"It's not fair" (Sept 18, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 25, Sept 18 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Exodus 16:2-15; Ps 105:1-6, 37-45; Phil 1:21-30; Mt 20:1-16

“It’s not fair”

Humans, it seems, are born with an innate sense of fairness.  It never ceases to astonish me how quick children are to have a sense of what’s fair and what’s not.  In fact, after children have learned to say their first words, mama and dada and so on, sometimes it seems like the first sentence that comes out of their mouths is “it’s not fair.”  Especially if they have brothers or sisters. 

I have a younger brother.  And when we were kids, because he was younger, he had certain privileges.  I imagine I had privileges too, but I’ve forgotten what my privileges were.  But I sure remember his privileges.  Like if there were two pieces of cake, he used to get to pick first.  That’s not fair is it?  I knew it wasn’t fair, and so I came up with my own strategy.  If he was going to get to pick first, then I was going to do the dividing.  And believe me, I developed as a young child the rare talent of being able to take the most irregular piece of cake you could find, and cut it into two pieces so evenly that it was impossible to detect a difference in size with the naked eye.  Because that was the only way to make things fair.

And like so many things in our human nature, our innate sense of fairness can develop into something good, or it can develop into something which is not so good as we get older.  If, as we grow and mature, our sense of fairness can be directed towards the well-being of others, it becomes the foundation of justice, and striving after justice in our world is a very good thing.

However.  If our primary concern about fairness remains at the level of what I judge to be fair for me, if our drive for fairness remains captive to ego and self-concern, if we continue to be outraged if someone else’s piece of cake, or house, or salary or whatever is bigger than mine, then we have a problem. 

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

  

The first concern of the day labourers in Jesus parable is to get hired for the day.  If you were hired you could return home that night and feed your family.  If you weren’t hired, you couldn’t.  Being a labourer in Jesus day was tough.  It meant that you didn’t have land of your own to work.  There were more workers than there was work.  Some days you wouldn’t get hired.  So you can imagine the sense of relief and even of joy that those first labourers experienced when they went to the usual place in the market and were hired early in the morning by the land owner.

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

 It turns out this landowner is a bit unusual.  Because he returns to the marketplace later in the day, and hires more workers, and he does it again, and finally, at five o’clock in the afternoon, with just one more hour left in the work day, he returns to the market one last time. Still waiting there is one last group of dejected, anxious, unemployed workers.  They’ve been waiting all day in the marketplace, hoping for work, even though they must have known by late afternoon that it was now too late.  But on this day it’s not too late.  The landowner hires them, every single last one of them, to work in his vineyard.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who returns at 5 o’clock to hire labourers for his vineyard.”

At the end of the day, surely to their astonishment, those who were hired at 5 pm are paid a full day’s wage by the landowner.

And those who have worked a full day, and have yet to be paid, well, they’re watching pretty closely.  They start to do their calculations.  They should get paid more, after all, they’ve worked twelve times more hours than the latecomers.

The landowner calls them forward at last and he pays them the same wage, the usual daily wage.  And what do they do?  They grumble.  They complain.  They cry out “it’s not fair!”

And those of us who listen to the story, we get it, don’t we?  We can all put ourselves in the place of those labourers, we’ve all been in similar situations.  All of us at various times in our lives have cried out “it’s not fair”.

When I graduated from Engineering in 1984, it was the tail end of the recession.  There were 31 people in my graduating class, 29 men and 2 women.  The unemployment rate in Canada was over 12%, the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  It was tough to get a job.  In fact of the 31 people in my class, only two graduates landed a job.  The two women.  “It’s not fair” cried out all the men.

And yet, wasn’t it great that Karen and Jennifer had found good jobs upon graduation?  And wasn’t it true that we were, all of us, a privileged bunch?  We had just received a wonderful education.  Many of us ended up going to grad school, and went on to interesting, well-paying jobs.  We had many, many things for which to be grateful.  And yet sometimes, instead of focusing on the good stuff and giving thanks to God for all the gifts that we’ve been given, our preoccupation with what’s fair for us can lead us to focus on what we don’t have, and we grumble, and we complain, and we are envious and we are resentful.

I want you to try something this morning.  I want each of you to take two of these small cards, and to get yourself a pencil.  If you don’t have the cards or pencils, you can get one from the people coming around.

Now I want you to do the following.

On one card, write “Gratitude” at the top.  On that card, I want you to write down some things that you are grateful for today, things in your life, or in the life of someone else.  Go ahead.

(pause)

Now on the other card, write “Resentment” on the top.  On this second card, I want you to write down things that you are resentful about, or that make you envious, or cause you to grumble.  Something that makes you want to say “it’s not fair”.  Don’t worry, nobody else is going to read this, it’s just for you, so be honest.  This one might be a bit harder for some of us, because sometimes we don’t like to admit our resentments to ourselves.

