Bridesmaids (Matthew 25)

    In today’s Gospel, the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids (which used to be called the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins), we have another story whose theme is wakefulness, preparedness. It follows the Parable of the Faithful or the Unfaithful Slave, and is followed by the Parable of the Talents, and the Last Judgment. The parables are meant as preparations for the story of the Last Judgment; one way or another, we are being reminded of the choices before us, and their possible consequences.

     “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” says Jesus, and he then unfolds his tale. In this case, the kingdom is a place of possibility, where choices are before the actors in the story. The kingdom in this story is not so much a destination, a final condition, as it is a condition in the process of being created, by the choices of the bridesmaids. The wise bridesmaids create an opportunity for the Lord, the kingdom, to appear, by their readiness, their preparedness. The foolish bridesmaids in effect get in the bridegroom’s way, by their lack of attention, lack of readiness. The bridegroom, the Lord, can’t appear where he can’t be seen. The kingdom, in this story at least, is less about the Lord’s initiative, and more about the initiative, the readiness, of the wise bridesmaids. They are at least precursors of the kingdom; their presence is necessary to make it actual. The bridegroom is waiting for their welcome; he is not going to force his way into their presence.

    “When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.” The natural, obvious meaning of this story is easy to follow. Through long hours of darkness, lamps must be filled, an oil supply must be ready to hand, wicks must be trimmed, and at least one lamp must be kept burning, or embers of a fire, so that lamps can be lit when needed. This is a picture of the world before electric light, not that long ago. Nighttime darkness was total, relieved only by the moon and stars, and by lamps, candles, and fires, where possible. Our experience of darkness is softened by the instant availability of electric light, at the flip of a switch. We don’t usually experience a stark contrast between day and night, light and dark, as likely the ancients did.

    What is it about the lamps in this story? The wise bridesmaids won’t part with any of their oil. The foolish bridesmaids apparently make it to the wedding banquet with refilled lamps eventually, but the lamps seem not to be burning brightly enough to allow the bridegroom to recognize the foolish bridesmaids, and so they are left out. What is going on here?

    I don’t want to sound too fanciful here, but there is a symbolic way of thinking about this story that is perhaps interesting. It is not accidental that there are ten bridesmaids, five wise and five foolish. The five can be understood as the five senses, and the lamps can be understood as the state of readiness of the senses to the reality around them. The burning lamps are the lights of a mind fully awake, aware of spiritual reality and ready for its appearance at any time, even in the darkest times, called ‘midnight’ in the parable. The bridegroom, the Lord, can appear at any time; even the five foolish bridesmaids, a mind and senses unprepared and not fully awake, belatedly recognize reality and attempt to respond to it. I’m reluctant to believe that the bridegroom’s inability to recognize the foolish bridesmaids is total and permanent. A mind can grow, develop, reach the readiness necessary to choose to enter the kingdom. But the apparent rejection by the bridegroom is a reminder of the nature of our choices, that they have consequences, now and in eternity. May we keep awake therefore, for we know neither the day nor the hour, when the bridegroom will arrive. Amen. (11.XI.17 Adv.)

Great Commandment, David's Son (Matthew 22)

    Today’s Gospel continues the sequence of readings from Matthew’s Gospel that we’ve been following this year. Today’s reading comprises The Great Commandment and The Question about David’s Son. These two selections follow the questions about paying taxes and about the resurrection, which we’ve heard in the past few weeks, and precede Jesus’s denunciations of scribes and Pharisees, the same people who have been questioning him. This arrangement is not accidental.

    “One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.” It is said of lawyers in court, that they don’t ask questions to which they don’t already know the answers. That’s certainly true in this story. “Teacher, which commandment in  the law is the greatest?” Now, the lawyer knows the law, and Jesus knows that he knows it, but he answers anyway: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and so on. Jesus and the lawyer know that in the book Deuteronomy (which means Second Law, or Second Giving of the Law) in chapter 6, it says, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one! Therefore, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and so on. But Jesus doesn’t stop with the quote from Deuteronomy; he adds a quote from Leviticus. He says, “And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The source of this is in Leviticus, chapter 19, which lists dozens of rules of conduct, all of them concerned with regulating life in a tough subsistence economy. Jesus selects this one and puts it on the same level as the great commandment; indeed, he adds it to the great commandment. Apparently this passes the lawyer’s test, since he doesn’t ask Jesus any more questions. But it gives us an opportunity to think about questioning itself, and its role in the spiritual life. I said that the arrangement of this reading is not accidental; putting the question about David’s son right after the question about the great commandment is revealing.

    Jesus comes back to the Pharisees with a simple question, to which they know the answer, of course: “‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David.’” Simple question, simple answer. Why ask? Well, it gives Jesus the opportunity to present the Pharisees with a paradox. He quotes Psalm 110, taking for granted that David  is the author of the psalm, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand.” How can the Lord say this to the Lord? How can the Messiah be both son and Lord at the same time, both superior and inferior, mortal and eternal at once? No one in the gathering is able to answer, “nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

    This puzzling question reminds me of what our Zen Buddhist friends call a koan, a story in paradoxical form meant to lead anyone meditating on it to an awareness, an insight into reality beyond the limitations of logical contradictions and superficial meanings. Reality in itself is not contradictory or illogical, but is a unity that can be perceived directly. It is this perception that Jesus is pointing to, when he asks the Pharisees his questions about David and the Messiah. Jesus is leading the Pharisees, the lawyers, beyond their organized, logical, written law, their system of thought, to a perception of the unity of God and neighbor, Lord and son, David and Messiah, the unity that we, and Jesus, call Love. Jesus is not trying to frustrate the Pharisees, but to point them in the direction of the real meaning of the great commandment, the unity of God and neighbor. Jesus’s denunciations, which follow this chapter, are meant to waken the scribes and Pharisees to the reality which their own teaching points to.

