The Living Bible

April 28, 2024            5^th Sunday of Easter

2 Timothy 3:10-17          Jeremiah 31:31-34

            I really admire the Bible.  It’s one of the few books of ancient history that records what a group of people went through over 2,000 years in a significant area of the world.  It gives us history, philosophy, and theology.  It has one of the greatest love poems in the world.  It has stories of politics, battles won and lost, betrayal, murder, sneaky scams, and horrendous acts of genocide.  There are heroic men and women along with great villains.  It has natural disasters like plagues and earthquakes.  It has the evolution of the Jewish religion, and then the story of the early Christian religion. It has mystical encounters with the spirit of the universe that we call God.  

It is an incredibly honest book about the follies of people and the follies of nations.  You aren’t supposed to like all the characters and agree with their actions.  There are people in this book that you’re supposed to feel outrage and disgust towards.  Those characters and their actions were left there deliberately to show and warn us about what NOT to do and what their wrong actions lead to.

The written Bible probably started in about 1,000 BCE, when King David united the 12 tribes into a nation with a central capital of Jerusalem.  Now, when you have a centralized government, you need to be in touched with the other parts of your nation and keep records of what was going on.  This is when the scribal tradition really became important and scribal schools were started.  Probably at this time the book of Deuteronomy was recorded from oral history, to give an official history of the Jews in Israel.  It summarizes Israel coming out of Egypt, being given the law by God, and the wandering in the desert.  The other two books that were probably written at this time were proverbs and psalms.  They were used in the scribal schools to teach kids, mostly boys, how to read and write.  Although, we do know that some girls were given an education because we have the historic character of Hulda, in 2 Chronicles 34, who is consulted by the court to verify a book of law that is discovered.  

From that start the Bible expanded over the centuries to 66 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament.  So, what are we supposed to do with this huge collection of stories and teachings?  Despite all the neat stuff that’s in it, it’s a very daunting book to tackle.  Also, what stories and scriptures are we supposed to admire and use to lift and guide us to be more holy, and what stories are we supposed to use as lessons in what NOT to do?   Sometimes that distinction is a bit murky.  And how can we work with it as a guide and not as a dogmatic sledgehammer. 

            And I do mean sledgehammer.  This book was used in the 17^th century to justify the burning of women and men as witches in Europe and the hanging of people in Salem Massachusetts.  There have been some pretty nasty things done in the name of God and justified with this book.  So how do we keep ourselves from doing that?

            I think the first thing we need to ask ourselves is: What is the purpose of using this book? Reading or not reading the Bible isn’t going to get you forgiven or into heaven.  As Paul said, we are forgiven by God’s grace, through Jesus’ sacrifice.  But what this book will do for you is help you to understand the story of God’s salvation and how much God loves you; how much Jesus loves you; and how much the Holy Spirit is with you.  So, it does help us stay connected to God.

            Some people say that once we are saved, we have to obey the rules set down in the Bible and keep up good works so that we can be assured that we will go to heaven.  That’s a very legalistic view of salvation: If you keep to the straight and narrow and rack up the points through good works, when you die you will step over into heaven.  But, we’re only human and we make mistakes.  I hope that for every mistake I make that might hurt someone, that somehow I’ll balanced it with a good deed or two.  But two rights do not erase a wrong.  A wrong is only sponged away from my soul by admitting the wrong and asking God to forgiven me.  And with that forgiveness I believe that I am given the strength to change my behavior, and to try to repair whatever damage I made.  I hope then that I can learn to go forward as a little less of a selfish and hurtful human being.  It is by the grace of God’s love that I am saved, not by the amount of good points I rack up.

            Remember the story that Jesus told of the two men at prayer in the synagogue?  The pharisee says: I thank you Lord that I am not like that sinner over there. And then he lists all of his good works.  He thought that to be holy he had to rack up holy-action points.  The other man simply weeps, beats his chest, and says: God forgive me for I am a Sinner.  Jesus asks, which of them came away justified, or made right with God?  The implication being – it was the man who knew he had sinned and wanted to change.   

And yet, Jesus’s brother, James says, faith without works is dead.  James didn’t mean that we aren’t saved by God grace or that works are what save us.  He means that once you’re saved you do good works to express your love for other people, which in turn strengthens your faith and your connection to God.  

So, we have to realize that scripture it’s not just a collection of do and don’ts.  It reveals to us how to connect to God through our living of faith through our actions.  

But we shouldn’t follow scripture blindly.  To put our faith into action we should also look at how it’s illuminated by tradition.  The Bible gives many examples of traditional actions.  Feeding the poor, tending to the sick, helping those who are in prison or who are in trouble.  Taking care of widows and orphans, which we can translate to be the most vulnerable in our society.   The prophet Micah says: We should do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.  In other words: our tradition should  always be concerned about creating a fair and equal society; we should show love every chance we get; and through worship we should connect with God regularly.

That is part of experiencing our faith.  But, our experiences of faith aren’t the same.  Some people come to the realization of their faith very early in life, some later, and some not even until the end.  Do you remember the parable Jesus told, about the landowner who hired some people in the morning, some in the afternoon, and some in the evening?   The weird, Whaaat? moment about that parable was that they all got the same reward at the end.  That story tells us that we’re all in different places on our journey to God, but God is still going to lift up all of us with the same support of Jesus’s teachings, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.   Each of us understands different aspects of our faith in a different ways and times, but those differences don’t invalidate each other’s faith or the way it’s shaped. 