(give some time)

Ok, so now we each have two cards, a gratitude card and a resentment card.  Most of the time we carry both of these around with us.  If you take one in each hand, you’ll find that they weigh about the same, don’t they?  But that’s only their physical weight.  Because emotionally, socially, relationally, spiritually, their weight is completely different.

This one, resentment, is like having an anchor around your neck.  Like having your feet cast in concrete or a ball and chain around your ankle.  It will bring you down.  It will eat away at you.  It will make you blind.  It will screw up your sense of judgement.  If you suppress it, it will become depression.  If you indulge it, it will become anger.  That’s resentment.

This one, gratitude, on the other hand, is the very opposite.  It will lift you up.  It will give you wings.  You don’t have to take my word for it.  Major research studies over the past five years have shown that gratitude practiced daily can do the following:  it will enable you to sleep better and have more energy in just three weeks.  It can reduce your risk of depression, anxiety disorders and eating disorders.  It will help you better manage stress, boost your immune system and increase your overall health.  And, it will increase your usual level of happiness by 25% and increase your overall vitality and life-satisfaction!  That’s gratitude.

You have a choice to make.  You have a way of life to practice.  When you look at your life, do you count your blessings or your misfortunes?  Do we pay attention to the areas of plenty in our lives, or to those things that we lack?  You have two cards in your hands.  Don’t carry both of these cards around with you.  Someone will be coming back around with a garbage basket, and I want you to make a choice.  You have two cards in your hand, Gratitude and Resentment.  Choose to keep one of your cards, and let go of the other.

The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.  In Jesus’ parable, the landowner acts with a generosity that transcends, even offends, human standards of fairness.  May we respond not with resentment but with gratitude and thanksgiving.

Amen.

Forgiveness (Sept 11, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 23, Sept 11 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Gen 50:15-21; Psalm 103:8-13; Rom 14:1-12; Mt 18:21-35

Forgiveness

I am remember once, back when I was in Sunday School, the Sunday School teacher, who happened to be my father, was going through the Lord’s Prayer with us.  When we got to the part which says “and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,” he paused, and asked to us, is that really what you want to pray for?  How good are you at forgiving others when they do something wrong to you?

We all had to admit that we weren’t really very good at forgiving others.  Forgiveness is hard.  So do we really want God to forgive us in the same way that we forgive others?  We decided that no, we wanted God to be much more forgiving towards us then we were towards others.  And so we decided that something must have been lost in the translation, that the Lord’s Prayer should really say “Forgive us our sins as we should forgive those who sin against us”. And later on during the service, when we were back in church, when it came time for the Lord’s Prayer, you could hear all the twelve year olds in the church insert the word “should”.

Many years later, after I’d been subjected to the rigours of studying Greek in my theology program, I went back to look and see if anything actually had been lost in translation.  And as you might expect, I discovered that the Bible translators did have it right – there is no “should” in the original Greek.  And to reinforce the point, to make sure that we don’t try to wiggle out of what he is trying to teach us about forgiveness, Jesus tells us the hard, challenging parable of the unforgiving slave that we heard in today’s gospel reading.

Forgiveness is hard.  Forgiveness is complicated.  In today’s Old Testament reading from Genesis we get the last episode in the story of Joseph and his brothers.  You might recall that Joseph’s brothers had beaten Joseph and thrown him into a pit, and then sold him into slavery.  Joseph was taken as a slave into Egypt, but eventually ended up as the Pharoah’s governor.  Many years later, because of a famine, the brothers come to Egypt looking for food, and they encounter Joseph, though they don’t recognize him.  Now, Joseph doesn’t forgive them right away.  He torments them for a little while.  He plants valuables in their bags and has them arrested for theft.  And so when Joseph finally does reveal himself to his brothers, they are terrified.  They are afraid that Joseph will seek revenge for the evil they had done to him.  But Joseph forgives them, and provides for them and their families.

You might think that would be the end of the story.  But forgiveness is complicated.  In today’s reading, we have the brothers coming back to ask Joseph for forgiveness again.  So what gives here?  Haven’t we already been through this? It seems that the first time around, even though they were forgiven by Joseph, they did not experience forgiveness.  Their guilt was still with them, their fears were still there.  Rather than the experience of forgiveness, their initial experience seems to have been more like a stay of execution, or a deal with strings attached, or a favour to their father who is now dead.  Sometimes, even when we are forgiven by another, or by God, we don’t believe it, we don’t experience it, and we find ourselves hanging on to the sin that our brother, or our spouse, or God has let go of.

