A sermon from prison for Bible Sunday

The crossing of the Red Sea: a summary of Exodus Chapters 13 and 14 to illustrate a point.

 

When the Pharaoh and his servants were told that the people of Israel had fled, they said, “What is this we have done, that we have let Israel go from serving us?”  So the Pharaoh made ready his chariot and took his army with him, and took six hundred chosen chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them. The Egyptians pursued them, all Pharaoh's horses and chariots and his horsemen and his army, and overtook them encamped at the sea.
And the people of Israel cried out to the Lord.  And Moses said to the people, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again.  The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.”
The Lord said to Moses, “Tell the people of Israel to go forward.  Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground.  And I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they shall go in after them, all his host, his chariots, and his horsemen.  And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.”

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.  And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.  The Egyptians pursued and went in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, and his horsemen.  And the Lord looked down on the Egyptian forces and threw them into a panic, clogging their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen.”  So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal course.  The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen; of all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea, not one of them remained.

A story is told of a young couple who went on honeymoon and due to a flight delay arrived at their hotel in the early hours of the morning. When they eventually woke they complained to the manager that their room was ridiculously small, had no windows and was furnished by a single bed settee. Having booked a honeymoon suite they’d been given a box room.

The manager accompanied them upstairs and asked if they had noticed the double doors, which the couple assumed was a wardrobe. He opened them to reveal a sumptuous room complete with four‐poster bed, a balcony with a sea view, flowers and bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. The couple had spent their wedding night in the hall of the best suite in the best hotel in the country.

I start with that story because we can have a very similar experience with the Bible if we’ve never sat down and read it properly. We might have experienced a few of the stories or books but never explored beyond what were the Sunday-school stories we were taught when we were young. We haven’t discovered the treasures of the whole of scripture - of this book which sits on many of our shelves.

Today is Bible Sunday: who knew? We hear from the Bible every week and then someone like me stands at the front and talks about one of the passages - and I know that some of you read it in private. I also suspect that because of the difference in the number of Bibles we give out and the number of guys who actually come to chapel that some alternative use is found for the pages – but that’s another story!

I’ll let you into a secret: very often when I look at the passage I’ve to prepare for a sermon, I sit at my computer and think, “Dear God, what on earth am I to make of this?”  Is it supposed to be easy? Yes …. sometimes, but sometimes we need to struggle with difficult ideas or how are we to mature and develop as Christian men?

But today is one of those days in the church calendar when people like me have the option to move away from the set readings and talk about something else: on this occasion, the Bible - and what it actually means to us.

One of the funny things about the Bible is that it’s the most published, printed and bought book in the history of literature but the chances of you finding someone who’s actually read it are pretty limited. I often get asked if I’ve read it and I’m never really sure what to answer: I suspect the answer is “No” if I’m being asked whether I’ve sat down and read it from start to finish, which is how you normally read a book isn’t it? Well, not this book! Why not? Any ideas?

I think what we need to remember is that the Bible is both a book and not a book. Yes, it’s a book in this form, the way it’s printed but it’s actually a mini library: it contains sixty six separate books, thirty nine in the Old Testament and twenty seven in the New Testament. When you choose a book you don’t start at the first book on the top of the first shelf of the first bookcase and work through every book until you reach the last book on the bottom shelf of the last bookcase – even if there were only sixty six books.

So, here’s the question: when you go to the library, how do you choose a book?

*Someone recommends an author. I’ve just read a book by an author called Con Iggulden, recommended by a lad on C Wing. I would never have chosen it myself but I enjoyed it and I’d read more of his in the future because of that recommendation. So when someone like Fr. Roger or Sr. Pat or Claire or I say to you, “Do you know, because of what we’ve been talking about you could read …. for argument’s sake …. this passage in John’s Gospel: it has some answers to what we’ve been talking about.” that’s a recommendation and a way into reading scripture.

*I’m a great fan of crime novels so when I’m in the library or a bookshop that’s the section I go to first. Now that’s what called a genre – a style of writing. Can you think of any others?

Sci-fi, romance, historical fiction, drama, poetry, fantasy, horror, comedy – and they’re all from the fiction range. What about those who like non-fiction? Biographies, autobiographies, history, study guides, text books and so on. The Bible’s like that: it has genre – different styles of writing -  and it helps to know what style one of the sixty six is before you start reading it. I don’t like sci-fi: I wouldn’t deliberately choose to read that style of book, but again, if my friend on C Wing recommended one, I’d give it a go. For me, the Bible’s a bit like that. I’m not a great fan of the Old Testament but there are occasions when I’ll need to read parts of it but I wouldn’t pick it up and open a page at random and dive in. I need to know what it is that I’m reading or I run the risk of not getting anything out of the experience. So, what are the genres – styles of writing - in the Bible?

Well, there’s poetry, myth, history, law, wisdom, letters, autobiographies and prophecy. The Gospels are autobiographies, the life of Jesus written by other people. If I want to know about Jesus that’s where I look. I don’t look in Genesis. That would be a complete waste of time. If I’m interested in the finer points of the law of the ancient Jews – and I’m really not - I’d look in the book of Leviticus. If I wanted to know about advice on Christian living I’d look in the letters of St. Paul. If I wanted some wise sayings I’d look at Proverbs. If I wanted some poetry I’d look at The Psalms. If I was interested in the history of the Early Church I’d look in the book of Acts or if I was interested in the history of the Jewish people I’d read the books of Kings or Judges.