And that also means that we are able to reason out what the words of this book mean for us at this time.  Reason is important because there are people who will follow the Bible literally.  They believe that we have to get back to living with the laws of 2,000 years ago as if the human experience, knowledge, and conditions of two millennia doesn’t matter.  When you do that, you are deifying the Bible; you are making the Bible God.  This book is an important connection to God, but God is an entity that is separate and beyond it.  The Bible helps us understand God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, but it’s not the Trinity.  God gave us our minds, our logic and discernment, and our ability to evaluate our experiences.  And in that evaluation, we can understand the Bible better and what it means to us.

But finally, what is our purpose as Christians?  Bringing together my reading of the scripture: my looking at the traditions within the Bible and within the history of Christian faith; my experience of my faith; and my reasoning that I’ve applied to all of it, has led me to my purpose.  I believe that as a Christian I am supposed to be working on building God’s Kingdom on earth.  I know I’m not expected to do it alone or be the one who saves the universe.  My job is to lay a few bricks by trying to treat people fairly and to promote equality; by loving people who need to be loved; and by working on creating safe spaces where people can sit with their faith and connect to God.  I don’t have to do it in a church, I can do that anywhere, but I do think churches are important because they should be safe spaces where we, individually and as a community, can connect to God.

I hope that you can develop a relationship with this book.  I hope that you can look at it and see the adventure stories in it.  I hope that you can look at it and understand that the history is both good and bad and is honest because of that.  I hope that you can find comfort in its pages when you need it.  I hope that you can find guidance and moments when you will be uplifted by its words.  The Bible is not going to be all things for everyone, but it can be something for you.  So don’t be afraid to delve into it.  Enjoy it, question it, work through the problems in it, and you’ll find that it will help you work through your problems and get you closer to God.

Hearing the Holy Spirit

April 21, 2024     4^th Sunday of Easter

Romans 5:1-5              John 14:15-26

One of the hardest subjects to preach about is the Holy Spirit.  God is easy to preach about because God is our creator.  I can always talk about the beautiful examples in this world, from sunsets to the glorious Catskill mountains.  Jesus is easy to preach about because we have his words and deeds, and we can relate them to our lives.  But how do you describe the Holy Spirit?  

            You can find a lot of poetic references to the Holy Spirit.  The Bible talks about the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus like a dove during his baptism.  At Pentecost the Holy Spirit is described as a mighty wind, which roars through the neighborhood and brings tongues of fire that alighted on people.  The Spirit gives them the ability to speak languages that they didn’t know before so that they could go out and begin to do ministry in other parts of the world.

       John Wesley described the Holy Spirit as a warming of his heart that allowed him to know that God’s presence was near him, and the certainty of God’s purpose for him.  Some modern descriptions say the Holy Spirit is a God’s breeze, which means that you feel that God is pushing you in a certain direction or showing you where you need to go.  Some people say they’ve heard a God’s whisper, where they feel that God has spoken to them either through a feeling or voice within.  I’ve heard people use the expression: The answer to my problem came to me and it felt so right.  They describe an absolute certainty that settled on their being when they knew they were doing the right thing in the right way.  

            But even if a gentle or mighty wind happens to you; even if your heart is warmed; even if you feel or hear a whisper how do you know that the Spirit is communicating with you?  How do you know that you are truly being led to God’s purpose?  How do you know that you are reading God’s message right?

            We all know that history – not just our present day – is full of tragic incidences where people claimed that they’ve heard God telling them to pick up a weapon and destroy people with it.  (Just look at the Crusades.)  People who believed in their hearts that they are Christians have walked into Jewish synagogues and done this.  Or there was that incident of a white Christian who walked into a black church and killed a whole bunch of people at a Bible study.  Now I admit that these actions are the extreme actions of the question.  But those people truly believed that they were somehow being led by God and doing God’s work.  How can we recognize the Spirit working in us, and faithfully follow the messages, and keep ourselves on a right path and away from a wrong destructive one? 

       I’ve talked with people who say: You just have to rely on faith to know what you should do.  I have nothing against faith.  The definition of faith is the complete trust or confidence in something and a belief that something is going to happen, even if I don’t have the proof for it.  The faith and belief that God is going to help me through difficult times sustains me.  But I don’t think God wants us to blindly and impulsively follow our feelings because they happen to feel good or right in the moment.  God gave us the ability to think our way through problems, and to evaluate our situations and our conditions, before arriving at a conclusion and an action.  

       I’m not saying that we should disregard those God breezes and whispers; I’m saying we should look at them before we leap.

       That’s not easy to do sometimes, but I think the two scriptures that we read today show us a little bit about how we can recognize the Spirit, and discern and understand what God is telling us, when he speaks to us through the Holy Spirit.  Jesus says: I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.  This is the Spirit of truth.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, so truth is what we have to look for.

            Jesus then says that if we love him, we’ll keep his commandments, which are the building blocks of how to live a loving life.  The first three Commandments are about our relationship with God.  First, we love God with all our being.  But because it’s hard to love such a great and powerful being that we cannot see and touch, God tells us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  So, we have a triangular relationship of love in our lives: God loves us, and we show our love to God, by loving and treating ourselves and others with respect.  And when we love ourselves and others, we are loving God.  So, the first way we can evaluate if the Spirit is speaking to us is to say: Does this thought or action promote love?