    As Christians we meditate on, and we proclaim, the greatest paradoxical teaching of all, that Jesus is divine and human, God and man, the firstborn of all creation and at the same time a mortal like all of us, now  resurrected and living both in eternity and in us, his body in the world, the church. That is what his questions about David and the son and the Lord are about, the resolution of all contradictions in the Incarnation, in which we participate sacramentally, and to which our Lord is leading us, both now and in eternity. Amen. (28-29.X.17. Adv.)

     

   

Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22)

    In this parable of the wedding banquet, we have another tale that sounds like it’s been put together rather clumsily from two or maybe more sources not related to each other, which the Evangelist has combined to back up a point that perhaps was circulating around the Christian communities, without a story to support it. So the Evangelist assembled a tale which begins calmly enough, but which quickly turns into a tale of violence, retribution, and apparently arbitrary abuse. All of this is supposedly coming out of the mouth of Our Lord. We may rightly ask, What is going on here? What point is the Evangelist making, and how is it related to the content of the story? Why is this story in Scripture at all?

    It’s clear almost from the beginning, that the king in the story is disliked and disrespected. His kingly rank is not enough to attract or compel anyone at all to come to a wedding banquet for his son. Apparently the son isn’t respected any more than the father is. The king’s agents are unable to entice the invitees with a description of the delights that await them. Some of the invitees go so far as to kill the king’s agents. The king responds in kind. This is not an edifying tale.

    The king sends his agents into the streets, to gather guests, and they succeed in gathering enough to fill the hall, “both good and bad.” Apparently all of them but one are dressed appropriately for the event. The king tosses out the wrongly-dressed guest, rather unfairly it seems, not into the street where he presumably came from, but into the “outer darkness.”

    The king, and some of his original invitees at least, remind me of gangsters. Some of the invitees, as the story says, turn on the king’s agents and kill them. The king responds in kind. He then seeks to buttress his position by seeking support among ordinary people, much as someone like Al Capone would have done, back in the day. But even then, the king’s gangster-like character comes through, in his rough treatment of the ill-dressed guest. The king is reminding everyone who’s boss.

    What is this story doing in Scripture? In our world, we are accustomed to hearing about violence, but for the most part, it can seem remote from us, until we witness it or experience it. The story reminds us that violence is never far away, that even a wedding banquet can be a cause of violence. Not even good intentions, not even an opportunity for celebration, can keep it at bay all the time. The story is in Scripture to remind us that we need to be aware of the choices that are always before us. The original invitees could have gone to the banquet, could have included themselves among the chosen, could have realized that they were among the chosen, as indeed we all are, even before they heard the invitation. Some of the invitees choose the darkness, when they attack the king’s agents.  This stark choice, between light and dark, between celebration and, ultimately, murder, between life and death, runs through the story. The original guests are so attached to their idea of the king as a person not to be respected, that they can’t let go of this idea long enough to celebrate his son’s joyful occasion. In other words, their egos get in the way of their chance to grow spiritually in a celebration of life, and they cling instead to a love of the outer darkness.

    That is the meaning of the story of the ill-dressed guest, missing a proper wedding garment. We are all provided with such a wedding garment at baptism. We sometimes shed it, or we lose it, or we cover it with other garments not suitable to our calling. If we come to the banquet without it, we are in effect choosing to send ourselves into the outer darkness. This serious parable presents in stark terms the spiritual choices before us. The violence of the tale we may understand as the spiritual violence we can do to ourselves and each other, when we reject or ignore an invitation to join the wedding celebration, the marriage supper  of the Lamb. Let us all accept the invitation, and come attired in the garment that Our Lord has provided us in baptism. Amen. (15.X.17 Adv.not preached) (10.X.20 Adv. Latin)

    

Wicked Tenants (Matthew 21)

    When we reach the end of today’s story, the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, we hear the Evangelist tell us how to interpret it. “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.” The chief priests and Pharisees are attempting to steal the vineyard from its rightful owner. The vineyard is the Kingdom and the landowner is God. Jesus promises rough treatment of the wicked tenants. That’s the gist of the story, and it seems that there shouldn’t be much more to say about it, beyond the interpretation that the Evangelist has provided us. But let’s unpack the story, and hear what more it may reveal.

    “A landowner...planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress...and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants, and went [away].” The  physical details are interesting: a fenced vineyard, a winepress that’s a hole in the ground, a watchtower. The expectation is that the vineyard won’t be secure from vandals, thieves, and animals, without a fence and a tower. The landowner is preparing for danger from without, not within, not from his tenants. The assumption is that he can trust his tenants, that they will respect and protect the property just as he does.

    They are tenants and they have a lease. A lease, even a long-term one, is by definition temporary. But the tenants want to turn the arrangement into ownership, and they try to enforce this by killing the landowner’s agents and even his heir. They think that they can get away with this because the landowner is in another country. He will never return, they think. But he does. He treats them as harshly as they treated his agents and heir, and their lease becomes very temporary indeed. The narrative is rather tough here, advocating death to the tenants. This sounds very harsh to us, but it reminds us of the uncompromising, all or nothing character of Jesus’s teaching. And of course, the heir in the story is Christ, who suffered death at the hands of the authorities.