Now there are a couple of genres that need explaining a bit more:

* Prophecy: this doesn’t mean telling the future. It’s about people speaking the word of God to their own generation – telling it like it is even if that made them unpopular. They tend to be, “This is what you’re doing wrong. This is what God wants from you.” conversations.

*Myth: whenever I mention myth some people get a bit uncomfortable because they think myth means fairy stories. No, religious myth is a proper style of writing. Religious myth is a way of explaining deep truths in a simple way: it’s not the details in the story which are important but the underlying message. Take the creation stories as an example of religious myth. If you could get a Tardis and go back to visit the ancient Hebrews, you’d struggle to explain the creation of the world to them in modern scientific terms. They’d have had no understanding of the Big Bang or Evolution which we tend to take for granted. Modern Christians have no problem with those ideas because they see God as the trigger for the Big Bang and the manager of the Evolution that followed it. A simpler people needed a simpler explanation and so this picture story developed to help them to understand their conviction that there was a God who was responsible for the universe and all that is it. The Myth stories of the Book of Genesis aren’t intended to be historical or scientific records but they are intended to put God right in the centre of the creative process as the one who set it all going.

Those Christians who take the creation stories literally and those who see them as religious myth aren’t so far apart because the outcome is the same: God is the creative force in the universe. We come to the same conclusion but by different routes.

And that leads us neatly on to the idea of how we read and understand the Bible. We all know - or know of - people who take the Bible as literal truth. We call them Literalists. If you’re a Literalist, you tend to believe that every word in the Bible IS the direct word of God revealed to people down the ages and recorded exactly as God wanted it in every word and punctuation point and that it should be applied in its entirety in each new age.

A second group you might call Biblical Conservatives: they also believe that the Bible IS the word of God but that those who wrote it were influenced by their own backgrounds and cultures in the way that they wrote things down and put their own Interpretations and ideas into their writing. That means that today we have to look carefully to see whether we are the real audience for a particular passage but the stories remain very important as lessons about how God dealt with his people down the ages.

The third group we might call Biblical Liberals because they see the Bible, not so much as the word of God but CONTAINING it so that each new generation needs to recognise that many passages were written at a very different time and place to where we are now. Those Christians tend to be a bit less interested in passages that clearly make little or no sense in today’s world but they are still committed to trying to understand God’s message for them today.

Take this reading as an example: (The crossing of the Red Sea: Exodus 13/14) When you heard it how did you understand it?

Did you think that the events happened exactly as they were described? That Moses actually called upon God to part the waters? Each time, God responded by physically separating the water with dry land under foot. This was a real, miraculous events which happened at a specific time and location. If we were there with a camera, we could have recorded the miracle. God temporarily suspended normal physical laws, such as gravity, and the ability of the sea bed to absorb water. The Bible is recording real miracles. God was in control.

If so, you are probably a Biblical Literalist.

Did you think that it was possible that this miracle didn’t occur in the way the Bible describes? The story may well have been mythical. That is, it contained important religious ideas, but described events that never actually happened. If the waters really did separate, the event must have been caused by natural forces. Perhaps a strong wind drove the Red Sea away from its normal shoreline. Perhaps an unusual tide temporarily disturbed the water or maybe the River Jordan became clogged and stopped its flow to the sea for a few hours.  Anyway, the people of Israel escaped so God was in control and that’s the key point of the story.

If so, you are probably a Biblical Conservative.

Did you think that it’s a great story and would make a film with fabulous special effects but it’s most likely that it never happened at all? Whether these events happened or not was not important. The story showed how God continued to work through various heroes and prophets to shape the lives of the people of Israel.

If so, you are probably a Biblical Liberal.

In the end, does it matter? What have the three ways of understanding the story got in common? That God was in control of the situation. I mention this because from time to time I talk to people who worry that they aren’t “real” Christians because they don’t - can’t – read the Bible in the same way that others do. That isn’t true. We are all unique and our brains work in different ways: understanding the Bible is not a one-size-fits-all exercise.

What’s important is that we engage our brains when we hear Bible passages read and don’t let them wash over us as too hard or too familiar, “Oh, I know that story, I don’t need to concentrate.” We need to see that in some way the Bible passages present us with a glimpse of God and how he deals with us. If we do that rather than worrying about how literally true the story is without recognising the religious truth, we encounter God in a way that is unique to us whether we are Literalist, Conservative or Liberal. The Bible is a channel for the word of God, which comes to us as we hear it, read it and discuss it. Through these sixty six books and their very different styles, written by a wide range of people over a long time-frame and from many different backgrounds, we’re drawn into an encounter with God. We’re involved in a story, drawn into the company of those who worked out their relationship with God in teaching and instruction, in praise, in celebration, in thanksgiving and in reflecting upon life in God’s world.

When we read, we walk alongside those who worked out their relationship with God through making laws and telling stories, in writing the history of their people, and in writings that came from their understanding of life in God’s world, and through confronting disaster and suffering with faith and hope and trust in God and his promises.