            The next commandment is to not set up a false idol; something that you put before your love of God.  In the old days people might have thought that was talking about foreign gods.  But I think a shopaholic’s idol might be clothing and jewelry, or someone might be obsessed with having the latest gaming system.  Do these things take aways from your love and care of others? If it is, it becomes an idol.  Likewise, the action of not giving yourself a chance to connect with God on a Sabbath day is also going to pull you away from your relationship with God.  Plus, murder, adultery, stealing, lying about people, disrespecting those who love you, and actively scheming to get what other people have, is not going to promote loving relationships with anyone.

            So you see, we can hold up the idea of what we think the holy spirit wants us to do, next to the commandments.  If that action goes against a commandment, then don’t do it!

            The thing about listening to the Holy Spirit is that you have to train yourself to do it.  That’s what Paul is talking about in Romans.  Is it easy to be a loving person in a world full of egotism, narcissism, and hate?  No, it’s really hard.  Paul says that if you try to live as a loving person in a world that doesn’t think that love is valuable then you’re going to have difficulties and maybe even suffer for your faith.  

       But Paul says that difficulties and suffering produce endurance.  He’s not talking about enduring more suffering – he’s saying that when we practice being loving people, we get better at being loving people for longer periods of time.  We are going to have moments when we lose our tempers, but the more we practice loving thoughts and actions, the longer we endure being loving people against an unloving world.  

And that endurance is a positive feedback loop.  It makes our characters more loving, and more holy, and better able to receive and understand the messages of the Spirit.  The result is that when we become loving people, we produce hope for ourselves and for others.  The more love that has been poured into our hearts, the more we understand what the Spirit wants us to do.

       Being a Christian isn’t just a declaration of who you were raised to be.  Being a Christian is a practice.  Being a disciple of Christ means you follow the discipline of Christ by living the third Great Commandment that Jesus gave to us: To love others as Jesus loves us.  So, is your Holy Spirit breeze or whisper reflecting an action that will help you love others as Jesus would?

       Faith is not just a feeling, it’s an experience of working with and inside God’s love.  The Holy Spirit is a reflection of God’s love which helps us to see how to use that love.  When you think of a loving action, that’s the Holy Spirit working in you.  When you are inspired by the beauty of God’s creation, that the Holy Spirit working in you.  When something says to you: look in the Bible for inspiration, or pray about something, that’s the Holy Spirit guiding you.  When you get a flash of insight that gives you an answer to a problem that will help you and others, that’s the Holy Spirit talking to you.  And you can know that all those things are the workings of the Spirit because you can litmus-test them against the Commandments of love.

            And sometimes the Holy Spirit teaches you a lesson.  One year I contacted a new coffee shop in town to ask if they wanted to participate in my church’s silent-auction.  I admit that I went in with prejudice.  This coffee shop was a branch of one that was in a more “prestigious” town that served the New York City population, and I was sure that the owner wouldn’t be interested in helping our small, local church.  They gave us a $75.00 gift card for our auction.  And I told the chair of our event: That’s the Spirit hitting me upside the head for my negative and unloving thinking.

       Don’t discount the Spirit – it knows what it’s doing, and what you need; and maybe it even knows what you don’t think you need.  

            Yes, the Holy Spirit is a little difficult to hear, to see, and to figure out.  But by practicing love, those breezes and whispers will eventually become mighty winds and roars in your life. And they’ll support you as you make your way through the world with love.

The Redeeming Keys

April 14, 2024            3^rd Sunday of Easter w/ Communion

1 Peter 1:18-21         Matthew 16: 13-20

            This is one of the scriptures that is usually read during the Easter season because it’s the passage where Jesus assigns to Simon Peter the authority to be the head of the new church after Jesus is gone.  What this passage does is set Peter up for his take-charge moment on Pentecost, when he explains to the crowd what the Holy Spirit is giving to all the people. 

            This position is given to Peter in two sentences. First, Jesus says: I will call you Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.  Second, he says: I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  

            Now what jumped out at me was the image of keys.  Why keys?  What’s so important about the key image, and how do they relate to the kingdom of heaven?  The authors of the Bible were very specific about the images they used, so, I decided to take a look at them.

            In general, the idea of giving a key to someone means that you’re giving them one or more of three things: Accessibility, knowledge, and authority.

            Let’s look at accessibility.  One of the oldest ideas of accessibility is giving someone a key to a city.  It represents opening the gate in the wall that surrounds the city.  When you give someone the key to a city, you’re saying: You are welcome here; please come and enjoy yourself and we accept you as one of our own.  We also use the image emotionally; That we give someone the key to our heart, or someone has the key to our heart.  The other person has proved that they understand us, and we now emotionally let them in.

            Knowledge is the second idea of the key.  Something gives us the means to unlock knowledge.  For instance, the discovery that we have genes, unlocked our ability to know where our blue eyes and brown hair comes from, or to analyze diseases and figure out how to cure them.  Einstein’s E=MC² unlocked our understanding of how atoms, electrons, ions, and protons work.  

            And knowledge and accessibility work very much together.  

For Christians, the knowledge and understanding of the gospel message is how we unlock our accessibility to God.  Peter says to Jesus: You are the Messiah.  When we understand all the implications of what Jesus being our Messiah does for us, we end up being saved and redeemed.  We are saved because we understand that our sins and our fear of death no longer have control over our thoughts and actions.  And we are redeemed because that salvation puts us back onto the right path of goodness.  We’re no longer condemned to walk on a wrong path of sin for the rest of our lives and we can switch to a good path because of God’s grace.

