Are Faith and Science in Conflict? (Nov 9 2014, St. Al's@5)

Are Faith and Science in Conflict?

Readings:  Psalm 19, Rom 1.20-21

“The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork.”

So says the opening line of Psalm 19.  And I believe it.  I believe that the heavens and in fact the whole universe declare the glory of God.  I believe it as a Christian, as a theologian.  And I believe it as a scientist.  As a scientist, as one who seeks to understand and explore and make sense of the natural world, I am often struck by a sense of awe and wonder.  I am amazed at the vastness of the universe.  I am overwhelmed by the beauty of nature.  I am awe-struck by the way a vast array of natural phenomena can be explained in simple mathematical equations.  The use of the equation Force = mass x acceleration to explain the motion of the planets leaves me gasping in wonder.  OK, I know that’s a bit geeky, but it’s true!

One of the reasons that I do science is that it reveals to me the glory of God.  And one of the reasons that I believe in God is the experience of wonder that I have when I do science.  I agree wholeheartedly with Paul when he writes “ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”  This verse is a manifesto for science, for exploring the natural world.  As a Christian, this verse motivates me to do science, as it has motivated many great scientists, men like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, or more recently Werner Heisenberg, Teilhard de Chardin and Francis Collins.

Now, I don’t get to do much science these days, at least not in the professional sense.  I used to.  I did my graduate work in theoretical quantum physics, my work was published in physics journals, and for a time I was a lecturer in the history of science.  I love science, I love God, and I have never personally experienced a conflict between science and faith.  On the contrary, my science inspires my faith and my faith motivates my science.

Are faith and science in conflict?  For me personally the answer is no.  But speaking from a historical perspective, the answer must be, sometimes!  There a have been periods where faith and science, or at least their practitioners and authorities, have been in conflict.

Let’s take a look at Psalm 19 again.  Did you notice that the first half is about nature, how we can know God through his creation, but the second half is about the law of the Lord?  By law, the Psalmist means the Torah, the holy Scriptures which reveal God’s law or teaching, which is greatly to be desired and which enlightens us.  So there we have it.  Nature and the Bible.  God has written two books.  Galileo, the great scientist of the late 16^th and early 17^th century used to talk about these two books written by God, nature and the Bible, each of which contained truths that could not contradict each other, provided their true meaning is understood.  And yet, ironically, even though Psalm 19 would seem to support Galileo’s understanding of the complementarity of Science and Faith, it was one of the scriptures used to attack Galileo.

Can anyone see how Psalm 19 could be used to attack Galileo?  Remember that Galileo was an advocate of the new Copernican astronomy that took the earth out of the centre of the universe.  Copernican astronomy said that it wasn’t the sun that went around the earth, it was the earth that went around the sun.  Have a look again at Psalm 19.

Verse 6 says that the sun goes forth from the uttermost edge of the heavens and runs about to the end of it again.  “Aha!” said Galileo’s opponents.  “The Bible says that the sun moves, but your science says it is the earth that moves.  Your science must be wrong!”  And before of you start blaming the Catholic Church for this, let me tell you that this particular argument actually came from the Protestants, not the Catholics!

Galileo, as most of you know, was condemned by the Catholic Church in 1633 and sentenced to house arrest.  He was however, and this you may not know, he was completely exonerated by the Catholic Church by the 20^th century, and not only that, but he was also recognized and commended by Pope John Paul II for not just his scientific theories but also for his theological views on how to interpret scripture in the light of science.  As Pope John Paul II said in 1992,

“there exist two realms of knowledge, one of which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power.  To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy.  The distinction between the two realms of knowledge ought not to be understood as opposition.”

So if church leaders from Thomas Aquinas to John Paul II to Pope Francis just last month have endorsed science, why have there been these periods of conflict between faith and science.  Usually these happen when science discovers something that shakes up our worldview, something that changes the way we understand nature, something that changes the understanding of nature which has been built into our faith and theology.   When Copernicus proposed that the earth was no longer the centre of the universe, he shook up the prevailing worldview.  Moving the earth from its central position didn’t just change science, it also changed our whole way of understanding ourselves as God’s special creatures, placed in a special position in the centre of the universe, with heaven above us and hell below.  That kind of shake up in what we think and believe creates the conditions for conflict!

But we sorted it out.  We realized that the Genesis declaration that we are created in God’s image didn’t mean that we had to be in the centre of the universe.  We realized that when the Bible says “the earth cannot be moved” as it does in Psalm 93, we didn’t have to take that literally and refuse to believe that the earth orbits the sun.  We sorted it out, we moved on.

The next big shock came in the 19^th century, when geologists realized from their study of rock formations and fossils that the earth must be much older than previously thought, and then biologists, and Charles Darwin in particular, proposed the theory of evolution based on their study of plant and animal species and characteristics.  Again, this shook things up.  There was the simple fact of the new time scale which seemed beyond human imagination.  Previously, there had been no pressing reason to think of the days of creation found in the first chapter of Genesis as anything other than normal days.  Now there was!  But much more was at stake.  For Catholics, the scientific theory that humans evolved from animals challenged the theological understanding of the uniqueness of the human soul.  And for Fundamentalists, having to let go of the literal truth of the creation stories in Genesis would mean that the “Fall” which played such an important role in their theology would no longer be conceived of as a real historical event.

Most Christians have by now sorted this one out too and have moved on from this shake up as well.   Not all.  Some still have doubts about evolution, or reject it entirely.  For Christians whose faith is wedded to a particular literal interpretation of scripture or to the insistence that the Fall was a specific historical event, evolution is still problematic, and the conflict with science remains.  Some of us here tonight might be in that situation.  That’s ok. We can talk about that in more detail later if you like, this evening or at our young adult group on Tuesday.