It’s in such ways, when hearing the Scriptures in worship in church, or as we read them in the silence of our own prayers and meditation, that God reaches out to us and touches us, delivers us, consoles us, renews and enlivens our hope, vanquishes any sense of ultimate fear, blesses us as his own and journeys with each one of us on our pilgrimage of faith.

Amen

 

 

Sunday Sermon: Luke 10.1-9 A sermon for the Feast of St. Luke

Luke 10.1-9

 

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road. “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. “When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you. Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

Do you remember the prayer we often say that follows from our Leading Your Church into Growth initiative? I wonder how seriously we take the ideas behind it and internalise them: we’ve been exploring together what mission means for us and how best to share the Gospel in word and deed in our wider community. We’ll soon be moving into Christmas, which, of course, is a wonderful opportunity for us as a church to engage in mission with our family, friends and neighbours. So it’s a good time to remind ourselves what it means to be a church dedicated to sharing the Gospel and that is what this morning’s Gospel reading is about.

The story is about Jesus sending out his followers into mission and you’d think that before he sent them, he’d want to give them strong words of encouragement and to stir up their spirits and fill them with a sense of joy and hope for the mission journey that lay ahead. But he doesn’t do that, I’m afraid: in fact, his approach seems a bit counter-cultural.

Given Jesus’ approach, I’m not sure that that many businesses would want to employ Jesus as a Personnel Manager: he obviously hadn’t been on any team building courses. There is a huge task that Jesus wants his team to undertake, so what does he say? “The harvest is plentiful. But the labourers are few”. That’s not much of a way to motivate the team, really: there’s a lot of hard work to do but hardly any of you to do it. Off you go!

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he compounds the problem further: “Go on your way! I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves”, and “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals”.

This task doesn’t sound very inviting, does it? It’s too big for the team, we are likely to get ravaged by wolves, and we can’t take anything with us to help us on the way.

Welcome to Christian mission!

But, as we’ve been recognising in the wider diocese, we’re called to be take mission seriously and devote ourselves to this most uncomfortable of callings.

When I was on the Yorkshire Ministry Course we had a unit on mission which looked at the changing patterns of mission through the history of the church and how those different styles reflected the needs and the thinking of the church at particular times.

1.  Filling the Ark was a term used by our lecturer to describe the approach of the early church: “Jesus is coming back soon, let’s get the ark as full as possible before the end of the age.” That was the pattern for the first one hundred or so years of Christianity but we can probably recognise that in the current approach of many Christians. “Let’s get them in.”

2.  Then, when the second coming wasn’t quite as imminent as originally thought, the emphasis turned to a wider mission into the gentile world with a greater emphasis on theological thinking shaped by the influence of Greek philosophy as individual believers were encouraged to consider union with God as the route to eternal life. There’s still a bit of a hint of that in some of today’s approaches as the church seeks to determine to what extent it can accommodate modern thinking and move with the times.

3.  Then we move into the Medieval Catholic period where authority became a key issue and the Church became increasingly identified with the Kingdom of God and the faithful were expected to render obedience to both the church and the crown. The emphasis on mission here was to bring people into the sacramental life of the church so they could participate in the penitential cycle and receive salvation. I think we still find echoes of that approach in today’s church too.

4.  Then the Protestant Reformation came. All the trappings of what was previously believed to be pleasing to God and necessary for salvation began to be peeled away to be replaced by a huge emphasis on justification through faith in God alone by His grace.  Can we still detect that in our mission? We should be able to.

5.  Then came the enlightenment and the emphasis moved to building the Kingdom of God on earth: a Christian needed to be a committed agent of social change as God’s Kingdom was built through education, medicine and social reform. We still see elements of that approach in today’s church.

6.  Finally we looked at post-modern mission which sought a locally rooted community of hospitality and care, prophetically pointing to the coming of the Kingdom. We are expected in this model to be practical theologians: in short, to walk the walk AND talk the talk.

Now I enjoyed all of those sessions but what really struck me was the idea that God’s mission, known as the Missio Dei, is exactly that: God’s mission and I thought back to all the times I’d sat uncomfortably in PCC meetings and other focus groups as we planned the latest parish mission. In retrospect whose mission was that then? God’s or ours? It seems to me that all attempts at mission are doomed to failure if the initiative is human rather than divine. The one principal I always remember from those lectures was what was to me was an inspirational message: to be involved in God’s mission is to seek out where God is already at work and join in with him there.

So, given that, what do we learn from today’s passage about the task of mission to which we are called?

Firstly, mission is a partnership activity between all of us and God.

We read that Jesus sent out 70 men and this is important because the fact that there were 70 people reminds us of the story of Moses in the wilderness: Moses was tired and overworked and the people of Israel were expecting too much of him and working him into the ground so Moses complained to God, and God said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel...they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.”

So we have the example of Moses calling 70 helpers for the mission mirrored here in the life of Jesus as a reminder that mission and ministry is not the sole responsibility of the leader, whether that’s Moses, or Jesus, or even Brunel. No, mission, and the ministry that goes with it, is a corporate activity that we undertake together as the Body of Christ in this community.