            The third key is authority, specifically the authority of the steward.  In ancient cultures, when we moved from a hunter-gatherer society into the agrarian-communal society, it was recognized that someone had to be the manager of the food and the supplies for the community.  This appointed person is the steward.   In the family unit it was usually given to a senior woman of the household who was in fact often called “the keeper of the keys.”  And when a woman got to be older and she could no longer manage the household, she would often publicly pass on the keys to her daughter or daughter-in-law, signifying to everyone that this person now had the responsibility to manage all the supplies of the household.

In Jesus’ time the steward was given to a man with the authority to manage an estate or business.  He was expected to manage the work, collect rent, manage the buildings, and pay people their wages.  He was responsible for bringing in, or binding, resources that were needed, and letting loose things that needed to be distributed, or were no longer needed.  Of course he wasn’t the final authority – that was the landowner, and the tenants or employees could always appeal to the landlord.  But usually, it was the Steward who would mediate between the landlord and the tenants, and who received his instructions from the landlord and saw that things that needed to get done were done.  

Because Peter has said: You are the Messiah, Jesus knows that Peter understands the core message of the Gospel.  Plus, Jesus must have really trusted Peter, and seen him as someone who, in spite of his occasional impulsiveness, would uphold the message, and was someone who would work with others for the good of the movement that Jesus had started.   

Jesus publicly appoints him the steward of the future church through two actions.  First, by giving him the new name of Peter.  It’s a very old tradition that if you give someone a high-ranking job that you grant them a new name to signify that their life has changed with greater responsibility.  Second, even though Jesus might not have physical keys on him he is telling Peter in front of everyone that he is being given those keys to the Kingdom of heaven.  The disciples would have understood that Peter now has the access, knowledge, and authority of a steward.

Now that’s a very nice little summary of what’s going on in the story.  Peter might have started the church in Rome but how many offshoots of the church are there now?  The church from the time of Jesus and Peter has evolved and what do those keys mean for us?  Well, I like to think that Jesus not only conferred the keys of the Kingdom on Peter, but also on all of his disciples, leading down to us.  

Jesus taught us that the Kingdom of God is accessible for all of us.  And we can take steps to open up that accessibility.  When you’re baptized you’re opened up to let the Holy Spirit work within you.  We go to church we learn about God and are given the knowledge about what it means for each of us to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God.  If we believe and accept the gospel message of Jesus’ gift of salvation and redemption, we then choose to be confirmed in our faith.  That opens the door to more accessibility about who God is and what it means to be working our lives with that divine power.  

And finally, one of the big things we learn in our life is stewardship.  How to manage ourselves and our lives so that we can be children of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.  

When we are kind to ourselves and others, we are being good stewards of our faith.  When we take care of our families and those who love us, and also those who don’t love us, we are being good stewards of our faith.  When we help our neighbors, we are being good stewards of our faith.  When we support the parts that make up our communities, like our church, and schools, and local businesses, we are being good stewards of our faith.  When we support charities, like our food bank and Heart of the Catskills, we are being good stewards of our faith.  When we protect our environment, we are being good stewards of the wonderful gift of this world that God has given to us.  And when we stand up to injustice, even if it’s as local as bullying in our school, or as large as supporting equal opportunities for people who have none in the world, we are being good stewards of our faith.

Now, God doesn’t ask you to do everything, all at once, all the time.  But when we are mindful of what we do in the moment in front of us; when we remember that we can choose not to sin; and we choose to live in God’s grace, we put ourselves on a continual path of redemption. 

Jesus gave all of us the keys, but we make the decision of how we use them to open the door to God and His kingdom.  Today we’re going to have communion, so as you come up and have your supper with God, I invite you to open your heart to the accessibility of God’s love for you; the knowledge of God’s love for you; and the care the God keeps you with his love, and the love that you can give to others. With those keys you are on the direct road to God’s Kingdom.

What Are We Saved From?

March 13, 2024         Easter Sunday

Psalm 118:14-24       John 20:1-18

If someone from another planet came to earth, they might think that with all the tinsel, parties, and gift giving, that Christmas is the most important Christian holiday.  But since the beginning of Christianity, Easter has always been the main holiday.  Before 567 C.E. when the Council of Tours designated the twelve days between December 25 and Epiphany, Christmas was only celebrated sporadically.

But Easter!  Easter was our beginning.  Easter was the big joyful celebration of Jesus over-coming death and emerging from the tomb triumphant and alive!  Easter was the proof-positive of all that Jesus had preached in his Gospel: That Jesus was indeed the son of God; that there was an eternal life that Jesus had opened the door to, which we could be a part of; that the conditions of the world could change; and that God had willing made the sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins.

Since I was little, every year I heard the same pronouncement: Christ died on the cross for our sins, and he was resurrected, and now we have salvation.  You know, sometimes you hear the same words over and over again, and we just assume that they’re valued and truthful.  But I bet if you asked someone: what are we saved from? could they really tell you?   I know I couldn’t for a long time, and it kept me from being a Christian.  Not understanding that phrase kept me from really seeing the Good News.  