    The vineyard is the Kingdom, and the watchtower is the Temple, which is both the gateway to the Kingdom and its defense. The chief priests and the Pharisees are expected to produce a harvest, the fruits of the Kingdom. By their fruits we shall know them, and in this story they produce nothing but violence.

    Jesus is saying plainly that religious authorities are temporary placeholders only; they don’t own their tradition --- they are the caretakers of it, and they are expected to tend it, to cultivate it, to produce the fruits of the Kingdom: all the good things that we can think of. Love, peace, wisdom, care for the poor, the sick, and all the virtues and moral behaviors that we know, are the fruits of the Kingdom. Not to make this harvest the goal of all religion leads to spiritual death, and physical death as well. The harsh words about death are warnings of the reality of spiritual death and the consequences of forgetting what the tradition is for. The history of the Church is littered with struggles for ownership of the tradition, for actual ownership of property and money and power, by people past and present who confuse the Kingdom with their own control. But mostly they forget that they are tenants only, not owners, that the Church itself is only a leaseholder in the vineyard, expected to “give [the landowner] the produce at harvest time.” The plain statement that there are “other tenants” is a reminder of spiritual reality, that God the landowner is not limited to the Church in spreading the Kingdom, just as he was not limited to the religious authorities of Jesus’s time.

    I admit that I don’t quite know what to do with the very short story of the “stone that the builders rejected,” which the Evangelist has dropped into the narrative about the tenants. It’s meant to refer to the heir killed by the tenants, and to foreshadow the Crucifixion, but, beyond that, it seems to me that it is out of place in the parable. It would be better placed later in the Gospel, closer to the Passion. It’s function here, especially of the line “the one who falls on this stone will be broken,” is to reinforce the harsh language threatening the wicked tenants with death. And it reinforces the all-or-nothing character of Jesus’s teaching. It would be possible to work out a mystical interpretation of the stone and what it represents, but that would take us a long way from the main point of the parable.

    It is possible to understand the parable of the wicked tenants as an implied critique of the idea of ownership. In our society, we take the notion of property, ownership, and rights derived from them, for granted. We are almost unconscious of them, they are so deeply embedded in our culture. The fact that the vineyard has a fence and a watchtower does not surprise us, for we surround ourselves with fences and watchtowers, real and virtual. We can hardly imagine life without them. The parable tells us that there are alternative tenants, who also accept the idea of ownership, who will be happy to take over the lease, and expel the original tenants. That awareness underpins the threat of expulsion, which gives force to the parable. It applies to everyone. When Jesus says, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom,” he says that to everyone, not just the original tenants.

    God is the landowner, and all of us are tenants in God’s world. No one, in the end, really owns anything. We have tenancy for a while, and, to be sure, some tenants are rather more impressive, more powerful, richer than others, as we know, but they are still tenants. God expects us to produce “the fruits of the kingdom.” If we do not, bad things can happen, as we see and hear about every day. Perhaps that is one possible meaning of the “stone” that we can fall on, and be broken. If we don’t acknowledge who the landowner really is, and act like God’s world belongs to us, then disasters can follow: personal, social, economic, environmental, and more. Let us remember who the landowner is, and, like good tenants, work to produce the fruits of the Kingdom. Amen. (7-8.X.17 Adv.)

   

Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20) Sermon by Bishop Marc

Sermon for Proper 20, Year A
Marc Andrus
2017

“Are you envious because I am generous” – God is always present as a generous presence in our lives


There is no getting around it – below all the outcomes of history that have resulted in the way power and resources are pooled across the Earth today lies the fact that there are seven billion people living today. In the face of such a huge population we are tempted towards fear and an outlook of scarcity toward the needs of life: will we have enough?  The Gospel and the Hebrew Scripture given us by the Lectionary today remind us that God is a constant, loving presence in, not beyond our lives, acting generously in our needs, and that we always have the choice to respond to life with gratitude.

A personal note about my own gratitude when I once again have the opportunity to work with the sacred stories of the Bible: Time and again I find myself so impressed by the storytelling genius of Jesus as he lays one impactful parable after another before us. I have heard in the last few years two fine intellectuals, Matthew Fox and Rick Tarnas say that the sprawling, but highly integrated novel War and Peace was the book that awakened new areas of their mind and heart, and that was true for me too. At the same time, these brief, highly circumscribed little stories Jesus told are not less than a full-length novel or other long narrative, they are just very different.

I remember that  when Twitter was in its infancy, George Kao helped me get a Twitter account set up and gave me some tips about tweeting. I thought these were insightful, potentially useful ideas from George, and I immediately ignored the advice and my Twitter account too. The truth is I felt like a 140-character message was a low-level endeavor, and certainly I saw some tweets that were simply flat status updates (I’m really full after that killer pizza from the best pizza place in the East Bay – about 80 characters, whew!).

But then the Rev. Joseph Peters-Mathews became our communications working group head and he told me I had to tweet, as  a way of sharing important messages in our diocese and the wider Church. I dug into the assignment, and I began to understand that a good tweet is like a compact poem – brief but with strong thought behind it. The parables are like tweets in that they are little energy packages of meaning.

Today’s parable from Matthew, and the snippet of the great story of the Exodus  we heard today both tell us important things about how the vast world works, based on descriptions of conditions in a vineyard and among a nomadic people fleeing across the wilderness from slavery.