Now that may make us feel nervous because we don’t feel confident in our own abilities. But that’s exactly how Moses felt during the Exodus when he said to God, “Lord, don’t send me. I have never been a good speaker. I am a poor speaker, slow and hesitant”. But God wouldn’t let him off that lightly and said to Moses, “Who gave man his mouth? It is I, the Lord. Now go, I will help you to speak, and I will tell you what to say”. And the same is true of us today. If we are obedient to God in responding to the mission call, he’ll empower us for the task and give us the words to say. Like these 70 who Jesus sent out, we may be taken out of our comfort zone. But we go in the power of the Holy Spirit and are transformed from being mere bystanders into being participants for the Kingdom of God.

If I can use a sporting analogy here, mission in some churches can seem a bit like supporting your football team where 11 people are running around, exhausted and desperately in need of a rest being cheered on by a big crowd of people who desperately need some exercise.  I’ll leave you to decide which of those groups you fall into but we need to continually share the load amongst us because we always need to remember that mission is a community act. And that’s why, in this passage, Jesus sent them out two by two, in partnership with one another.

So, the call to mission is essentially a call to partnership work for the Kingdom of God and we all have a part to play in that.

We also learn from this Gospel passage that mission requires us to be absolutely focused on the task in hand. As a church we need to be single-minded in our commitment to mission. That’s why, in verse 4, Jesus says to the 70: “Greet no one on the road” which sounds like Jesus was encouraging rudeness - but that’s not really what he was driving at. When it comes to mission, it’s easy for us to get side-tracked and forget why we’re on the journey in the first place. Too often, churches operate like social clubs – a place to hang out and be with our friends - which is absolutely vital to church life and if the churches in this benefice are not places where we’re forging friendships and positive relationships, then we’re doing something seriously wrong. Of course we must be a warm community but that’s not the sum total of what we’re about: we’re to be a mission-minded church, constantly seeking ways to share the Gospel with others.

So Jesus’ imperative not to stop and greet anyone wasn’t saying that they shouldn’t be friendly to other people but saying that the building of relationships was part of the task in hand and that they shouldn’t get side-tracked and forget the missional work that needed doing by becoming too comfortable. They needed to remain single-minded in purpose.

And as we continue to develop as a mission-minded church we may find ourselves being taken by God outside of our comfort zones so verse 7 in this passage is really important. Jesus says: “Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide”. Well, that’s obvious isn’t it so why is it worth mentioning?

Well, it was quite a radical thing to say to young Jews, who would only have eaten ritually clean food. Because the mission they were being sent on was to the other side of the Jordan, which was a Gentile region, if they accepted hospitality Jesus is saying that, in order to be successful in their mission, they would have to sit lightly to their religiosity and their rituals and immerse themselves in the local culture so that there would be no barriers to receiving Christ.

Of course, that is a huge challenge to us as a church as we seek to remove any barriers that prevent others from coming to Christ in our local community. We may be very comfortable with the way we experience church - but, if we are to be truly missional and embrace the wider community, it will inevitably involve us stepping outside our comfort zone in order to find new and creative ways to reach out with the Gospel. And that can be as challenging as it is exciting.

So our mission is a partnership activity, between all of us and God and mission is a way of being that demands us to be absolutely focused on the task in hand.

The final thing we learn from the passage is that mission is activity-based.

This might seem an obvious thing to say, but being involved in mission is about more than words; it’s about active engagement. In this passage, in verse 9, Jesus exhorts his followers to say: “The Kingdom of God has come near to you”.

But when we look at the world, we might very well question to what extent that is the case; there is so much pain, so much suffering and such terrible hardship in our society and across the world. These things are clearly not signs of the Kingdom - but Jesus does point to other signs that prove the Kingdom of God is near. In brief, there are three of them mentioned here:

Firstly, the sharing of hospitality, in verse 7: “Eat and drink whatever they provide, do not move about from house to house…” The sharing of hospitality is a sign of the Kingdom. And by hospitality, I don’t mean just having a cup of tea or a meal together but that we are to share space together, to celebrate diversity and to encourage one another in our walk with God - even when that journey may look very different from our own. A mission-shaped church is inevitably a hospitable church.

Second, compassion and care are signs of the Kingdom, in verse 9: Jesus said, ‘Cure the sick who are there”. Caring for the sick and the dying, the sad, the lonely, the hurt and the anxious are all signs of the Kingdom of God in our midst.

Third, proclaiming the Gospel is a sign of the Kingdom, verse 9 again: “Say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near to you’”. People can’t guess the truths of the Christian faith. They need to be told about Jesus’ love and how that has been expressed through the Cross and Resurrection. Proclaiming the Kingdom, clearly in words, is an important aspect of mission too.

So, this short passage has much to tell us about mission:

Firstly, that the call to mission is a partnership activity between us and God.

Secondly, that we need to be focused and single-minded about mission: we need to take it seriously and be prepared to move outside our comfort zones.

Thirdly, that mission happens in a variety of ways: sharing hospitality together, showing compassion and care to one another, proclaiming the good news.

Our prayer must surely be that we become increasingly known as a missionary people - not because of what we do but because of who we are: a hospitable people, a compassionate people, a proclaiming people.

But remember, too: the mission is God’s mission: all that I’ve said is good advice from Luke but there’s no particular pattern. “We’re going to have a mission week targeting children. We’re going to focus our mission on the elderly this year. We need a mission to young families.” No. It’s all about behaviour, not about a mission strategy: mission only makes sense if we discern where God is already at work and join in with him there. It should never be our initiative. We go out; we meet people and we do our thing as Christians where we see God already at work and in doing that we follow Luke’s guidelines.