What is forgiveness?  The Hebrew word used for forgiveness has the sense of “to lift up”.  To remove someone’s burden. Think of two hikers going on a long hiking trip together, call them Bill and John, each of them carrying 40 kilogram packs on their backs.  That’s a lot of weight.  It’s been a long day, a tough slog.  And at the end of the day, when Bill and John finally reach their camping spot, they stop, and Bill walks behind John and lifts that heavy pack off his back and sets it down.  Imagine how good that must feel.  If you’ve ever been on a long hiking trip, you know how good that would feel.  Well that’s what forgiveness feels like.  The lifting up of a heavy burden that weighs us down.  John at the end of the day hiking certainly knows how good that feels.

Then Bill, who’s still wearing his pack, turns to John and says, “Can you give me a hand getting my pack off?”  What do you think John will do?  Well of course he’s going to lift that pack right off of Bill’s back, won’t he?

Now let’s think about that a bit.  Why does he do it?  Why does he help Bill with his pack?  Is it a transactional thing, he helps Bill because Bill helped him?  No, I don’t think that’s it.  Is it an ethical thing, he helps Bill because he wants to be an ethical person and he owes Bill a duty of care?  No, if you were to ask him I don’t think he would say that either.

I think if you were to ask John why he lifted that burden off Bill’s back, he would say that it’s because he knows how good it is to be relieved of a heavy burden.  Once you know that, once you’ve experienced it, you just get it, it’s what you do, you just live that way.

I think that forgiveness is a bit like that.  Jesus’ teaching around forgiveness is not meant to be understood primarily as an ethical demand, something that you should do.  Jesus teaching on forgiveness is not meant to be understood as a transactional model, an “if this then that” equation.  I believe that Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness is an invitation to us to enter into a new way of living, a way of living marked not by calculation but by loving.  A way of living, a way of being, that Jesus calls the kingdom of God.

The slave in Jesus parable is offered the opportunity to be born into this new way of living when his debt is forgiven by the king.  But he misses the opportunity.  Even after his debt is gone, he’s still captive to a way of living in which debts are owed to one another, in which we keep score, in which we have to earn our way.  Forgiveness is different.  Forgiveness is not transactional, it is an interconnected experience of healing and relief from burdens.  It is a different way of living.  It is the way of living that Paul referred to in one of our readings a few weeks ago in Romans, when he said that the only debt we owe each other is to love one another.  All other debts are forgiven.  The slave in Jesus parable, even though the king has forgiven his debts, has not experienced forgiveness.  His failure to extend to others the mercy that he has received from God shows that he is trapped, doomed to a life of relentless calculations and emotional scarcity.

Jesus is inviting us into a better way of living than that.  The way of the kingdom of God.  If you want to understand why the seventh line of the Lord’s prayer says “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”, go back and look at the third line:  “Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven.”

Jesus is inviting us into the life of the kingdom.  And the entry point into that life is forgiveness, it’s understanding, and feeling and experiencing and rejoicing in the mercy and compassion that God has extended to us.  God wants us to know that despite our brokenness and sinfulness, despite anything we have done or not done, we are forgiven and we have been reconciled with God.  He wants us to know that so badly that he sent his only Son to die for us on the cross, bearing the weight of all that sin and brokenness.  That weight has been lifted off our shoulders and we have been healed. 

When you think of God, if someone was to ask you what God was like, how would you respond?

Would it surprise you to learn that some surveys report that one of the most common images people have for God is that of a border-crossing guard?  Sounds kind of transactional and rule-based, doesn’t it?

What’s your image?

Would you, like today’s psalmist, be able to say from your own experience that God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.  That as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us?

Know that you have been forgiven, and be born into the new life of the Kingdom of God, a life in which lifting burdens from others is what we do.

Amen.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name (September 4, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 23, Sept 4 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 12:1-14, Ps 149, Rom 13:8-14, Mt 18:15-20

I have to tell you that there are a few things that really bug me in today’s readings.  And yet, as this past week progressed, as I wrestled my way through the stuff that bugs me, I also realized that there’s a lot of great stuff too.  Often that’s my experience when I go through the Bible readings that are appointed for any particular week.  The bits that I have problems with jump right out at me, and it’s only after I’ve come to some sort of peace with these that I see the richness of what lies underneath.

Often, by the time we reach Sunday, those of us who preach on a Sunday morning will just skip right over the problem bits and go straight to the good stuff.  But sometimes, maybe it’s good to open the kimono a bit and talk about the problems.  Are you okay if I do that this morning?

Let’s take the Exodus reading.  It reminds me of the time I was invited as a guest to a Sunday School class of 12 year olds, and the teacher told the kids they could ask me any question they wanted about the Bible.

First question:  “Why would God give us the ten commandments and then proceed to break every single one of them?”

My response:  “what do you mean Johnny?”