In the vineyard and the agora
The vineyard and village economy Jesus describes in Matthew is familiar to us – we can read debates about who deserves jobs, debates that are far from academic; people have the same passions we hear in the voices of those who had worked all day in the hot sun, and who watch as the laborers hired at the end of the day are given the same wages as they – how unfair! And on the other side, we may feel solidarity with the workers hired late in the day, who have waited, fruitlessly, to be hired, who face the prospect of going home to their families with no wages at all, nothing to contribute to the survival of their dependents and themselves.

If we pause and let ourselves think and feel around the borders of Jesus’ parable of the vineyard laborers, questions begin to arise: what’s the background of these laborers – none of them, from those hired first to those hired at the end of the day seem to have steady jobs; do they have homes; where do they come from? And after the wages have been handed out by the farm manager, and those who had worked all day, carrying heavy loads in the blazing heat begin to grumble about not getting more than those who worked only an hour, and the vineyard owner hears and makes his declaration – “Friends, you haven’t been wronged, you received what we agreed. Don’t I have the right to be generous to whom I choose?” – I wonder what all of them, from last to first thought. What did they tell their families when they got home? How did they review this strange day during the night that followed, in their thoughts and dreams?

The economy of Jesus’ table
But what are we here today to make of this little economy of vineyard and village; how do we understand the farmer who combines both hard-driving business practices with the behavior of the immigration activist? Where can we see an example of such an economy?  How about here in your local church, every time we take part in the Eucharist? Here, at Jesus’ table, as in his fields and households, we find that we are all treated equally, despite how much more deserving, from whatever point of view deserving is determined. The biggest donor, the lay leader, the first-time visitor, the  poorly dressed and the richly dressed – all receive equally from God’s love.

Jesus learned from God, his divine parent
But how did Jesus, now the Christ, the Spirit of God who pervades the world, come to learn such an upside-down economic theory? Don’t you think it might be because God stretched out the divine love to this man of humble status, affirming a person whose life was filled with uncertainties? We might, then discern God’s own economy as the underpinning of our farmer’s generous way of managing his vineyard. The presence of God in the story takes us to the Hebrew Scripture reading.

“Who are we that you should complain against us?”
The Eucharist as you and I experience it also is an embodied experience, week by week, of the truth at the core of the passage we heard from Exodus today. In this section of the story about the long journey of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt to their new, promised home,  we learn that the people are grumbling against their leaders, Moses and Aaron. So far this is not unlike the workers who had been at their labor all day complaining to and about the vineyard owner.

Moses and Aaron, however take us to a whole other level of understanding the reality of the world; “Who are we that you should complain against us?” they ask the people. It is in truth God against whom you complain. Sometimes our focus is so entirely on the interplay of forces in our daily lives that we lose sight of God, always present with us, the Spirit who strengthens, sustains, and guides us. It is an arresting moment when we realize that God is active in our lives, that God’s ethic provides the structure and dynamic of the Cosmos. God led the Children of Israel safely out of Egypt, but in the days that follow, as they struggle in an unknown wilderness, as they seek to make it day-by-day, God’s providential presence is forgotten.



Different economic bases

Looking at the parable of the vineyard laborers and the story of the Hebrew people grumbling, so they think, against Moses and Aaron, we can see two economic bases at play: in the former we see a wage and money economy; among the Children of Israel on their long journey in the wilderness, the people were living off their flocks and the land. The differences between the economic bases of these two Bible passages reminds us that there are in fact many economies at work, sometimes at the same time. Academic communities have a wage economy and an economy of ideas, economic bases that are interlocking but not identical. Families have economies of affection; power itself underlies and is the base economy for many other economies that we often take at face value. In all these economies, we may well seek to see how the lessons from Matthew’s parable and the Exodus story could transform our lives. If we are alert to the presence of God in all our transactions, what new ways of seeing and doing would come to us? If we practiced gratitude for what we have received, and refrained from comparing our lives to those of others, how much happier and freer might we feel?

The inner economy - health
Part of this past week has seen many priests and deacons of the Diocese of California gathered at the Bishop’s Ranch for the annual Clergy Retreat. This year we extended the theme of last year and looked at health as an integration of mind, body, spirit and community. I wonder if we might not close our meditation on this week’s lessons together by thinking that when we speak of “economy” we might sometimes turn our attention not to great systems or even to small-scale systems like villages and families, but to our inner lives. Jesus spoke of the temple of his own life  - “Destroy this temple and I will raise it in three days.” John 2:19; how often do we pay attention to the economy of our own individual lives?  Our health, the balance of choices we make to tend to the resources of mind, body, spirit and community are as surely an economy as the movement of money in a system. It is important for the clergy who serve our church communities to attend to the health economy of their lives – they absorb many sorrows and worries that we bring to them, and they need to have good ways to catalyze all that we share with them. And you, navigating often stormy and dark waters of your own, how do you keep the inner economy, your health in balance? Let us be as generous with ourselves in making room for health as the farmer was with the those seeking work from morning to evening. And remember that the presence of the Holy Spirit is a lamp shining in the night, always with you. (23.IX.17 Adv.)

+MHA

The Canaanite Woman (Matthew 15)

     Today’s Gospel is the story of the Canaanite woman and  her daughter. There are some interesting things going on in this story, which reveal much about the nature of Jesus and his teaching.