As we allow ourselves to be shaped by God in this way, the community of Cleckheaton will increasingly join with us in proclaiming this one, great Truth: “The Kingdom of God has come near.”

 Amen.

Sunday Sermon: Matthew 22.1-14 The parable of the Wedding Feast

Matthew 22:1-14

 

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”

So, Jesus is on a roll! Following two parables where he castigates the religious leaders of the day as those who will be at the back of the queue for the Kingdom of Heaven and where he criticises them for failing to heed both the prophets God has sent and now the Son, he’s having another go at them. Remember, too, that this is all being played out in public during the run-up to the Passover Festival when Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims. The religious leaders knew that Jesus’ parables were about them and so did a fair few of the ordinary folk who witnessed the exchanges. Matthew doesn’t tell us that Jesus explained these parables but we’ve read enough in the past to suggest that Jesus would have to those who genuinely didn’t understand what he was saying.

Can you imagine the humiliation of the Pharisees as they find themselves in the uncomfortable and unprecedented position of being publicly called out? They’re not used to this and they don’t like it, but in last week’s Gospel we heard that they were afraid to do anything because Jesus had the support of the crowds and they were frightened of a riot if they tried to silence him.

So they plotted.

Anyway, we‘re getting ahead of ourselves and we need a little context for today’s parable: In Jesus’ day, it was common to invite guests to the elaborate wedding festivities well in advance of the day. And then a reminder invitation would go out just before the feast. To have been invited not once but twice and then not to have attended would have already amounted to a huge slight to the host.

That’s the background, but in Jesus’ parable that’s not the worst thing that happened. The guests not only didn’t show up, in an echo of the previous parable, they abused and even killed the king’s messengers when they came with the reminder invitation.

Within the context of Matthew’s Gospel, this parable is rightly read as a criticism of the Jews who had historically failed down the generations to heed the prophets, characterised here as the King’s servants and who also did not respond to God’s invitation to recognize Jesus as His incarnate Son. Because the story is grouped with a series of judgment parables that appear shortly before the suffering and death of Jesus, Christians typically hear this parable as a judgment on the Jews that persecuted and killed many of the prophets and then finally killed God’s Son Jesus.

Christians also typically see themselves as the ones that got invited after the enraged King allowed the original wedding guests to be destroyed. Those with an eye on the ancient history of empires generally see the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the Jewish people in 70 AD as the reference here.

There may be a degree of truth in that understanding but it raises the danger of an anti-Semitic view of events unless we are careful: Christians can come over in a triumphalist light as the good people that accepted the King’s invitation – unlike those that went before them.

The problem with reading the parable in that way is that Jesus, his inner circle, and most of the early Christians were Jews. Jesus’ followers continued to gather for Jewish worship and observe God’s Law, not only prior to the crucifixion and resurrection, but after the ascension of Jesus and the birth of the Christian church at Pentecost. The separation of Christian Jews from Jewish synagogues came much later than the events in Matthew’s Gospel.

It’s very clear that within Matthew’s Gospel the rejection of Jesus by Jewish religious leaders is a key part of the events leading up to the trial, suffering, and death of Jesus and that’s an inescapable part of the story. It is also very clear that within Matthew’s Gospel the contrast is drawn between the joyous welcome given to Jesus on Palm Sunday and the bitter rejection of Jesus by another crowd at His crucifixion. The Son, the bridegroom, will soon be rejected and killed. The Scribes and Pharisees and the ordinary people who followed them, those initially chosen, disregarded the invitation to his kingdom. But Matthew doesn’t tell us this story in order to build up Christian antipathy towards Jews. Jewish Christians were the most significant part of the early church.

Remember that the Gospels were written sometime after the events, certainly at a time when the early church was sufficiently well established to need some advice on discipleship. I suspect that Matthew included this parable to address a general problem of hypocrisy – calling oneself a Christian and yet neither responding to the Lord’s invitation to His feast like those that stayed away in the story, nor being ready for the feast when one did show up.

Which brings us neatly to the man who turned up in the wrong outfit. That’s an odd element in the story, but it won’t be there by accident: nothing in a parable is there by chance. Some scholars argue that this wedding outfit needs to be seen as a daily putting on of repentant discipleship; repentant discipleship in word and deed and so this part of the parable is an implicit warning of hypocrisy. What’s being identified here is the person who claims Christ as saviour but doesn’t live that out in their daily life. God's gracious invitation always comes to us as we are, but we need to come not as we were. Grace is free, but it is not cheap. It involves change, what we’ve come to know as a spirit of penitence. If that’s not our mind-set, we’re the man who turned up in the wrong outfit.

This is a difficult parable because it seems to suggest on one level a wonderful inclusiveness in the love of God: all are invited to the feast and, of course, the feast is the Kingdom of Heaven. But the parable is also clear that not all are willing to accept the invitation. The parable becomes, then, a parable about transformation: changed lives through the grace of God by the Holy Spirit.