I started my own personal exploration with the pronouncement: Jesus has saved us from our sins.  I’ll preach about sin in detail another time – I mean whole books have been written about that subject.  But as an English teacher I always like to start by defining terms and I came up with my definition that sin is an inflection of negativity on another person or myself.  

You can have spontaneous inflections, when you hurt people without meaning to; that’s just a mistake.  There are systemic inflections, like when a university won’t accept students of a different gender or race because we all know those people aren’t as smart as we are.  And there is strategic inflection, when you decide and plan to do something that is going to hurt others to benefit yourself; like the landlord in the parable who charged such a high interest rate that people couldn’t work off their debts and were in slavery to him forever. 

Judeo-Christianity starts from the premise that humans were created in the image of a loving God and therefore we are meant to be good.  But because we’re not perfect, we’re going to make mistakes.  And because we live in a world of brokenness and often desperation, we’re sometimes lured off the path of goodness, which involves helping others, into the path of sin, which is using others for our own gain.  

But because we are made to be good, when we hurt people, we feel guilty about our actions, and we want to make amends and fix things.  But all of us carry the part of us that doesn’t want to admit we’re wrong, because when we admit we’re wrong we feel terrible.  We feel like failures, that we’re not good, and will never get anything right.  We feel unworthy of friendship and love, and we fear that even an apology or an attempt to make things right, will not make things right.  Sometimes we mess up so badly that it seems that the apology and the repentance would even cause more damage to ourselves and others.  We start to believe we can never be forgiven for what we’ve done and get ourselves back to goodness.  

            The ancient Hebrews had a system to get over this unworthiness, shame, and guilt that we can carry around inside.  They made sacrifices at the temple.  Depending on what you did wrong and how wealthy you were, the sacrifice could be anything from a handful of flour to a large bull.  The sacrifice to God was supposed to be something that costs you to prove to God that you really wanted to be forgiven.  But that’s only the beginning of process.  Once you got right with God you were supposed to repent – go in another direction – and fix the problem, knowing that God is on your side and is going to help you fix the problem.  

            That system worked for quite a long time.  The problem was it became more exacting and more difficult for the average person to do.  So, God sent us Jesus who says over and over to people: You are forgiven.  And then he said at the Last Supper: I am the sacrifice for all of it, all you have to do is believe that I sacrificed myself for you.  Yes, there is still a system.  When we do something wrong, we go to Jesus, and we say: Jesus I messed up I and I’m really sorry about it.  Please forgive me and give me the strength to help make some of it right again.  

            The great glory of Jesus’ death is that we don’t need a priest or an elaborate ritual to stand between ourselves and God, we just need humble and willing hearts, and we are assured that Jesus will listen to us, forgive us, and show us a way to become God’s children of goodness again.   

            You see Jesus gives us the way out of the spiraling-down trap of believing that we are unworthy of living and that we are unworthy of love.  And when we believe that we are unworthy of love, where do we end up?  Despair is at the bottom of that horrible pit.  I really believe that despair is the blackest emotion there is, because it destroys hope and doesn’t allow hope to live within us.  

            Think about the disciples on the day after Jesus’s crucifixion.  They were absolutely shattered.  Jesus gave them so many promises.  He told them that he was the Messiah.  Wasn’t the Messiah the person who was supposed to free them from the tyranny of the Romans and a corrupt temple that only seemed to take from the poor and never give anything back?  Wasn’t he supposed to become the king who would straighten out the social injustices of a corrupt system that oppressed 80 percent of the population?

            Now he’s dead and every hope has been shattered, and they are fearing for their lives. Are they going to be next?  Have the last three years been for nothing?  They were in the depths of despair; right down in the place where there is no hope.  

And then the women come back from the tomb with this incredible message.  The door is open, the body is gone, but it hasn’t been stolen or confiscated – Jesus is alive!  And everything that they thought was wrong is now right.  They not only have hope again, they are now living with sure and certain hope.  Jesus is the son of God; there is an eternal life that Jesus has opened the door to, and we can be a part of it.  Because of that sure and certain hope the conditions of the world can be changed; and we no longer have to live with the despair that our sins create for us.  Despair is no longer the tyrant over who and what we are.

            With his resurrection we are given proof-positive that God forgives us and loves us.  Our sins no longer have to drive us into despair, because if Jesus and God love us, we can love ourselves.  And with that love we are given the strength to go out into the world and fix the problems of our own making and of other people.  We are saved from despair.

            The world of the devil doesn’t want to hear that!  Advertisers want you to despair that you don’t have enough, and therefore you are not worthy, so you need to buy what they offer.  Politicians want you to despair that the world is so messed up that it can’t be fixed so that they can stay in power.  And that you have no power to cause positive change. Bullies don’t want you to believe that you are as strong or as worthy as they are.  They want you in despair so that they can continue to oppress.

            Don’t you believe it!  You never have to live in despair.  Jesus has proved to you that his message was real by his resurrection.  So now we can live in hope.  The great gift of the resurrection is that we can always walk with the love, hope, and the eternal strength of the renewing energy of God.  We might stumble, we might fall, but we can always get back up with God.  As Christians we always live in a state of resurrection and every morning for us is Easter.  So today open your hearts and live in the eternal power and glory of Jesus’ love for you. 

