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.