    Today’s reading begins, “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” Jesus takes himself into Gentile territory. It suggests that Jesus believes, or knows, that he can take his message of the kingdom into Gentile country, and that there may be an audience for it. It’s also possible that he is going into Gentile country to avoid the authorities in Jerusalem. After all, at the beginning of chapter 15 of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has been telling the Pharisees and scribes that they are hypocrites for wanting to uphold their traditions at the expense of the commandments. We can imagine how the scribes and Pharisees react to that, so Jesus may think it prudent to get out of town for a while. 

    But something else is happening in this story. Being in Gentile country, “in the district of Tyre and Sidon,” gives Jesus an opportunity to demonstrate a new teaching, especially to his disciples, who have a narrow view of their ministry, as they soon demonstrate. Jesus will show that he is not limiting his ministry to Israel, and intends to take his teaching to the wider world, and he chooses to reveal this in a roundabout way.

   The Canaanite woman (called the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, definitely a Gentile) with the demon-possessed daughter, hears about Jesus and finds him. “Lord, Son of David” she shouts; she knows exactly who he is. And this recognition from a Gentile, an outsider, and a woman, no less, in a time when women were subordinated in every way, is a significant turning point in the ministry of Jesus. As the story unfolds, Jesus reveals his new teaching. And we notice that she mentions her daughter, tormented by a demon. Note that she’s asking for help, not for herself, but for her daughter.

    Jesus doesn’t answer at first, and eventually replies, not to the woman, but to the disciples who want to get rid of her. A superficial reading of this is that Jesus is not interested, can’t be bothered even to reply to the woman, and, and talks only to his disciples to say that he is sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But his real intention becomes clear in his response to the woman. Jesus is deliberately misleading the disciples at this moment.     

    And in the interaction between Jesus and the woman, we see the apparent paradox in Jesus’s Gentile ministry. When she requests Jesus to heal her daughter, he replies with a remark, not about healing, but about food! “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” We’re meant to understand the comparison the way the woman does: she, a Gentile, is one of the dogs under the table. Why does Jesus compare Gentiles to dogs? If that’s what he thinks of Gentiles, what is he doing there?

    Jesus is triangulating, to placate his followers who believe in their superiority to Gentiles (and to dogs too), and to appear to reinforce this attitude, at least in public, in the presence of a Gentile woman. At the same time, he responds to the woman’s request, that he heal her daughter, as soon as it becomes clear that the woman is not intimidated by Jesus or by her supposed inferiority, and has faith in Jesus’s ability to do what she asks of him. His remark is not a rejection, but a spiritual test, the kind of test that a fully aware, awake, genuine spiritual guide will make of anyone seeking spiritual help, to test the seeker’s own awareness or insight, or, in this case, faith. Jesus takes advantage of the situation to make it clear that faith is what matters, not a social or religious or ethnic or any other kind of distinction. Jesus is abolishing the Jew/Gentile distinction at the very moment when he appears to be reinforcing it. He is in Gentile territory because he is including Gentiles in his kingdom. And it is the Canaanite  woman who recognizes Jesus for who he is, and makes it possible for him to use the opportunity to reveal his nature and his teaching.

    In this story, Jesus’s removing the demon from the woman’s daughter, nothing is said about the daughter’s faith.  In other words, there is no suggestion that the daughter had to earn her healing by professing anything in particular, by affecting any particular religious attitude, or even by expressing gratitude. Jesus never asks her to. There is no religious test in Jesus’s ministry, just as there is no ethnic test.

    What can we learn from this story? We need not be afraid to take the message to the Gentiles, that is, to people outside our religious or social circle, and beyond. The story reminds us that there is a real need in the world for signs of God’s power, for signs of his power over the demons of our time. There are demons abroad in the world today, and if the news of the past several days is anything to go by, many people are possessed by these demons. Our challenge is to find the faith to overcome these demons, and to remind ourselves that God has power over them. May we have the faith of the Canaanite woman, as Jesus leads us into Gentile country. Amen. (20.VIII.17.Adv.)

Transfiguration (Luke 9)

“This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him.” From the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 9, verse 35.

    In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

    We commemorate the Transfiguration twice a year, on the last Sunday after Epiphany, and on August 6.  This double commemoration emphasizes the importance of the event. The Transfiguration occurs at the end of Epiphanytide as a summing up of what has been revealed in that season: Jesus as the divine and human Son of his Father, and the relationship of the Father and the Son with the Holy Spirit. We can also understand it as a foreshadowing of the Resurrection, which is definitely another transfiguration and an even greater revelation of the nature of Jesus. Transfiguration occurs again in August, close to the end of the church year in the Orthodox calendar, and just before the celebration on August 15 of the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God. The proximity of the two feasts is not accidental; it emphasizes, again, who Jesus is and keeps before us the role of his Mother in the history of salvation. His Mother shares, in effect, in her Son’s transfiguration.

    “And his clothes became dazzling white.” Light is often associated with divinity. In our time, accustomed as we are to bright, steady light whenever and wherever we want it, we are perhaps too used to it. We can turn night into day, and we have so much light in our cities at night that we can’t see the stars. We can banish darkness. And so perhaps we don’t realize how stunning light can be, and what a powerful symbol it is for God. Peter and James and John, however, are dazzled by the very bright light of the Transfiguration, brighter than any light they had seen. This is no ordinary light; our Orthodox friends call it “the light of Mount Tabor,” or “the uncreated light,” which is nothing less than the divine radiance. And they soon see what this light is revealing to them: the presence of Jesus with the prophets Moses and Elijah.