But most Christians have moved on.  They are content to regard the story of the Fall as symbolic and metaphorical, rather than historical, and that takes away none of its power.   They have no problem regarding the language of days in Genesis as poetic rather than literal.  And the common ancestry we have with other life forms which is revealed by evolution actually serves to remind us that we are meant to be in relationship with all of God’s creation.

Sometimes, however, there is another faith-science problem that arises, and that is when scientists or others make the claim that science is the only way humans can know things, and that therefore faith is irrelevant.  Let me first of all point out that the claim that science is the only way to know things is not a scientific claim, it is actually a statement of belief or faith!  But it is a real concern.

The claim of the completeness of science has its origins in the success and power of science, especially the success of Newton’s science which fuelled the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age.  In Newton’s physics there is matter, that matter is in motion, and that motion is caused by forces.  Those simple principles and a handful of simple equations were used in the 19^th century to explain just about everything that moved in the natural world.  There is a famous story that when Laplace used Newton’s Laws to explain planetary motion and presented his text on astronomy to the King, the King read the text and asked Laplace where was God in all of this.  To which Laplace replied, “I have no need of that assumption.”

Science no longer needs the assumption of God to do its work.  It is an attempt to understand our experience of the universe based on a particularly powerful methodology:  empirical observations, controlled, repeated experimentation, measurement, mathematics and reason.  Science teaches us a great deal about ourselves and about the world God made. 

But our Christian faith goes beyond science.  Our faith welcomes the insights of science, because “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork.”  But our faith also asks the question of why the world is the way it is.  We ask questions of meaning and purpose, we ask how things should be, we talk about the importance of relationships, of loving God and loving each other, we talk about God who is both immanent in this universe but also transcends it.  These are questions that science cannot answer. And as people of faith we explore these questions based on our own experience of the divine, based on the collected wisdom of others who have been in relationship with God, especially as these experiences have been recorded in our sacred text, the Bible, and, most importantly, because we as Christians believe that the same God who created the universe actually took on human form and walked this planet, we seek to answer the most important questions of our lives based on the words and deeds of Jesus.

So I encourage all of you to be both scientists and people of faith.  For ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things God has made.

Amen.

Divided Loyalties (Oct 19 2014)

Homily.  Yr A P29.  Oct 19 2014. St. Albans

Ex 33.12-23; Ps 99; 1 Thess 1.1-10; Mt 22.15-22

We’re pretty good at giving the Emperor the things that are the Emperor’s.  We stand when the national anthem is played.  We support our troops when they go to war.  We turn our noise down at 11pm, or if we don’t and we get caught, we pay the fines.  We license our cars.  We pay our taxes – in fact, not only do we pay our taxes but we spend a considerable amount of time and money collecting receipts and filing our tax returns every year.  We may resent these things, or disagree with the politics, or maybe we only do them because we feel we have no choice, but whatever the reason, overall, we’re pretty good at giving the Emperor the things that are the Emperor’s.

How good are we at giving God the things that are God’s?

Now some might argue that the reason we respond well to the Emperor’s demands is that the Empire is pretty good at making clear to us what we have to do.  The problem, perhaps, is that maybe we don’t know what God requires of us?

Except that it’s pretty clear what God requires of us.

The prophet Micah in response to that very question puts it quite simply:  “The Lord has told you what is good and what the Lord requires of you:  to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.”

When Jesus was asked what God requires of us, he too gave a clear answer:  “Love the Lord with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.”

And just in case we still have doubts, Jesus was even more specific:  Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, cloth the naked, take care of the sick and visit those in prison.

We know the things that God requires of us.  And sometimes, there doesn’t appear to be any conflict with the demands of the Empire.

But there is a conflict going on in today’s gospel, a conflict that is a matter of life and death.  The day before the scene in the gospel reading we just heard, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey and was acclaimed by the crowds as Messiah and King.  He then went straight to the heart of Jerusalem, entered the Temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling, overturning the tables of the money changers.  The following day he had the chutzpah to return again to the Temple, and when he was confronted by the religious authorities, he proceeded to tell a series of stories each of which directly challenged the authority of the chief priests and religious leaders and turned the crowds against them.  The leaders were both angry and afraid:  angry enough to want to arrest Jesus and put him to death, but afraid of the crowds who sided with Jesus.

Conflicts occur when something important is at stake.  When loyalties are divided. When values that are important to us are threatened.  What’s at stake in the conflict which is at the heart of today’s gospel?

We know what was at stake for the Emperor.  History teaches us that the Roman Empire valued two things in an occupied province:  stability and tax revenue.  Jesus was a threat to both of these imperial values.  His temple action had disrupted the collection of taxes, and the crowds that acclaimed him as king could easily turn to riot and rebellion.

But what was at stake for the Jewish authorities, the Chief Priests and Elders, the Pharisees and the Herodians?  They weren’t Romans, they were Jews, and maintaining the religious and cultural identity of the Jewish people even in the midst of the Roman occupation was their priority.  They wanted the people to follow God’s Law, they wanted to preserve Temple worship.  But in order for them to do these things, they had to deal with the empire.  In fact, they only stayed in their positions of leadership and authority by permission of the empire, and that meant that they had to buy in to the empire’s values of stability and taxation, even if that made them complicit in the economic and political oppression of their own people.  Even if that meant that they would have to put to death an upstart preacher from Galilee who was too unsophisticated to understand their delicate situation with the Roman authorities.

