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