    But this is only the beginning of the revelation. Peter says, “Let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This tells us that, at this moment, Peter understands Jesus to be of the same rank, or on the same level, as the prophets. He seems to have forgotten that he, earlier in the chapter, at verse 20, had proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah. The other disciples at that point compared Jesus to Elijah, or John the Baptist, or other prophets whom they don’t name. They were not ready to see Jesus as Messiah, except Peter.

    It is conventional for preachers to say at this point, the dwelling-building proposal, that this is another example of Peter’s well-intentioned but clueless reaction to what is really going on. After all, Luke the Evangelist says, “Let us make three dwellings...not knowing what he said.” He goes on to say, “They were terrified as they entered the cloud.” I’m skeptical of Luke’s comment, since Peter has just said, “It is good for us to be here!” That doesn’t sound like terror, or cluelessness, to me. I suspect, and this is my own speculation of course, that Luke thinks that the disciples ought to be terrified, and so he says that they are. But the disciples themselves say no such thing. Perhaps the Evangelist would have been terrified.

    I think that something else is going on here. Peter is not clueless. Peter and the others are sufficiently mature spiritually, that they are capable of seeing the divine light, and the prophets too. They have been helped by Jesus to be open to the reality of God, by teaching, miracles, and example, so that when Jesus takes them up the mountain, they are ready for the next step.

    Already in Luke’s Gospel, demons have recognized Jesus as the Holy One of God, or the Son of God, in the story of the Gerasene demoniac. But now God himself announces Jesus’s sonship, in the cloud that overshadows Jesus and the disciples. I’ve been thinking about this “cloud” and what it represents. Of course, it probably is a real cloud; mountains make their own weather, and they are frequently obscured by clouds. The cloud can also describe the state of mind of the disciples; they are in a new situation, and so they may be experiencing a certain darkness, after the experience of the Transfiguration, which may have blinded them momentarily, perhaps like those of us who come from wintry places remember being dazzled, even blinded, by sunlight on snow.

    “And from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.’” We recall the words of God to Jesus at his baptism, when he says, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” Then, only Jesus hears it. Now, Peter, James, and John hear it. Before this point, demons had proclaimed the Sonship of Jesus; now God himself says it, again, so that not only Jesus can hear it, but his closest disciples as well. It is interesting to think about why God let the demons know this before the disciples; I’m not going to speculate about this now, but it is worth keeping in mind that humans are not the only creatures in the universe capable of perceiving the reality of God.

    “When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.” Jesus, in other words, is more than a prophet. They are not on the same level as he is. The disciples don’t see them, because they don’t need to, because their understanding of Jesus has gone beyond them. Peter has already understood that Jesus is the Messiah; now they all realize that Jesus is more than the Messiah, more than the Anointed One. Prophecy, and the coming of the Messiah, are only steps on the way to a full understanding of the ministry of Jesus, the Son, the Chosen.

    There is still more. “And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.” Jesus has been telling them that there is more to discipleship than dazzling visions. Only after Jesus rises from the dead will they have a full understanding of what the vision really means. They are to keep it a secret, until the right time. The right time is after the Resurrection. The purpose of the vision is to prepare the disciples for what is to come, to strengthen them and to give them confidence in the dark days to come. The light of the Transfiguration will always be there, even when the disciples can’t see it. If they can recall it, keep it in mind, they will see their way through all the way to the Resurrection.

    And so we will see our way through to the Resurrection, strengthened by the faith that has been handed down to us, faith founded in the experiences of the disciples, who saw the transfigured Lord and heard the voice of his Father. The light of the Transfiguration continues to shine, no matter how dark the cloud is on the mountaintop. That light leads us to the mountaintop, where we will hear the voice of the Father, when he says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

    In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. (5.VIII.17.Adv.)

   

   

   

Mustard seed and more (Matthew 13)

    “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed...it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it...becomes a tree…” (Matthew 13: 31-32).

    Today’s Gospel is put together from verses 31 to 33, and verses 44 to 52,  of chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel. The reading skips over Jesus’s remarks on The Use of Parables, and his explanation of the Parable of the Weeds among the Wheat, or Wheat and Tares, as the old translation has it. Today’s reading lists five short parables: the Mustard Seed, the Yeast, the Treasure hidden in a field, the Pearl of great value (or great price, as the old translation says), and finally, the Net thrown into the sea. I’ll say a few words about each parable.  

          The parable of the mustard seed can be understood in a few ways. The first way, perhaps the obvious natural meaning, is that small actions can lead to great consequences --- in this case, an individual choice to accept the message of the kingdom of God will help spread the kingdom, here called a tree, in which countless numbers of people, here called birds of the air, can nest, and themselves bring more souls to the kingdom.

    Secondly, I’m reminded of what the Russian saint Seraphim of Sarov said, “Acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands will be saved around you.” Acquire the spiritual seed of peace, if I may put it that way, plant it in the soul, or rather, nurture the seed that is already there, that God has planted in the center of our being, and help it to grow into the spiritual tree that countless others will be able to find a home in. The spiritual tree is that endless series of consequences that flow from our choice to nurture the seed of the kingdom that has been planted in us. I’m reminded of what’s called the butterfly effect, the notion that a butterfly changing course over the Amazon can lead to a typhoon over the Pacific six months later. The mustard seed of the kingdom is like that, a very small thing leading to a very large outcome, the growth of the kingdom.