And you know what?  I’m in no position to stand in judgement over those religious leaders.  I’ve been in situations where I’ve compromised my values in order to try to make the best of a difficult situation.  They were trying to protect their people from the very real threat of a confrontation with the Roman army that would lead to death and destruction.  Sure, maybe they were also trying to protect their own positions of privilege, but we all do that don’t we?

But that sort of divided loyalty wasn’t good enough for Jesus.  For him something else was at stake, something important enough to put his own life at risk by his words and actions in the Temple.

Let’s go back to the previous day.  When Jesus enters the Temple, he says “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.”

With those words, Jesus quotes the 56^th chapter of the Book of Isaiah.  If you read that chapter, you will see that the LORD through his prophet Isaiah is calling for people to maintain justice and do what is right.  He is calling for the inclusion of all peoples, including foreigners, including those who have been marginalized and oppressed, he’s calling for all to be included in God’s house of prayer.  It is a radical call for justice and inclusivity.

When Jesus then says “but you have made it a den of robbers” he is quoting the 7^th chapter of Jeremiah.  Again, if you were to turn to that text, you will find that it is a call for repentance, a call for the people to amend their ways and return to God.  It is a call to end the oppression of the widow, the orphan and the outcast. It is a call to return to acting justly, for this is what God requires of those who seek to worship in his Temple.

These are the things that matter to Jesus.  They ask about taxes.  Jesus asks to see a coin.  It is a Roman coin.  In whose image is the coin made, Jesus asks.  The emperor’s, they respond.  “Then give to the emperor what is the emperor’s”.  Is it an instruction to pay the tax?  Or is it a call to take that coin, that Roman symbol of oppression, and to get it out of the Temple area.  The coin is made in the image of the emperor.

But you, in whose image are you made?  You are made in God’s image.  God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God he created them.  The coin may belong to the Emperor, but you belong to God.  And so does the person sitting on your left and on your right.

So give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s; but give to God the things that are God’s.

Some people have tried to make this saying into a justification for the separation of church and state, or the sacred and the secular, or a way of categorizing our actions or dividing our loyalties.

But for Jesus there is no divided loyalty.  He is demanding that we should be focused always and at all times about how our decisions and actions – how we use our money, how we use our time, how we treat others, how we set our priorities – how all these must be shaped by our faith that the whole world and all that is in it is God’s and that we, and all people are made in God’s image.

We’re pretty good at giving the Emperor the things that are the Emperor’s. 

How well do we give God the things that are God’s?

Amen.

A Story About Sight (Thanksgiving, Oct 12 2014)

Homily:  Thanksgiving, Oct 12 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Deut 8.7-18; Ps 65, 2 Cor 9.6-15; Lk 17.11-19                                        

“A Story about Sight”

Creative Commons - Photo by TheStolpskott

Today’s gospel is the story of a healing.  It’s the story of ten lepers, ten people who had been forced out of society because they suffered from a dreaded, contagious disease of the skin.  When Jesus arrives at the outskirts of their village, they call out to him from a distance, “Jesus, have compassion on us.”  And when Jesus sees them, he has compassion, and he tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, because that’s what the law said they had to do to rejoin society.  And as they went on their way, the sores disappeared and pus on their skin vanished, and they were healed.

Now if this is where the reading had stopped, and I was to ask you what the story was about, you probably would say that it was about the healing of ten lepers, that is to say, a story about skin.

But the text doesn’t stop here.  As we continue reading, we’re told that one man, seeing that he was healed, turns back and in so doing he takes our story in a whole new direction.  Because for ten men, this is a story about skin.  But for one man, it is a story about sight.

What is it that the one man sees that the others don’t?  Surely all ten could see that their skin was healed, that the sores had disappeared.  But the one man sees something more, something that makes him stop dead in his tracks, separate himself from the group and turn back toward Jesus.  He sees something, so he changes direction.  He sees something, and he praises God.  He sees something, and so he prostrates himself at Jesus feet and thanks him.

What did he see?  Ten men saw the gift, the healed skin.  One man sees the Giver. 

  

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving.  It is the time of year when we deliberately direct our attention towards the many gifts that we receive, all the good things that we enjoy.  It is therefore an opportunity for us to learn to see, to see not just the gift, but also the Giver.  

Are we like so many, who receiving a gift, think to themselves “Boy am I ever lucky!” or are we like the one man who is able to see the active presence of God working in and through all the events of our lives, and, as a result, is truly able to say “Thank you”.

I don’t think it’s surprising that nine out of the ten people in today’s text were unable to see God in their own healing.  As our first reading from Deuteronomy reminds us, we have a tendency to forget God, to lose sight of the divine in the day to day happenings of our lives.  Our vision tends to narrow over time.  We become near-sighted.  We become complacent.  We no longer belong to a culture that sees God’s hand in the events of our lives.  We belong to a much more skeptical age, a empirical world that places its emphasis on what we can measure and on what can be experienced with our five senses.  Most of us after all, at some point in our lives, have been taught that “seeing is believing.”

But what if we’re wrong about that.  What if we’ve got it backwards.

There’s a man named Dewitt Jones who’s a photographer for the National Geographic.  You know, the yellow magazines with all those amazing pictures that, back in the days before Google, many of us used to collect and use for school projects.  Over the past thirty years, Dewitt Jones has learned a thing or two about vision.  His insights originate with his photography, but I think they speak to us too.  Here’s what he says:

“I started out in life, as most of us do, holding the maxim “I won’t believe it till I see it”.  Yet the more I worked for the Geographic, the more I realized I had it backwards.  The way it really works is “I won’t see it till I believe it”.  That’s the way life really works.”