Easter Sunrise Service 2024

Think about the haste that the disciples had to go through when they put Jesus in the tomb.  They had to quickly take him down from the cross and hurriedly wash him and then wrap him in linins before they could lay him into the tomb.  This all had to be done by sunset before the Sabbath could begin.  The normal preparations were rushed, and everyone was thinking: We’ll do the best we can and then go back home and hopefully on Sunday we’ll be allowed to go back and prepare the body. 

From Friday night to Saturday at sundown, and then again for about another 9 hours the disciples, both male and female, are sitting in mourning for Jesus.  All their hopes and dreams had been shattered.  And they were probably scared to death.  Just because Jesus had died didn’t mean that the authorities who had orchestrated his death would leave them alone.  And then the final indignity: they had to bury their wonderful teacher without preparing him with the common decencies that his body needed.

            So, before the sun rises the women wake up.  They probably had everything ready to go, which they had put together after sundown on Saturday – they couldn’t prepare anything before then since you aren’t supposed to do any work on the Sabbath.  And they couldn’t go before then because walking after dark would be too dangerous.  So as soon as it was light enough, they left the house and made their way to the tomb. 

            The men stayed home.  Don’t blame them – preparing a body was traditionally woman’s work, and the men were still hiding and trying to figure out what to do.  The women were safe; enough people were out and about early, and unlike the male disciples no one probably noticed or could identify the women.  They were still in mourning and worried if they could roll aways the stone.   

            And then suddenly everything changed.  Jesus wasn’t there.  There were angels who appeared to them and told them that Jesus was alive not dead.  Instead of a dark day it was now a light day.  Instead of a day of mourning and death it was now a day of rejoicing and life.  Instead of a day of no possibilities there are now infinite possibilities.  In fact, impossibilities have become possible because Jesus walked out of the tomb. 

            Now what if we truly lived as Easter people and saw every morning as a resurrection? What would our lives be like?

            What if we had a really bad day, if we could wake up the next morning and believe that with this new day, we would have better possibilities?

            What if we could open our hearts to all the good things God gives us?

            So today with this sunrise, let us all open our hearts to the daily resurrection which gives us new life, hope, joy and possibilities, and be Easter people in our hearts from this day forward.  Amen      

Palm Sunday 2024

In our churches I don’t preach on Palm Sunday because we are celebrating both Palm Sunday and the Passion of Jesus. But I do preach at 4 services on Easter. One is a Sunrise Service and three are regular church services.

Sheep or Goats?

March 17, 2024          5^th Sunday of Lent

Psalm 100       Matthew 25:31-46

I’ve interacted with both goats and sheep, and to me they seem to be equal.  They’re both farm animals, which provided wool, hides, cheese, and meat; whether you had goats or sheep seemed to be a matter of taste.  So why are goats the bad animals and the sheep the good animals?  What on earth did those poor goats do to Jesus that he would send them to the fiery furnace?  I did some research on goats and sheep, and I found out some very interesting things about these two animals that explains why Jesus used them in this parable.

Goats and sheep were the standard herd animals in Jesus’ time.  And, like the bad and good humans, can live together socially in a herd or group.  However, goats and sheep have very different personalities and Jesus would know that people would understand those differences and would see the parallels to humanity.  

Let’s start the personalities of sheep.  Sheep are very much family-oriented animals.  They like to hang out with their family group, and they also are okay with welcoming new sheep into the herd.  They are also very receptive to being trained to hear and respond to a shepherd’s voice.  Sheep will follow the shepherd and come to his call and are easier to herd.  Of course, we have the example in the Bible of the little lost lamb, but the lamb strays because it is curious or confused, and if the shepherd calls for the lamb, very often the lamb will respond, so the shepherd can find him.  Sheep are also not destructive in their grazing.   If you put them on a lawn, they will nibble on the grass, but they’ll leave about a 1/4 inch layer of grass and leave the roots alone.  This is why you see all those paintings where the sheep are grazing on the front lawn of old English manors.  They’re nature’s original lawn mowers and they do a pretty good job of it.

Goats however are a little more problematic.  First of all, while they don’t mind hanging out in a herd, they’re more territorial, and they often have a problem of welcoming a new outside adult goat into the herd.  They are also not as receptive to learning how to follow a shepherd or goatherd and so the person in charge has to really keep an eye on the goats so that they don’t wander off.   Do you remember that line thy rod and his staff they comfort me?  The staff was the hook shepherds usually used on sheep to pull on their legs to get them to move.  The rod is the stick that you use to whack the goat into line.  Goats are more independent and are much more prone to wander off by themselves and get lost.  They also adapt quickly to wild conditions.  If you put a domestic sheep and a domestic goat into the wild, the sheep will try to get back the farm and call out to the shepherd.  The goat however will very quickly become a wild creature.  Finally, their grazing practices are different.  Goats can pull up, eat, and digest weeds, thorns, and brambles.  An ancient practice of clearing a field would involve penning the goats into the field and they would clear it out by pulling everything it up by its roots, so when the goats finished you would be down to dirt.  If a sheep gets into your garden, it’s just going to nibble a little bit; if a goat gets into your garden it’s going to eat everything!  They are greedy little critters.

So you see, goats and sheep represent the two basis sides of the human personality.  The goats represent those people in the herd of humanity who are going to run wild.  They’re the ones who are going to be destructive if they’re not controlled.  The ones who are not going to have family ties and who are going to be independent and selfish.  They think they can go their own way.  The sheep on the other hand are the ones who are family oriented and who welcome and invite other people into the social group.  They’re the ones who are willing to listen to the shepherd’s voice and be herded in the right direction.  They listen to God and participate in what God wants them to do.