But the Holy Spirit does not force: she whispers, she nudges, she pleads, she persuades but she doesn’t force. In the end it is our own free-will which determines whether we accept the invitation or not. You refuse the invitation and you stay as you are. You accept the invitation and you put on a new garment for the occasion and you’re transformed as you attend the party: transformed to a new reality and a new way of life, the reality and the way of life which is that of the Kingdom of God. A kingdom in which love, justice, truth, mercy and holiness reign unhindered. These are the clothes we need to wear for the wedding and if we refuse to put them on, we’re saying we don’t belong at the party. That is the reality.

Sunday Sermon: Matthew 21.33-46 Another parable of the vinyard

Matthew 21.33-46

 

“Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

Before we look at the parable which is the focus of today’s Gospel passage, we need, perhaps, a little context: Jesus has just made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, hailed by the crowds as the Son of David, the fulfilment of their hopes, prophecies and dreams, coming in the name of the Lord to usher in the new world order. Then immediately after that, Jesus went into the Temple and overturned the tables of the traders and claimed that space back for God before continuing his healing ministry; showing that he had authority not just over the crowds and the religious institutions but authority over nature itself.

Let’s be clear: Jesus was clearly a threat to the religious and social leaders of the day. He was exhibiting enormous and miraculous powers, the crowds were absolutely enthralled by him, his courage and boldness in confronting the institutions of power was astounding.

But we need to remember that although we invariably see the religious authorities as blinkered, they were, to all intents and purposes, the good guys of the day as they sought to teach and to give a moral lead to God’s people and hold society together. In Jesus’ own terms they were close to the Kingdom of God: what was hampering them was their inability to step outside of the longstanding tradition of closely prescribed religious rules and regulations and show a human face in implementing the spirit and not just the letter of the law but they were hard, fixed, obstinate and resistant to the new revelation of what God was doing in their midst.  Jesus had already outmanoeuvred them over the question of his authority and had told a parable about a vineyard which effectively accused the religious authorities of dishonouring God to the extent that they were at the back of the queue for admission to the Kingdom of God, behind the prostitutes and tax collectors.

And of course, this was festival time just before the Passover, when Jerusalem was packed to bursting with pilgrims: all this was played out in public. The authorities were rattled because they understood what Jesus was saying and were furious. Matthew tells us that "They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet."

Wouldn’t you have liked to have been a fly on the wall there?

So today we pick up a second parable about the vineyard: Jesus is on a roll.

Nobody around Jesus at the time when he spoke this parable heard it without realizing that Jesus’ was quoting an earlier parable spoken long ago by the prophet Isaiah: “Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.” (Is. 5:1-7)  Jesus quotes the description of that vineyard almost precisely in the opening verses of the parable that he now speaks. Isaiah very explicitly says, “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel.” And the house of Israel has gone astray.

Isaiah’s very down to earth, very unambiguous about the problem between God and his vineyard: “He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, an outcry!”

“Now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard,” the Lord says, “I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and briers and thorns shall grow up.” In other words Israel’s evil actions or failure to act don’t simply make God feel bad about what’s happening: he’s getting ready to do something about it.

Those are hard words: words of concrete action and a determination to change thing. They aren’t mere words of anger, but the promise of angry and harsh reaction to the faithlessness of his people.

When Jesus takes hold of this very old parable through which all his hearers recognized the judgment of God held in suspension over Israel, he gives it a new twist.

Once again the owner builds and provides for his vineyard, just as in the parable by Isaiah. But this time he leaves it, fully operational, in the hands of tenants who are to care for this profitable enterprise and there’s quite clearly an agreement between the two that the future profits are to be divided in some way between the renters and the owner.

In the following story it’s clear that Jesus refers to the prophets when he speaks of those who are sent to the vineyard by the owner to “collect the rent.” It is equally clear that without fail the prophets of God are rejected, beaten and even killed. The renters have come to think of themselves as the owners of the vineyard and resent the true owner’s constant insistence on receiving his rightful due.

It seems implausible that the owner would put up for long with such treatment of the servants he sent to collect the rent. Even more incomprehensible is the fact that he sends his son as a last resort, thinking that those who rejected his servants would honour the son.

Is it possible to imagine God’s long-suffering and patience through the ages, given this mistreatment of both his vineyard and those sent to collect the rent? Or is it possible to imagine God’s willingness to send his son into the midst of this rebel group of workers? Isn’t it the height of conceit and overconfidence, in fact, when the tenants say, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.” Then at the height of their smugness “they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.” It is an obvious reference to the fact that Jesus was crucified “outside the city gate.”

Today’s parable has a past, a present and a future in it:

The “past” is nothing other than the long history of God’s patient calling of his people through his prophets to be faithful, to serve him, to care for the vineyard of which Isaiah spoke with such lament: one that had been claimed for their own by the very ones to whose care it had been entrusted.

The “present” was incarnated in the speaker of the parable. It was Jesus who had come from the Father to claim what was rightfully the Father’s. It was Jesus who was being rejected, who would be killed “outside the city gates.” He spoke to the tenants, the chief priests and the Pharisees who “perceived that he was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet.” It would be through his suffering, death and resurrection that the “present” would be the time for reclaiming the vineyard for the Father and the shaping of the new possibility that only God could make of this vineyard. The “fertile hill” upon which this vineyard was being built anew was surely none other than Calvary.