“They sent me out to places I’d never been.  I believed there would be beautiful landscapes – and they were there.  I believed there would be interesting people to photograph – and I’d find them.

“Perception controls our reality.  If we don’t believe it, we won’t see it.”

How open are we to seeing the divine in the midst of our lives, to seeing the active presence of God in our world?

In the midst of the chaos of our lives are we aware of the divine spark within that urges us to live lives of meaning and purpose?

In the midst of the conflicts and injustice of our world, do we hear God speaking in those voices throughout history that have urged us to do justice and to love our neighbour as ourselves?

When we consider the air that we breathe and the water that we drink, do we think of these as fortunate outcomes of random processes, or do we have a vision of an awesome, evolving creation which is life-giving and is a reflection of its Creator.

When we suffer, when we are in pain, are we aware of a subtle force which suffers with us and brings a transformative energy to bear on our situation.

If we believe it, we’ll see it. 

But sometimes we have trouble seeing.  Sometimes our sight gets clouded.  When life gets hard, when we or those we love encounter difficulty, our vision loses its clarity.  When we encounter skepticism or doubt, our field of vision narrows.  Even, or perhaps especially, when times are good, our vision becomes complacent and near-sighted.

When our vision fails us, what are we to do?  It’s at these times that we need to come together, to tell each other our stories, to hear the stories of those who have gone before us, to celebrate in praise and in song the presence of the divine in our midst, to be reminded of what we once saw and to be encouraged in our belief that we will once more see the active presence of God in our lives and in our world.

That’s what we’re doing here this morning.  Some call it worship, others just say they’re going to church.  Someone on the Internet that I read this week says he likes to think of going to church as weekly cataract surgery.  We may come in with our sight clouded, but if the surgery is successful we go out with a clear vision of God at work.

And on this Thanksgiving Sunday, on this day when we pay particular attention to the good things of our lives, we want to learn to see not just the gifts, but also the Giver, and when we do, we respond by praising God and saying Thank you.

Giving thanks is good and right, and to top it off it’s also good for us.  But is there more that we should be doing? 

Yes there is.  Because once we’ve learned to see the Giver in the gifts, we then should realize that each one of us is called to participate in the giving.

That’s what Paul is trying to explain to the Corinthians in the second lesson that we heard this morning. 

Paul was doing something quite remarkable, something which was actually unprecedented.  He was organizing the world’s first foreign aid project.  Corinth, you see, was a prosperous Greek city of the Roman Empire, a sea port which benefited from trade and commerce.  Jerusalem, however was exactly the opposite, a poor, remote city under Roman Military occupation, oppressed by the Roman military because of its rebellious past.  And so Paul has organized that a collection be taken up in the prosperous Greek cities, including Corinth, so that the money can be given to the poor in Jerusalem.

And apparently his project was meeting some resistance among the Corinthians.  Why should we give our money to those no-good foreigners? they complained.  “We worked hard for our money.  Why should we give it away?”

And so Paul writes them a letter, part of which we heard read today.  Why should we be generous?  Why should we give?

We give because that’s what Jesus did.  Jesus gave his life for us.

We give because all that we have, all of our wealth is a gift from God, and the purpose of wealth is to do good for others.

We give to others because that is how we express our thanks to God for what we’ve been given.  As Paul writes, “Generosity produces thanksgiving to God, for the rendering of this ministry of giving and generosity not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God.”

As we gather here this morning, we have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.  We live in a land of plenty, we are loved by friends and family, we have our health and our lives and so much more.  May we learn to see God at work in all the blessings of this life, and seeing, may we also realize that each of us is called to participate in God’s work, to be generous and giving towards others, for this is how we offer thanks.

Amen.

Ref:  David Lose,  http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=411

Change Your Minds (Sept 28 2014)

Homily:  Yr A P26, Sept 28 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 17.1-7; Ps 78.1-4,12-16; Phil 2.1-13; Mt 21.23-32

“Change Your Minds”

What do you think?  A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.”  He answered, “I will not”; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, “I go sir” but he did not go.

Which of the two did the will of his father?    The first.

God wants us to change our minds.

And that’s a problem.  Because changing our minds can be really hard.

Paul Calandra is the Member of Parliament who was widely ridiculed this week for not answering questions in the House of Commons.  On Friday he rose in the House to apologize for his conduct.  He realized that he had been wrong, he said that he’d thought about how his own father would have been ashamed of him, and as he spoke, he cried, right there on the floor of Parliament.  Changing your mind can be really hard.

God wants us to change our minds.  God knows that changing our mind can be really hard.  And so God creates space for us to change our minds.

The Father in Jesus’ parable says to the first son “go and work in the vineyard”. 

“I will not”.

You can imagine the gasp from Jesus listeners.  This was a culture in which sons didn’t refuse their father’s order to work in the vineyard.  It was an act of rebellion, a breaking of the relationship.  How would the father respond?  Would he force him to go, would he get angry, would he kick him out of the house and cut off his inheritance?

This father does none of these things.  As far as the story tells us, he does nothing; and later, we don’t know how much later, the son changes his mind and goes.  The father did nothing – nothing, except to create some time and space for the son to change his mind and to go to the vineyard of his own accord.

And as we step out of the parable into the larger story of today’s gospel, we see that it too is all about Jesus creating space for the chief priests and the elders of the people to change their minds.