Those who reject people, who are destructive and selfish, and do not listen to God, are going to the side of the fiery furnace.  The ones who are family oriented, who take care of each other, who accept the stranger, who are nurturing, who listen to the shepherd and are willing to be moved in the right direction are going to the eternal Kingdom.  Jesus is asking his audience: Is your personality a goat or is your personality a sheep.

Now think back to the last two parables that we talked about.  People asked Jesus: When is the Kingdom coming and what’s the event going to be like?   Jesus starts by giving them the parable of the bridesmaids which tells us that we have to keep our spiritual light and connection to God alive by nurturing it so that we will be ready when God the bridegroom comes.

In the parable of the talents, we had the evil landlord and two servants who live surrounded by greed and oppression and promote it.  Jesus acknowledges that in many ways this is how the world operates.  He’s telling his people, who are victims of an unfair system, that God knows this and sees you.  We need to stay strong, like the third servant, who doesn’t cheat and lie, but tries to get by as best he can with his integrity intact.  He’s keeping his connection to God alive just like the bridesmaids who tended their oil did.  

When God comes down, he lines up everyone, the bridesmaids, the landowner, the first and second servant, and the third servant, and He asks: Who are you and what did you do?  God knows who’s a goat, and who’s a sheep.  He’s going to know: Did you tend your lamps and keep your light alive by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and taking care of those who are sick or in prison?    

The landlord is going to be on that line along with the first and second servant.  And all they have to show is that they exploited their fellow humans for their own gain.  They were the oppressors, and they are going to go to the fiery furnace.  But when the third servant comes and stands before God, he can say he didn’t play the game.  And maybe, like many of the people listening to Jesus, he couldn’t feed the hungry, because he was one of the hungry.  He didn’t give others his clothes because he was one of those who were naked.  He didn’t heal the sick because he was one of the sick.  But he can look God in the eye and say: I gave kindness to my fellow humans, and he is going to enter into the eternal Kingdom.

 Jesus is not asking us to solve all the world’s problems.  Jesus just wants us to use what our resources to make the world better so that we can all live with those problems.  There are people who have great resources and have done great things.  They have funded vaccine programs or scholarships for children.   In our heritage in the 1700s & 1800s, Methodist societies started schools and universities just so children could learn to read write and then go on to careers. They started what we would call clinics and then hospitals.  And those institutions were set up in places where there were none.  They saw a community need and filled it.  

Sometimes we say: I’m not rich or important; I can’t do a lot.  I can’t be Mother Teresa who ministered in the slums; I can’t be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who gave away countless computers to schools. And maybe we can’t be that large, but we can look into our own community and see the hungry, the needy, and the ill – both physical and mental – and we can help them even in small ways, with food banks, clothing drives, and by supporting places like the Wellness Center and maybe just driving someone to a doctor’s appointment.

But do you know what our greatest social crisis is today?  The greatest problem in America is now loneliness.  People just don’t believe or feel that they’re connected anymore in a meaningful way to other people.  And no connection is like being in prison.  I would invite you to look for the lonely and the unconnected in our community.  Look for those who need your love and bring it to them. 

There is one more thing I’d like to say about the Kingdom of heaven and the final reckoning.  Jesus was addressing the great end-times, when the world breaks and God descends.  But Jesus was also talking about the fact that we all have limited time on this earth; we all have a final reckoning.  We all need to tend our lights so that when we encounter the troubles of the world, we keep God in our hearts.  We need to keep reaching out to those who need love and give them actions of love by feeding, clothing, and tending to bodies and souls.   I have been privileged to have sat with people who are in their last days.  And many have said to me: I have not done enough.  They worry that when they meet God, they will not be enough.  I cannot speak for their actions, but I can tell them: If you did try to reach out to those who needed love, and tried to give love with words and actions, then you will find that when you stand before Christ and God you will be able to say: I tried to live as you would wish me to live.  

And since you’ve tried, God will love you, and will forgive your inequities, because he knows we’re not perfect.  He knows that sometimes the sheep go in the wrong direction.  But if you try to follow His voice, He will love you, and accept you, and will say: My good and faithful servant, come to the right and into eternal life with me.  Amen

How Do We Use Our Talents?

March 10, 2024          4^th Sunday of Lent

Deuteronomy 23:19-20                    Matthew 25:14-30:

            Usually for The Parable of the Talents a minister will equate talents, a measure of the weight of metals in Roman times, to the modern use of the word, the actions we are good at, and how we can use them.  

            In the metaphor, God is usually identified as the landowner and the servants are identified as disciples.  The first servant is given 5 talents, the second is given two, and the third is given only one.  The talents are equated to abilities that we are given at birth, or that we learn and become good at.  Sometimes they’re equated as opportunities that come our way.  The idea is that if we use and refine our talents and opportunities, then we will continue to expand the wealth of our lives.   

            Now the wealth is not just monetary wealth; it can be numerous things like friendship, connections, love, spiritual growth, and our connection with God.  The first two servants who increase their talents are praised by the landowner who says: Well, done good and faithful servant.  Their reward is to be put in charge of more things for the landowner, and you get the feeling that they’re going to have greater prosperity from these promotions. 