“Well we’re told not to murder, but God went and murdered all the first-born Egyptians”

It’s a problem isn’t it.  It was problem for Johnny and it’s a problem for us.  I have a hard time believing that the God who was revealed in Jesus Christ would do such a thing.  But our text today says that’s what God did.

Marcus Borg has just written a new book called ‘Speaking Christian’ in which he makes the point that it is important to be able to say that in some places the authors of the biblical text may have got it wrong.  It may be that the ancient Israelites, who were much more familiar with “an eye for an eye” than “love your enemies”, got it wrong when they interpreted whatever happened back in Egypt as God striking down the Egyptian first-born.

People like me and Johnny need to have the space to wrestle with these difficult bits in order to get to the beauty and richness of the text.  Because once I’ve got past the problem I have with God striking down the first born, then I can open up to so much more of what this text has to say:  that God heard the cries of an oppressed people, and acted in history to rescue them and brought them out of slavery in Egypt.  And that God gave them a founding story, the Exodus, and a ritual event, the Passover, which would shape and mold this people into a community, perhaps the most cohesive and enduring community in the entire history of human civilization.

If there is a common theme in today’s readings, it is the theme of community.  It’s certainly present in Paul’s letter to the Romans.  In today’s reading, Paul exhorts the Christians in Rome to love one another, for love is the fulfilling of the law.  Communities may have rules and practices and even constitutions, but what makes a community really tick is love for one another.

And then there’s today’s gospel from Matthew, with its explicit instructions for how to deal with sin in the community.  And again, my first reaction is that this text bugs me.  Maybe it bugs me because sometimes in the church we seem only too eager to point out the faults in others.  Maybe it bugs me because the injunction to treat offenders as Gentiles and tax collectors has too often been misused to exclude people from our church communities and to make them feel unwanted.

But the main thing that bugs me about today’s gospel is that the short selection which we read has been taken out of context.  Let me put back some of that context for you. 

Immediately preceding today’s gospel, in verses 12-14, Jesus teaches about the shepherd who has a hundred sheep, and how if one of them goes astray, he will leave the 99 and go in search of the one who went astray, and rejoice over it when it is found.  The conclusion is that our Father in heaven does not want anyone to be lost or separated.

And immediately following today’s gospel, in verses 21-22, Peter asks Jesus just how many times he has to forgive his brother or sister.  Is seven times enough?  No, Jesus responds, but seven times seventy.

And finally, when Matthew writes that the one who refuses to listen to the church is to be treated as a Gentile or a tax-collector, we need to be reminded that Matthew himself is a tax-collector.  How was he treated?  Jesus is the one who went to Matthew’s home, Jesus is the one who reached out to Gentiles and tax-collectors, who entered their houses, who ate with them, who treated them with hospitality and compassion.

So when we put today’s gospel back in context, when we pull it all together, what do we get?

We get that community is tremendously important.   That Jesus cares about community.  That Matthew, the one who has gone from being an outcast to a member of the community of disciples has been moved by his experience.  That authentic, loving community is something that we all long for, something that indeed is a taste of the divine in our midst.

But, communities are made up of people, and people will have conflicts, will disagree, will hurt one another, will ignore one another, people will be, well, people.  So what do we do about this?  Communities don’t just happen by accident, and it takes work to develop and preserve them.  Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, is telling us that community is so important that when something goes wrong, we need to do something about it.  Deal with it.  Talk to each other.  Be honest and loving and compassionate and forgiving.  And when two or three are gathered, whether it is to pray or whether it’s to air your disagreements, know that Jesus is present.

There is a longing for authentic community in our world.

[Play Cheers theme song]

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got. 
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot. 

Wouldn't you like to get away? 

Sometimes you want to go 

Where everybody knows your name, 
and they're always glad you came. 
You wanna be where you can see, 
our troubles are all the same 
You wanna be where everybody knows 
Your name. 

You wanna go where people know, 
people are all the same, 
You wanna go where everybody knows 
your name. 

What sort of community do we want to be?

There are communities that are “affinity-groups”, communities where risk of conflict is minimized because the members are somewhat alike and the community is focused around a common interest.

There are communities that are social groups, that strive to be pleasant to one another and suppress and avoid conflicts because these might strain the social fabric of the community.

There are communities where “everybody knows your name”, where we know each other and are known by each other, where anyone is welcome, where there is a commitment to each other’s lives, where we love one another, where there is intimacy, where conflicts and disagreements arise and are engaged in creatively, communities which care about the one person who hasn’t been around for a while.

Here at St. Albans, we are a new community, a new congregation that is still in the process of forming.  There are many ways of being community.  Authentic community is hard to come by, it takes work, but it’s worth it.

Let’s talk about it:

What have been your experiences of community? 

And perhaps most importantly, what kind of community do we want to be?

Amen.