The dramatic confrontation between Jesus and these leaders in today’s gospel takes place the day after what we would call Palm Sunday, the day that Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the cheering of crowds who acclaimed Jesus as King and Messiah.  And the very first thing that Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem is go straight to the Temple and drive out all the buyers and the sellers, and overturn the tables of the moneychangers and those who sold sacrificial doves.

And the Chief Priests and the elders, the people in charge of the Temple, they are thoroughly pissed, and they resolve to get Jesus.

So when Jesus has the nerve to show up in the Temple again the next day and to start teaching the crowds that gather around him, the Chief Priests and elders confront him.

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

Jesus doesn’t answer their question right away, and instead poses a question of his own.  Why does Jesus do this?  Sometimes I’ve heard it said that Jesus his trying to outfox them, to outsmart them at their own game.  But I don’t think so.  I think that what Jesus is trying to do is to create some space for the chief priests and elders to change their minds.  Which would be consistent with what Jesus has been trying to do for people since the very beginning of his public ministry.  Do you remember the very first word that Jesus spoke when he began in Galilee?

Repent.  Change your mind.  Repent, for the kingdom of God has come near.

And so Jesus asks the chief priests a question about the baptism of John.  Do you remember what the baptism of John was about?  John proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  Repentance.  A changing of minds.  There it is again.

And when Jesus asks his question, “did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin,” it causes the leaders to argue amongst themselves, and in that argument, their agenda and concerns are brought to light.

“If we say, ‘from heaven’, he will say to us, ‘why then did you not believe him.’  And that would make them look bad, foolish, hypocritical.

But if we say, “Of human origin’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.”  And that would be dangerous, for a rebellious crowd might draw the intervention of the Roman military, and that might put the authority of the leaders, and the prestige and privilege that go with it, at risk.

The question and the argument expose the chief priests as schemers, as those who act out of ambition and self-interest, rather than any desire to seek the truth and do the will of God.  The question of what is actually true about the origins of John’s baptism doesn’t even enter into their calculated response.

And so even as they finally agree and utter their pathetic “We do not know,” surely at least some of them have glimpsed a truth about themselves.  I think that’s what Jesus’ question was designed to do, to give the leaders a chance to see their own truth.  Because often the first step in changing our minds is to get a glimpse of the truth about ourselves.  That’s what gets us into the space where a change of mind becomes possible.  By Paul Calandra’s own admission, it was when he realized that he was behaving in a way that his own father would have been ashamed of that he changed his mind.

But to simply glimpse the truth about ourselves is just a start. Jesus isn’t finished yet.  Having created a space for repentance, he opens it up a little more.  He knows that it’s hard for us, he knows that it takes time.

“What do you think?”  It’s an invitation to dig a little deeper, to open up a little more.

“A man had two sons.”  Jesus tells a story, but not just any story.  It’s a story about a man who had two sons.  There are lots of stories about a man with two sons.  Cain and Abel.  Isaac and Ishmael.  Esau and Jacob.  The prodigal son and the elder brother.  And all of these stories have something in common:  a surprise ending which involves a reversal. 

“He said to the first, ‘Son go and work in the vineyard today.’  He answered ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.”

The story is simple, sparse, lacking in detail.  But the message is clear.  “Which of the two did the will of his father?” 

They answered, “the first.”

When our initial response is to oppose the way of God, and it often is, we need to change our minds and go.

Jesus is calling on the chief priests and elders to change their minds.  He’s created some space for this to happen.  And we know that at least one of them did change his mind.  We are told in John’s gospel that Nicodemus stood up for Jesus, and at Jesus’ death, he arranged a proper burial for the body.

But most of the leaders refused to change their minds, and they left the temple to plot Jesus’ death. 

Changing our minds is hard.  Because God is calling for more than just a simple admitting that we were wrong about something.  He’s calling for big changes.

Paul, who experienced big changes in his own life, puts it this way in his letter to the Philippians:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

Who, though he was in the form of God,

Did not regard equality with God

As something to be exploited,

But emptied himself,

Taking the form of a slave

Being born in human likeness

And being found in human form,

He humbled himself

And became obedient to the point of death,

Even death upon a cross.

That’s what we’re being called to.  A change of mind that would have us look not to our own interests but to those of others.  A change of mind that would have us do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit.  A change of mind that would have us in humility regard others as better than ourselves.

That’s hard.  That takes time.  That’s why Jesus creates space for us.  In fact you might even say that our whole lives, maybe even this whole universe have been created as a space for us to change our minds.

What do you think?  A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.”  He answered, “I will not”; but later he changed his mind and went.

Amen.

The Parable of the Generous Landowner (Sept 21 2014)

Homily:  Yr A P25, Sept 21 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 16.2-15, Ps 105 1-6, 37-45; Phil 1.21-30; Mt 20.1-16

The Parable of the Generous Landowner

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of different interpretations of the parable we just heard.  Sometimes people will use this parable to talk about salvation, how it doesn’t matter whether you become a Christian as a child or on your deathbed, you will still receive the reward of eternal life.  I have also heard this parable interpreted as a teaching on social justice, how God wants a world where there is full employment and income equality, where everyone is paid a living wage regardless of how much and what sort of work they do.  I’ve heard this passage used to justify an increase in the minimum wage and I’ve heard this passage used to justify the inclusion of the Gentiles in the early church and I’ve heard this passage used as a critique of legalism and envy and hard-heartedness and competitiveness and so on.