    The Parable of the Yeast has a similar meaning, a very small thing, practically invisible in this case, wild yeast  eventually leavening three measures of flour, or about three pints, as my commentary says. Again, a small action leads to large consequences, the word of the kingdom leads to transformation of the surrounding society, and eventually the whole world, “until all  of it was leavened,” as the Gospel says.

    So far we’ve heard about very small things, invisible, hidden things, leading to large, visible outcomes. The next hidden thing is the treasure in a field, “which someone found and hid; then...he sells all that he has and buys that field.” This hiding of the treasure is a kind of planting, although it’s hard to know what to make of such a devious manoeuvre. One way to understand this is to think of the hidden treasure as the seed of the kingdom planted in us, which we need to do whatever is necessary to make grow. In this case, “selling all that he has and buying the field” is a way of saying “letting go of everything which can get in the way of letting the seed, the yeast, the hidden treasure, grow and spread the kingdom.”

    The pearl of great value, another small item, but not invisible or hidden like the seed or the yeast or the treasure, has a similar meaning. Like the treasure, it encourages the merchant to sell all that he has, to buy it. The theme here is the same: let go of everything which gets in the way of the spread of the kingdom, of everything which gets in the way of the growth of that treasure in the soul, which will grow into the kingdom, that is, into life with God in this world and in eternity.

    We now come to the parable of the net thrown into the sea, which catches fish of every kind. There’s a change of tone here, a change in the direction of judgement, of sorting bad fish from good and casting the bad “into the furnace of fire.” This is a reminder of what we may think of as the shadow side of the parables, the realization that bad choices, perhaps small, hidden, invisible ones, can have huge consequences, just as good choices do. We create our outcomes, sometimes at least, both in this world and in eternity. We need not take the “furnace of fire” literally, but we should keep in mind the idea behind it, that it is possible not to make the best use of the seed, the yeast, the pearl, the treasure, that we have been given.

    Jesus reinforces the need to understand the parables when he says, “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom...brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” What is old is the reality that the seed of the kingdom, invisible, small, hidden, is planted  in each of us from the beginning; what is new, as Jesus says in the skipped-over section of today’s reading, he makes explicit in his teaching, “I will...speak in parables, I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.” And so he has. “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” Amen. (29-30.VII.17.Adv.)

   

Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13)

      “But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” Matthew 13:23

       In the Name etc..

     The 13th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel contains several parables, explanations of a few of them, and a discussion of their purpose. The compilers of our lectionary, in putting together today’s reading, chose the Parable of the Sower and Our Lord’s own explanation of its meaning, verses 1 through 9, and verses 18 through 23. To do this, they skipped over the section explaining the Purpose of the Parables. This puts a preacher in the awkward position of having to say something about the meaning of the parable, simultaneously commenting on Jesus’s interpretation and ignoring Jesus’s statement of his purpose. The ancient editors of the Gospel arranged texts the way they did for good reasons, which makes the arrangement part of their message, and that makes it necessary for us to discern what that message may be. So I’ll talk about the parable, and Jesus’s explanation. And I’ll talk a little about the skipped bit, Jesus’s statement of his purpose in verses 10 through 17.

    “A sower went out to sow...some seeds fell on the path...other seeds fell on rocky ground...other seeds fell among thorns...other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain...Let anyone with ears, listen!” That is my abbreviated version of the parable. The natural meaning is easy to understand: seeds sown on rough ground won’t grow much, and seeds sown on good soil will bring forth grain, lots of it. And Jesus’s explanation of the meaning is easy to follow too. “Hear then,” he says, “hear.” Note that word. The path: the place where the evil one tempts  those who don’t understand the word of the kingdom (that is what the seed is: the word of the kingdom). Rocky ground: the shallow enthusiasm of those fall away at the first sign of trouble. Thorns: the cares of the world and the lure of wealth, which distract from the word of the kingdom, and lastly, the Good Soil, which is the one who hears the word and understands it. Notice how the story is framed: it begins with one who hears and does not understand, and ends with one who does hear and understand.

    Who is the sower in this story? We normally take the sower to be Jesus, or perhaps John the Baptist or the prophets. John and Jesus both proclaimed the coming of the kingdom. The analogies between the types of ground and the types of people who hear the word of the kingdom are easy to understand, and certainly come out of the experience of Jesus and John and the kinds of people they encountered. And the analogies match our own experience too. We recognize the people and situations that Jesus is talking about.     

     Are we one or more of the people in the story? We may naturally think of ourselves as not understanding the word, or of ditching it at the first sign of trouble, or even of letting worldly interests and the lure of money take the place of the word. Or are we the ones who hear the word of the kingdom, understand  it, and accept it? At this point, we are no longer the people who don’t understand, or who turn and run, or who give up the kingdom for the goods of this world. We become, we are, sowers of the seed, proclaimers of the word of the kingdom ourselves. We are no longer only recipients of the word, but are one with Jesus and John in proclaiming it. That is what Jesus is getting at when he says, “Let anyone with ears, listen!” The main point of the parable is this: become sowers of the seed, of the word of the kingdom. That is what Jesus wants us to hear.

    There is a progression in this story, steps in a spiritual journey. Hearers of the word may pass from misunderstanding, to another stage, enthusiastic but shallow understanding, where they need to learn to overcome threats, to a third level, where they need to overcome the powerful attraction of worldly goods, to reach a fourth level, where they become disciples of mature understanding, who have passed through threats and temptations, to become  those “who indeed bear fruit.” At this stage, we are not merely recipients of the word, the seed. We are spreading the word of the kingdom; we are, in fact, signs of the kingdom, part of the kingdom.