That vineyard, then, was to be the “future” of this parable. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.” With these words from Psalm 118, equally recognized by all around, just as they had recognized the words of the prophet Isaiah, Jesus set forth the future: “I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.”

The vineyard wasn’t destroyed. Instead, it was given to others who would return to the owner the share of the fruits rightfully due him and it’s you and I, the ones gathered here and those others gathered all around the world, who are the “future” which Jesus spoke of. It was for us that he was crucified and rose again. It was for the sake of a kingdom no longer bounded by geographical lines or genealogical heritage, but by faith fostered by the Spirit in the saving death and resurrection of the one who spoke this parable, that the events following the speaking of this parable took place. For Jesus spoke this parable in the very shadow of the cross, between Palm Sunday and Good Friday; during the time between the ecstatic welcoming of the Son of David into the Holy City and the time when the cry “Crucify him” would become the shout with which he was thrown out of the city. There, outside the city gate, death itself would be overcome. There the sin of rejecting this vineyard’s owner would be atoned for and “other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons” would be put in charge of this “vineyard on a very fertile hill.”

So how does this parable of Jesus apply to us today in our world some twenty-one centuries later?

We too silence the messengers of God to us, especially when they tell us unpleasant things about our lives. That what we are doing isn’t right. We all have those people who come to us and are honest with us about things which are imperfect in our lives.

The prophets of God in our lives are not usually priests or bishops. Rather, the messengers of God to us are usually must closer and nearer, like a wife, a husband, a child, a parent, a longstanding friend: those who have the willingness to be honest with us.

And deep down inside, we often want to silence the honesty of God’s messengers to us. We’re like the Pharisees in that we want to silence the voices of the messengers of God to us or to our nation, or about our nation. Yes, we often want to silence those messengers from God who tell us the truth about our country and how it’s perceived by our friends and allies as well as our enemies abroad.

We’re to be the channels of God’s care: the way we care and exercise concern for others is the “rent” owed by the tenants: “He looked for justice and for righteousness.” Isaiah said. 

These are the fruits which he still looks for when he calls for the rent in his vineyard today. These aren’t outdated ideas. They continue to call us to care for our neighbour in the forms that we call “love.” That is not a sentimentally emotional word about “feeling good” toward our neighbour; about “wishing the best for those who are suffering;” about “warm feelings” toward the needy. The “fruits of the vineyard” have to do with the way we live our lives daily in our various neighbourhoods: in our homes, at work, in our hobbies, in those random chats in the post office or at the bus stop.

Perhaps James was thinking of this parable when he wrote in his letter, “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith, but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” 

The master still owns the vineyard and we, the church of today, are the ones the welfare of the vineyard has been passed on to. But the servants of the Lord keep coming, asking of us the recognition that God still owns the vineyard and that we are still only the people who have been temporarily entrusted with its care.

Sunday Sermon: Matthew 21:23-32 The authority of Jesus

Matthew 21:23-32

 

When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” Jesus said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things. “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?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.

Jesus has just made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, hailed by the crowds as the Son of David, the fulfilment of their hopes and prophecies and dreams, coming in the name of the Lord to usher in the new world order. Then immediately after that, Jesus went into the Temple and overturned the tables of the traders and claimed that space back for God. Then he continued his healing ministry; showing that he had authority not just over the crowds and the religious institutions but authority over nature itself.

Is it any wonder then, in the light of all this exhibition of power, that we read the opening words of our passage today: “When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, ‘By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?’”

Jesus was clearly a threat to the religious and social leaders of the day. He was exhibiting enormous and miraculous powers, the crowds were absolutely enthralled by him, his courage and boldness in confronting the institutions of power was astounding. Of course they would want to question his authority.

And the questioning comes out of the security they felt in their own authority. They were the leaders. The Chief Priests were in a spiritual lineage that went all the way back to Moses. The Scribes were the most learned theologians in Jewish society. The Elders had years of experience and had the unquestioning respect of the people.

We need to remember that although we invariably see the religious authorities as blinkered, they were, to all intents and purposes, the good guys of the day as they sought to teach and to give a moral lead to God’s people and hold society together. In Jesus’ own terms they were close to the Kingdom of God: what was hampering them was their inability to step outside of the longstanding tradition of closely prescribed religious rules and regulations and show a human face in implementing the spirit and not just the letter of the law.

These were the religious insiders.  Although the parallel is not exact, these people were in some senses the churchy people, and there’s a difference in style between what he says to the outsiders and what he says to the insiders, what he says to the poor and to the rich. The words to the poor lift them up. The words to the rich challenge them and critique them. The poor and the sick and the meek inherit the earth. The rich and arrogant will be the last to enter the kingdom of heaven.