The problem I have with all of these various interpretations is that they all tend to focus on us, the labourers in the context of this parable.  In most of the Bibles and commentaries that I’ve seen, if there is a sub-title given to this bit of scripture it’s usually “The Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard”.  But I’m not sure that’s a very good title.  Because it’s not about labourers, really.  It’s about the Landowner.

Jesus says so himself.  “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.”  Sometimes we get so focused on the grumbling amongst the labourers that we barely even notice the landowner.  But with Jesus’ opening words, we’re getting a hint that this is no ordinary landowner.  Why is the landowner hiring labourers?  That’s not his job.  Most landowners rarely even visited their vineyards, they were absentee owners who lived in the big city. It was the job of the vineyard manager to hire the workers, not the landowner.  Did this landowner have no manager?  No, there’s a manager alright, he shows up later on in the story.  It just seems like this landowner really likes to hire labourers for the vineyard.  So he goes himself to the market-place at 6am, the crack of dawn and hires some labourers.  Then he goes back at 9am, and again at noon, and then 3pm and once more, if you can believe it at 5pm, just an hour before the work day is done.  And each time the landowner goes to the market-place, he hires every unemployed labourer he can find to come and work in his vineyard.  It seems that this landowner really wants to have as many labourers as he can in his vineyard.  In fact you might say that it’s something of an obsession.  Going back and forth to the market-place to search for labourers and bring them into the vineyard is pretty much the only thing the landowner does all day long.

I’ll bet that if you were the manager of the vineyard, you’d find it to be pretty frustrating to be working for this landowner.  Imagine the conversation between the landowner and the manager as the new day dawns.

Manager:  OK we need 5 labourers for the vineyard today, I’ll go to the market-place and hire them.

Landowner:  No you stay here, I’ll go and do the hiring.

Manager:  But the last time you did that you came back with twice as many workers as we needed!

But the manager’s words fall on deaf ears.  The landowner is already out the door and heading to the market place.  An hour later he’s back with ten workers.

Manager:  But I told you we only needed five workers.

Landowner:  Don’t you worry about that, you just put them to work.  I’m heading to the market-place again to see if I can find any more.

By the end of the day there are fifty labourers working in the vineyard.  The manager, looking a bit frazzled, turns to the landowner:  “It’s time to pay all these workers – should I pay them by the hour?”

But the landowner replies, “No, pay each one the usual daily wage – they all have to go home and feed their families.”

Because you see, in those days the usual daily wage was just enough to feed a family for one day.  Those who didn’t get work didn’t get to eat.

You get the picture.  What we have here is a landowner who is a little crazy by normal standards.  He’s certainly not a good businessman working to maximize profit.  He is rather obsessed with bringing as many labourers as possible to work in his vineyard, and he really wants all of them to have what they need to feed their families.

Now, the people listening to Jesus tell the story, and those of us who are familiar with our Bibles, would certainly notice some resonances here. 

In the Bible, the vineyard wasn’t just any old farm.  The vineyard is the image the prophets had been using for thousands of years for the people of God.  Bringing someone into the vineyard meant that they were being welcomed, chosen and included as one of God’s people.  And the landowner’s insistence on paying a full daily wage so that people can feed themselves can surely be seen as a response to the request that we make each week in the words of the Lord’s Prayer when we pray “give us this day our daily bread.” 

And the Landowner’s obsession with repeatedly going to the market to seek out those who are unemployed and bring them into the vineyard reminds me of the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to go and search for one who is lost, or of the Father who welcomes home the prodigal son, or of Jesus himself who eats and drinks with outcasts and sinners.

And just as in the case of the Pharisees who see Jesus eating with outcasts and sinners, and the elder son who hears the sounds of the party being thrown for his younger brother, there is grumbling.

Because the God who is revealed by the landowner in this parable is a generous God, a God who’s generosity will not be limited by our standards of fairness.  And when that generosity comes into conflict with our natural human tendency to think that we should get what we deserve, we grumble.

“These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”

I understand why the 6am’ers grumble when the 5pm’ers get paid the same as they do.  I’ve grumbled like that.  I suspect we all have.  And I think the generous landowner understands too.  Because not only is the landowner generous with the 5pm’ers in the way that he pays them; he’s also generous with the 6am’ers in the way he responds to their grumbling.

“Friends, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?  Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.  Am I not allowed to do what I want with what belongs to me.  

And then finally the landowner asks, “Are you envious because I am generous?”

It’s a good question.  I like it even better when it’s translated literally:  “Is your eye evil because I am good?”

How do you see things?  When something good happens, do we see evil?

When others, the late-comers, the less qualified, the outsiders, are made equal to us, do we see that as a good thing or a bad thing?

When the 5pm’ers, to their great surprise, are given a full day’s wage so that they can feed their families, do you share their joy, or do you get offended?

Is doing the work that God calls us to do, laboring in God’s vineyard, is that something we see as a joy or a burden?

“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.”

This is the parable of the generous landowner.

God is generous.  God’s generosity will not be constrained by any of our standards of fairness.  So deal with it!  Learn to see with a generous eye.  And may you too be generous with others as your Father in heaven is generous with you.

Amen.

Forgiveness (Sept 14 2014)

Homily.  Yr A P23, Sept 14 2014, St. Alban

Readings:  Exodus 14.19-31; Ps 114; Romans 14.1-12; Mt 18.21-35

Forgiveness

Sometimes it’s the stories that are easiest to understand that are the most difficult.  In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us a story about forgiveness.  There was a slave who owed his king an enormous sum, ten thousand talents, billions of dollars in today’s terms.  When the king demanded payment, of course the slave could not pay, and so he was ordered to be sold along with all his family, as provided for by the law.  The condemned man fell on his knees and pleaded for mercy, and out of pity, the king released him and forgave him the debt.

