at our clumsy feet, and she would have said, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” We would have answered, “Aww, we’re not good at these games…” or “It’s too late for us to play.” But Sheri would have said, “Get out there and play.” At lunch time, when it was time to stop the games, she would have gathered the team thrown together at the last minute and, no matter what their score, she would have invited them to go to lunch first. When the other teams, who had been playing longer and had more points, came over to hear what was going on, she would have sent them on to lunch, as well. “We had more points,” they would have complained! “We should get extra dessert or something! That’s not fair!” But Sheri might have replied, “The points don’t really matter. You all got to play, didn’t you? I desperately needed each and everyone one of you out there. If any of you had been missing, the games would not have been the same. Your reward was the joy that came from your playing; your worth the very fact of your unique participation. Now go and be fed. You are not in charge of the games, anyway, thankfully. I am.” Sweaty and laughing and enjoying one another’s company, we would have trooped in to lunch together, relieved, actually, that this was a game where points don’t count. But wait--That’s really what happened, anyway! Last weekend, our teen’s comment about the “first and the last” was of course not even a serious reproach. It was spoken with a light and generous heart and really meant, “we don’t care about who won or lost. We had fun together; we gave and laughed and loved and helped each other to accomplish a goal; all of this team stuff was just for show, anyway.” Such is the Kingdom of God.

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[1]Ulrich Luz, Matthew, 534.

[2] This interpretation of the parable comes from Bernard Scott in Hear then the Parable, 297-98.

[3] Martin Smith, Compass and Stars, 88.

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[1]Ulrich Luz, Matthew, 534.

[2] This interpretation of the parable comes from Bernard Scott in Hear then the Parable, 297-98.

The Tattletales: a homily for kids, teens, and parents at a rainy retreat in the woods on September 11 ...

      

          How many of you have ever tattled on anybody? I used to be the queen of all

tattletales when I was little, so I know that it feels really good to tattle. You can just feel an inner glow of goodness spread through your body, as you give voice to the wayward actions of your neighbor. Right? By putting the other guy on the wrong side of the rules, you can bask in the sunshine of rightness and feel in control of the scales of justice, and you can make sure that ordered fairness reigns around you. I have a feeling that in the classroom of life, we human beings all tend to be tattletales, and our merciful God is the exasperated teacher. Today’s parable is Jesus’ attempt to put a crack in the complacency of all of our tattling hearts. Instead of calling it the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, I think that it should be called the parable for the Tattletales.

          Today’s parable is a tricky one. It is so tricky that it appears only here in the Gospel of Matthew—and even Matthew tries to make an allegory out of it, placing it next to Peter’s question about forgiveness. Matthew identifies God with the King in the parable and takes the moral of the story to be: “Don’t be like the unforgiving servant or God is really going to zap you!” We and the Gospel writers often get in trouble, though, when we start to make one on one correspondences in Jesus’ parables. In today’s parable, an allegory leads us to a fickle, untrustworthy God, to a God who can take away the mercy that he has promised, like the king in our story. It leads us to a God who throws out grace and hands sinners over to “the torturers” for eternity. And most of all, it allows us to convince ourselves that Jesus is addressing people like that bad, unforgiving servant, instead of us.

          Instead, let’s say that the king in this parable does not represent God at all. Actually, in Greek, this is a human king, probably a Gentile King, the kind of all-powerful ruler who was known to farm out the collecting of taxes on his land holdings to a lesser noble, who would bid for the chance to collect the king’s taxes, and who would make money by adding his own percentage to the amount to be collected for the king. In our story, on the day of accounting, this conniving tax collector cannot come up with the amount of his bid. This Gentile king and his big deal tax collector are already “bad guys” in the minds of Jesus’ Jewish listeners, peasant farmers who lived at the constant mercy of Rome’s thirst for tax revenue. The amount owed to the king is also shocking in this story. Ten thousand talents is an absurdly large sum of money, equivalent to something like a billion dollars in our modern world, a crazy, unthinkable debt for one tax collector to owe. Like most of Jesus’ stories, this is a tall tale, a strange and disturbing story, meant to shake us up.

          Just for fun, and to keep us out of the realm of allegory, let’s put the parable into a similarly shocking setting on this 11^th of September 2011.[1] Let’s make it a story about a Taliban-linked drug lord in Pakistan and the lesser tribal chief who owes him a billion dollars in drug money. “Ahhh,” we all shake our heads as we hear the story begin, “this bad tribal chief is in trouble. We’ve seen enough movies to know that he is going to get in trouble with the Taliban leader, but you know, he deserves what he gets. He shouldn’t be dealing with that evil group, anyway. He’s not a good, law-abiding Christian, like I am.”

          Then, of course, when the Taliban leader grants the tribal chief mercy, when he has pity on the chief’s groveling …. For goodness’ sake, we are really shocked, then. We start to wonder what kind of crazy story this is going to be. According to the lawless world of the Pakistani border that we know about from movies and news reports, merciless Taliban drug lords are supposed to punish the people who fail them; they’re not supposed to forgive them enormous debts out of pity.

          Then, to top it all off, having been given mercy, the tribal chief goes out and demands money from one of his own associates, practically strangling him and confiscating his property as punishment for not paying a little $50 debt. We find it even easier to pass judgment on the tribal chief now. “What awful, immoral, violent people,” we proclaim, “that kind of insane behavior is just what you can expect from the Taliban. He is granted mercy and then he turns around and refuses mercy to someone else. I would never be caught in a situation like that!”

          When the other tribal chiefs from the region come in, having witnessed the blatant but expected hard-heartedness committed by the drug-running chief, we are all ready to identify with them. As our parable says, “when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place.” See, here they come: the tattle-tales! Our reactions to the story have placed us side by side with them all along. And how does the drug lord respond to the tattlers? He is of course forced to act, just like a teacher in a classroom when misbehavior is brought to her attention through tattling. In his anger, the Taliban drug lord now revokes his mercy, acting not in the unexpected, merciful role, but in the role assigned to him by his culture. He hands the tribal chief over to be tortured until he repays the billion dollars, which of course is too large ever to repay.

Despite our satisfaction over justice that is now served on these enemies of ours, in the usual, expected ways, we can’t help but be uneasy and shaken up, can we, by the violent reaction of the drug lord this time. Does the unmerciful tribal chief really need to be given to “the torturers,” we wonder? Couldn’t he just sit in a nice prison for awhile? We don’t really want to be responsible for brutal torture, do we? And his punishment IS kind of our fault. We tattled on him, after all, bringing what he did to the drug lord’s attention.

          We tattletales believe that failure is logically supposed to lead to a just punishment. But in the world of our parable, our tattling implicates us in chaos. Here we are, trying to bring about justice, or to bring about what we judge to be justice, and we find that the reality is indeed more complex than we thought, and we ourselves are trapped by our tattling in a pervasive, sticky web of evil. As we pray in our confession today, “Lord, forgive us the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.”

          Our parable today shows that God’s justice and God’s mercy are somehow inexplicably intertwined. When we try to separate judgment and mercy with our unforgiving, tattling tongues, in order to make them fit our corrupt molds here in this world, we deform the very Kingdom of God. God needs all of us as partners in putting back together a creation shattered by evil and sin. For our own sakes, and for the sake of God’s Kingdom, we can’t afford to let our self-righteous tattling send anyone off to the torturers.

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[1] This take on the parable is indebted to Bernard Scott's interpretation in Hear Then the Parable.