The first dialogue that Matthew shares has Jesus involved in a bit of ding-dong with a rabbinical crowd. Jesus rarely used this approach much to the surprise of listeners who said, “He doesn’t talk like the teachers of the Law, but he speaks with authority.” It’s a rare moment when Jesus participates in the traditional rabbinical style of argument. The rabbis say to him “where do you get the right to say and do this stuff!” Jesus responds in this debating style, “Where did John get the right to do what he did?” And then, the rabbis begin to debate, amongst themselves, “If we say “from God,” then he’ll say, “why didn’t you believe him?” And if we say, “from men,” the crowd won’t like it and they’ll attack us.” So they couldn’t come up with an answer. And Jesus tells them, “I won’t give you one either.” He understood his audience: they were the religious in-crowd, so he met them on their terms and debated with them as they were used to debating with each other, and when it came to it, they were speechless and defenceless in the face of a very simple question. They claimed authority and power and privilege over the people, but their chief concern was to protect their standing in society and to protect their reputations. They felt threatened by Jesus because his authority was of a completely different kind to what they were used to: it was worked out in his welcoming of sinners and prostitutes; it was worked out in his welcoming of children; it was worked out in his welcoming of the outcasts and those on the margins and ultimately, the authority of Jesus was worked out in a life of service, not ruling; a life hallmarked by betrayal and personal sacrifice, rejection, torture and a criminal’s death on the cross. That is where the authority of Jesus lay: not in some sort of power game full of rules that brought with it prestige and wealth and the respect of the people.

The religious leaders had never seen anything like that before and had no idea how to respond to it.

In that encounter, we have a lesson for all politicians and religious leaders and all those who hold positions of authority in society today. The claims of the Gospel are intense and all of us in political and spiritual leadership are called to moments of decision that will have profound impact for our future. Are we prepared to stand up for what is true and right in the eyes of God and to live out our ministries by the standards of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Or will we seek to deny the truth in order to protect our power and position and status in the eyes of society, or our electorate, or our congregation? Spiritual and political leadership demand courage to do what is right - often at the expense of personal gain and popularity.

The challenge to us in this passage is the extent to which we are prepared to develop our gifts and position in this community to love and to serve those in need rather than to seek prestige and honour and respect from others. That’s the ultimate value that underpins the work of God’s mission, as Jesus goes on to outline in the second part of this passage with the parable he now goes on to give his hearers.

Here’s it’s a story about two bad boys. Boys don’t change much, so the story stands the test of time. The father asks the boys to work in the vineyard. One says—he will, but he doesn’t. The other says he won’t, but he changes his mind and does. “Which one, “Jesus asks, “did what the father asks?”  But, there’s a catch to this parable that is easy to miss: Jesus wants his hearers to make a choice between the sons; which one has done the right thing and which one has done the wrong thing. The choice is simple: a son who disobeys his father by saying ‘No’ to him, but then changes his mind and a son who says ‘Yes’ to his father, but then doesn’t go on to do what he said. Which is the better son?

To us, the choice is obvious: the better son is the first one, who first says ‘No’ but goes on to do the right thing. But that wasn’t the obvious choice for his first hearers because the first son who said ‘No’ would have brought real shame and embarrassment on his father by disobeying him. Yes, he went on to do the right thing in the end but in terms of undermining the social standing of his father in the eyes of the community, the damage had been done in his initial refusal to obey. So, in reality, the behaviour of the first son was no better than the second son: they were both equally guilty in the eyes of their father.

But Jesus wants the religious people to choose between them; they are both equally sinful – but which one is more likely to be redeemed in the eyes of the father? In the light of that, there is only one choice to make: redemption and forgiveness is available to the son who at first disobeys and embarrasses his father but is not available to the son who mocks his father,  and continues to mock him, by his refusal to do what is asked of him.

So this isn’t a parable about the choices we make so much as a parable about the need to honour the Father and to give him his due.

And the key word in this passage comes in verse 29: “But later he changed his mind and went…” The phrase ‘changed his mind’ is not a particularly good translation of the Greek. A more literal translation would be to say: “Later he changed what he cared about and went…”

And that is the key idea here. When this son said ‘No’ to his father, all he really cared about was his own comfort, his own way of living. But later, he changed what he cared about and chose instead to care for the honour of his father and then went out into the vineyard to work for him.

At the heart of this passage is a simple question: What do you care about? What do I care about? Are we like the religious leaders to whom Jesus is talking, whose primary care is for social standing and personal reputation and the comforts that come with a lifestyle of relative privilege? Or is our primary concern going to be for the honour of our Father God who asks us to go out and work for him in the vineyard of his Kingdom? If our primary concern is for the honour of God, we’ll be called out of our comfort zone and we’ll need to undertake some work for him. But that’s what he asks of us.

And the message of this parable is that, if we respond to the call of the Father and change our concern from us to him, then we will be acceptable to him, regardless of what we have done in the past. All of us have said ‘No’ to God in the past. But as soon as we say ‘Yes’ to him, the past is washed away and no longer counts against us in his sight. It doesn’t matter what our past contains: all that matters is the ‘Yes’. And that’s why Jesus is then able to say what he does in verse 31: “Truly I tell you, the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

The religious leaders to whom Jesus was speaking were still locked into their ‘No’ to God and so, until they changed their concern, there was no hope of them entering the kingdom of God. But the sinners and those on the margins of society had changed their concern and turned their ‘No’ into a ‘Yes’ and so they were perfectly acceptable to God

What about us? Are we too fearful of saying Yes to God? Do we think the secrets of our past or the shame of our present life is too much for him? That’s not the message in this passage and that’s not the message of the Christian Gospel.

The past is gone – the present can be healed. All God wants is a ‘Yes’, so we can let him yet further into our lives so we can experience his love and his healing power.