But then, the released man goes to a fellow slave who owes him a much smaller sum, about three month’s wages.  When the second man is unable to pay, the first ignores his pleas for patience and instead throws the debtor into prison.  When the king finds out about this he is angry.  “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave as I had mercy on you?”

The point of the story, I think, is clear.  Just as each one of us has been forgiven by God, we are to forgive our brothers and sisters.

Now that shouldn’t come as a big surprise.  Each week we recite the Lord’s Prayer together, and we pray, ‘forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us’.  Jesus, in this parable, is simply repeating and reinforcing that principle, albeit in dramatic fashion.

Forgiveness.  Simple in theory.  So very difficult in practice.

Why do we find forgiveness difficult?  It’s worth thinking about that for a moment.  Consider a time when you found it difficult to forgive another person.  Or, if nothing comes to mind, think about occasions when you find it difficult to forgive yourself.  Enter into those places for a moment.

Why do we find forgiveness difficult?

1.    Forgiveness is difficult because it means letting go.

When we forgive, we have to let go of something.   Something that we might want.   I am reminded of a story I heard about how to catch a monkey in some parts of south-east Asia.  To catch a monkey, you take a coconut, hollow it out, nail it to a tree and put a banana inside.  The trick is to make the hole in the coconut just big enough so that the monkey can put his hand inside to grab the banana, but small enough so that when the monkey clasps his hand around the banana, he can’t get his hand out of the coconut.  And with that the monkey is trapped.  In order to escape, all the monkey has to do is let go of the banana, but he can’t.  He wants the banana too much.  He’s trapped.

Forgiveness may mean letting go of knowing that I was right and you were wrong.  It may mean letting go of the hope that the past can be changed.  It may mean letting go of our instinct for justice.  It may mean letting go of a power that we have over another person.  And letting go of things that we want or find valuable is hard.

2.    Forgiveness is difficult because there is a natural human tendency to think that people should get what they deserve.

Call it Karma.  A merit-based society.  The economy of exchange.  Quid pro quo.  Whatever you call it, there is a natural human tendency to think that people should get what they deserve.

A few years ago, I read a story in the newspaper about a pastor in Wisconsin who received a phone call one day from the local prison.  There was a young convict there who wanted to be baptized.  The minister went to the prison and he met the young man.  The young man’s name was Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer who had confessed to brutally murdering 17 young men and boys in 1991.  His depraved actions made headlines around the globe and caused the world recoil in disgust. 

Dahmer turned to God and to this pastor seeking redemption and forgiveness.   Was he sincere?  Who knows?  A few weeks later, the pastor baptized Jeffrey Dahmer and welcomed him into the family of God.  Every Wednesday the two would meet and pray, sharing their faith.  Six months later, Dahmer himself was brutally murdered in prison.

But that’s not the end of the story.  In the years that followed, many people shunned the pastor who baptized the serial killer.  They grumbled that others had been more deserving of the minister’s time and pastoral care.  They were angry with him.  They wanted no part of a heaven that included Jeffrey Dahmer.

There is a natural human tendency to think that we should get what we deserve.  That makes forgiveness hard.  But Jesus shows us that God is not like that.

Now, I need to add something here.  Forgiveness does not mean that a Jeffrey Dahmer should be released from prison, or that an abuser should be allowed into a position where someone’s safety is compromised.  We have laws both in our society and in our faith tradition which regulate behavior and which hold us accountable to certain values and ethical standards.  This is good because laws create room for relationships.  But for relationships to flourish, we also need forgiveness.  Forgiveness is all about maintaining and nurturing relationships.  It is inherently relational. 

3.    Forgiveness may be difficult because we have been wounded.

Sometimes people do things that wound us deeply.  There are times when forgiveness is difficult because of the need to protect ourselves, to avoid re-opening wounds that have not yet healed.  Forgiveness can make us vulnerable.  Often that is a good thing.  But not always.  There are times when we are not yet ready to forgive.  I think that it’s instructive that Jesus embeds his principle teaching on forgiveness not in a commandment but in a prayer.  Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.  We may not be ready to forgive today.  But we can this day pray that God will heal our wounds and move us to a place where forgiveness becomes possible and the hold that the past has upon us can be released.

4.   Forgiveness is difficult because we come at it with a legal or accounting mindset.

We often think of forgiveness in legal or accounting terms.  We think in terms of a legal structure of right actions, wrong actions, judgment and punishment, and then we add in forgiveness as a kind of escape clause, a one-off suspension of the normal legal consequences.  If we think in these terms, it is only natural to ask the question that Peter did, how many times must I forgive?

Peter was probably familiar with the rabbinic teaching of the time that went something like this:  If your brother wrongs you and you forgive him, you are generous.  If your brother wrongs you a second time and you forgive him, you are exemplary.  If your brother then wrongs you a third time and you forgive him, then you are a fool!

Now Peter, knowing that Jesus was big on forgiveness, tries to impress him by increasing the number.  “How about seven times?  Should I forgive as many as seven times?”

But Jesus’ reply is that if you’re counting, you don’t really understand forgiveness.  Because forgiveness is not a transaction that can be counted.  It is rather, a way of being in relationship.  When we forgive each other, life becomes relational, not transactional.  And to enter into the sort of relationship that Jesus is calling for means that we have to let go of certain things.  We don’t get to hold grudges.  We don’t seek revenge.  We don’t get to feel superior to others.  We don’t allow ourselves the satisfaction of thinking that the other person is wrong.  We let go of all that.  Instead we forgive.  And we love.  And we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, the sort of fools that the rabbis were talking about.