    I said that I would say something about the skipped bit, verses 10 through 17, where Jesus talks about the purpose of the parables. The disciples ask him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”  He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” He goes on for several lines, even quoting Isaiah, to make it clear just how completely ignorant the crowd is, when it comes to knowledge of the kingdom. It sounds as if, on the surface, Jesus wants to keep the crowds from knowing about the kingdom, but this is not true. Jesus is speaking to the crowds using images and stories that they can follow, to teach them about the kingdom. The disciples already know about the kingdom; as Jesus said to them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom.” Jesus likely taught them privately, from his own experience. We may think of the disciples as having attained a fifth step in their spiritual journey, perhaps after passing through the four steps of the sowing of the word, as we heard in the parable. Jesus confirms this when he says, “But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.” They have been empowered to sow the seed of the word of the kingdom, and to help others to see and to hear, and to sow the seed as well. May we attain this level of discipleship. May we also bear fruit and yield, some thirtyfold, some sixty, some a hundredfold.  Amen. (16.VII.17.Adv.)

(Note: No real farmer would scatter seed anywhere but on fertile ground. And in modern scientific agriculture, a hundredfold increase would be impossible; fortyfold would be a maximum possible increase.)

    

   

Children in the Marketplace (Matthew 11)

       The compilers of the lectionary handed preachers an interesting problem when they put together today’s Gospel reading, which comprises verses 16 to 19, and then verses 25 to 30 of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 11. They skipped the section titled ‘Woes to Unrepentant Cities’. The reading begins with the conclusion --- a conclusion, not an introduction --- to the section titled ‘Jesus praises John the Baptist’, and ends with Jesus’s prayer to the Father, and then adds a few more lines. It is my task to find the thread that ties this  arrangement together.

    “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”  The “children” are offering their services as musicians and professional mourners, and they have no takers. The situation is one of a disconnect between ‘message sent’ and ‘message received’: there is no match between what is on offer and what is wanted. Jesus is using this story to say that the message of John the Baptist is not being heard. Just before today’s reading, Jesus says, “Let anyone with ears, listen!” The example of the children in the marketplace makes the point that people aren’t really listening, aren’t really getting what John is about. Jesus says, “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’”. In other words, they totally miss the point. They miss the point about Jesus too, and ignore the total contradiction that their remarks reveal: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard.’” The situation that emerges from these lines is one of inattention, confusion, spiritual deafness, in fact a refusal to open up to the spiritual reality before the people in the marketplace.

    It is significant that Jesus locates this story in a marketplace where children are the main characters, and where the goods on offer, so to speak, are dancing and mourning. We may think of dancing and mourning, flute playing and wailing, as representing opposites of our experience: carefree celebration, joy, freedom at one end, and at the other end, awareness of death. In a marketplace, that is,  in all the busy-ness and routines of daily life, we can ignore, even forget for a while, both dancing and mourning, flute playing and wailing. But the children, as children often do in their guileless way, remind us of the truth of our experience, that even in the marketplace we are not far from dancing and mourning, from flute playing and wailing, from freedom and the reality that limits it. And Jesus confirms the truth of this when he says, “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” Some ancient manuscripts say, “Wisdom is vindicated by her children.” Reality, in other words, is not far away, even in the marketplace, where we go to avoid it.

    As I mentioned, today’s reading skips over the section called ‘Woes to unrepentant cities’, woes which the cities will experience because they ignore the ‘deeds of power’ done in them. This section reinforces the point that Jesus makes earlier in the chapter. “Let anyone with ears, listen!” as he says. The cities ignore deeds of power, the same way people in the marketplace ignore the children.

    Jesus turns to his Father in prayer, in words that seem to contradict what he has said so far. “I thank you Father...because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants;” infants now, not just children in the marketplace, are getting the message. Jesus has just been urging people to listen, and is now apparently thankful that they aren’t. We may rightly ask, what is going on here?

    Jesus is saying that the wise and the intelligent need to rediscover the openness and immediacy of perception that children often have, before they, the wise and the intelligent, will be ready to hear, to perceive what the Father will reveal. When the Father hides a truth from humans, it is to prod us into letting go whatever would prevent us from perceiving it. The goal is not to drop wisdom and intelligence, but to prepare for new depths and new connections. Just as the minds of children are constantly developing new connections, so must the wise and the intelligent not imagine that spiritual growth has ceased, that new growth is not possible.

    And what does the Father reveal? Jesus says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” This is one of many statements of what our religion is about. In this case, it is about knowing the Father through the Son. This “knowing” is not a doctrinal statement, a form of words, an idea about which we may have opinions, but a living experience, in which we participate in the divine life, as members of the Body of the Son, who has incorporated us into himself in baptism, and who is transfiguring us in the eucharist into his mystical Body. And in fact the Son chooses to reveal the Father to everyone, as it says in John’s Gospel, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

    Jesus goes on to say, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” One burden we can lay down, so that we can rest in Christ, is the burden of the marketplace, all the busy-ness and distractions and routines of life that we use to avoid both the dancing and the mourning that the children, the infants, remind us of. Jesus invites us to lay down that burden, and to take up another, much lighter one. He says, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me...for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” His yoke, his burden, is participation in his life, which is what “knowing the Father” means, both now and in eternity. Amen.  (8-9.VII.17. Adv.)