That’s what Jesus did.  That’s what God is like.  No one said that being in that sort of relationship is easy.  But we have been called to love others the way that God has loved us.  And only forgiveness makes that possible.

Amen.

Power, Promise and Presence (Sept 7 2014, St. Albans)

Homily:  Yr A P23, Sept 7 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Exodus 12.1-14; Ps 149; Rom 13.8-14; Mt 18.15-20

The Power and Promise of Presence

I really wish it was true.  I really wish that you and I could come together, and share our deepest concerns, and agree on something, anything, to ask, and that it would be done for us by our Father in heaven.  I’m thinking of the big asks.  I’m thinking about my friend who’s being treated for cancer.  I’m thinking about the conflicts and suffering in so many places that I’ve read about in the news lately.  I’m thinking about the things that we as a community often pray together.   I believe that there is power in gathering, and power in coming to agreement.  I believe that there is power in asking, and that there is power in prayer.  I’ve seen and experienced that power at work, in my own life and in the lives of others.  There are times when I experience prayers as answered – but there are also times when I don’t.  I really wish it was true that if two people agree on earth about anything they ask, it would be done for them by my Father in heaven.  But that’s not my experience.

And in that I’m sure I’m not alone.  The gospel we read today will be proclaimed by a billion Christians around the world.  I wonder how it will be heard.  I wonder how it will be heard in northern Iraq, where it will be read in the mountains and in the refugee camps of Christians who have been forced to flee their villages.  I wonder how it will be heard in Liberia this morning, by those who sit in quarantine suffering from ebola.  Surely in those places voices have been raised in union this very day asking, pleading with God for healing and for peace, or perhaps simply pleading for enough food and water to survive another night.  I pray that it will be done for them.  Perhaps it will.

These last months have been brutal.  The on-going civil war in Syria with hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced from their homes and villages.  The ebola outbreak in West Africa.  The war in Gaza, race riots in Ferguson, the beheadings of two journalists by ISIS, the genocides going on in northern Iraq, the conflict in Ukraine with Russia, not to mention our own personal tragedies, things that never make the headlines but affect us just as deeply.  It’s been brutal.  What is going on in the world?  It is a question many of us are asking.  I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me during the past month to tell me how angry they are or how saddened they are or how perplexed they are by what’s going on.  We respond with rage, we respond with depression.  And sometimes we wonder, where is God in the midst of all this?

I understand, at least a little, why God can’t just do any and everything we ask.  Bishop John’s article this month in Crosstalk is entitled “Where do you put your rage?”  When we see a video of a brutal beheading, when we read news reports of children bombed on a beach, we are rightly angry, and just imagine what we might ask for in our rage.  We may well respond with words like today’s psalm in which the psalmist cries “let a two-edged sword be in their hand, to wreak vengeance on the nations and punishment on the people.”  Or perhaps we might choose the words of a modern psalmist like Bruce Cockburn:  “If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would pay.”

And yet, in our rage and in our sadness and in our confusion, in the midst of emotions that so often can isolate us, Jesus calls us to gather together, and to pray.  Justin, the Archbishop of Canterbury, put it this way recently:  “You can’t look at the pictures coming from Gaza and Israel without your heart breaking.  We must cry to God and beat down the doors of heaven and pray for peace and justice and security.” 

When we do, Jesus promises us that our Father in heaven is listening and will respond.

When will God act? How will God respond?  I don’t know, but I do believe it will be in more ways than we can ask or imagine. 

Sometimes we’ll be called to be part of that response. I have a friend, who found herself moved by the suffering in parts of central Africa, suffering caused by war and conflict, suffering caused by disease and inadequate medical resources.  She and many others prayed that those who were suffering there might find healing and peace.  Not long afterwards, a flyer from Medicins Sans Frontiers showed up in her mailbox.  Within months, she found herself on a flight to the Central African Republic to work as a nurse practitioner in the MSF clinic there, treating those who were sick and those who had been wounded as a result of the conflict.

But it doesn’t always work like that.  Sometimes, many times, we can’t see anything happening in response to our prayers.

Two weeks ago I was in Pembroke for a preaching workshop with some other priests of our Diocese.  While we were there, one of my colleagues received an urgent phone call.  She jumped in her car and rushed to the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital.  One of her parishioners was in the ICU, and he and his family had just made the difficult decision to end the blood transfusions which had been keeping him alive but were no longer working.  When my colleague arrived at his side, there was nothing that could be done.  There was nothing she could do.  There wasn’t much to be said.  And so for the time that she was there, she simply sat by his bedside, holding his hand.

Sometimes I think that we focus so much on what needs to be done that we miss the most important part of the promise that Jesus makes in today’s gospel:

For where two or three are gathered in my name I am there among them.

It is the promise of presence.  The promise of a God who chose to come into this world to be present as a human being, Emmanuel, God with us.  The promise of a God who raised Jesus from the dead so that he might be with us always, to the end of time.  There is power in presence, a power that too often we miss or dismiss in our habitual rushing around to get things done.

Whenever, wherever people gather in Jesus name, he is in their midst, comforting, encouraging, holding our hands.  Today once again, as he promised, Jesus is in the midst of God’s people:  on the mountains of northern Iraq, in the ebola wards of Liberia, in the home of my friend with cancer, here with us in our worship this morning.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.  That’s the promise that I’m willing to hang my hat on.  That’s the promise I’m willing to stake my life on. 

Amen.