The third servant, who is afraid of the landowner because he’s a harsh man, simply buries his talent in the ground and is punished for his ineptitude.  Even though the servant does not steal from the landowner and returns the talent, the landowner is angry with him for not increasing his talent at all.  He claims that the servant should have at least put the money with the local bankers where it would have gotten a minimum return on the investment.  The landowner throws the servant out of the house, where supposedly he will now become destitute and homeless.  

The usual conclusion of the metaphor is that we shouldn’t be lazy and do nothing, like the third servant.  Instead, we should all use the talents that God gives to us, and if we do, our own abundance will increase.   

I’ve heard this sermon several times in my life, and to be honest that’s a pretty good message.  We shouldn’t be afraid of using our gifts, talents, and graces that God gives to us.  And I have found that if I use my talents to give more love, and help, and positive things in my life then positive things will come back to me.  Bread on the water is never wasted, it always comes back to you somehow.  

However, and you knew that however was coming, I took a class in seminary which put another light on this parable.  The usual interpretation of the parable is very valid if you read the parable by itself.  But if you read it next to the parables before and after, it takes on a different flavor and reveals some other really important stuff about using our talents for God’s Kingdom.   

The parable before is about the ten bridesmaids who are waiting for the wedding party to come back to the groom’s house.  This story illustrates that you shouldn’t take for granted that you’re all set with God.  That you need to keep on feeding your spiritual light, so that you’ll be ready when the kingdom of heaven comes.  The parable after this one is the story of the judgment of the nations, where Jesus lines up goats on one side and sheep on the other.  The goats end up going into the eternal flames because they have not feed the hungry, clothed the naked, or helped the sick.  The sheep, who have done all those things, end up going to heaven. 

In seminary we studied these parables as if they were parts one, two, and three of the same story.  This changes who the characters are in the center parable and what they’re doing.  

In the parable of the talents, we have three servants who are working under a harsh landowner.  The third servant says: Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid.  This doesn’t sound much like the loving and forgiving God that Jesus has been teaching his disciples about, does it?  But instead of God, Jesus’ audience would have recognized the character of an unscrupulous landlord.  Landlords were usually people who owned tracts of land that they rented out to tenant farmers.  It was very common for landlords to loan their tenants money for grain and then charge high interest rates so that the tenants wouldn’t be able to pay back the loan completely when it came time to sell the wheat.  This practice kept the tenants chained to the land because they couldn’t leave until they cleared their debts to the landlord, which kept mounting up over the years.  And there was nothing illegal about this practice.  

The characters of the servants change too.  The first two servants invest their money as the landlord would have done.  They are following his example and are able to double the money that he gave them.  Five to ten talents doesn’t seem like a huge increase but usually a talent equaled 6,000 denarii.  Most people made an average of one denarius a day, so a single talent was worth 20 years of labor.  Ten talents is 200 years of labor and 4 talents is 80 years of labor.  No one makes this amount of money quickly and legally.  So, you can see that the audience would recognize that these servants, like their master, are seriously cheating people.  

The landowner is so pleased that his servants are following in his footsteps that he gives them control over more of his business.  But the third servant is not following the program.  He doesn’t want to make money by cheating people.  He even chooses to not invest with the moneylenders because that would feed into the system of exploitation.  Instead. he buries the talent and then returns it to the landowner.  And the landowner punishes him for calling him out and not participating in his schemes.

If you follow this metaphor, you see that the landowner is the corruption and greed of the world, and the first two servants are people who are brought into the system that teaches them corruption by enticing them with wealth and position.  The third servant is not lazy, rather he is the courageous one who refuses to participate in the system.  And yes, his reward is to be ridiculed and cut out of participating in the wealth of others.  The landlord thinks that he’s throwing him into the outer darkness, a common expression for a place of powerlessness.  But actually, this man’s reward is going to be an eternal life in God’s Kingdom.  He is going to be counted as one of the sheep who enters the kingdom, and the landlord and the other two servants are going be goats, who will go to the other place.  

With this metaphor the story isn’t so much about using our talents, it’s about the choices that we make about howwe use them.  Someone might have a talent of being a salesperson, and the ability to manage a lot of people under them to create a merchandising empire.  But if that empire is based on drugs or illegal arm sales that’s an immoral use of your talent because you’re exploiting people’s addictions, destroying their health, and putting people in harm’s way.   

Even today we have predatory loan sharks and people who try to corner the stock market through insider trading. Think of the tutoring school which bribed officials to allow sub-par students to get into high-ranking colleges.  My brother left a construction company when he realized that they were using shoddy materials and cutting corners on techniques.  Only recently I had to close my bank account and change it because I unwittingly got caught up in an internet scam.  I thank God that I listened to an inner voice that didn’t let me lose thousands of dollars. 

And all these people are good at what they do and make a lot of money at it.  But we do not have to play their games.  In fact, we can stand up to them by creating fair laws that protect people.  We can support people who have been exploited and try to help them get to better places.  We can create work environments that allow people to flourish in their lives.  And we can call out and name the people who do exploit others and expose their unjust actions, like the third servant did. As Desmond Tutu said: If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor. And from Edmund Burke: All that is required for evil to flourish is for good men and women to do nothing.

Most of Jesus’ audience would see themselves as the third servant, a person with no power who is just trying to live humanely.  And in the judgement of the nations, they are assured that because they cared for their fellow humans and, like the third servant, stood up as best they could to the injustice of the world, that God sees them.  Many of them were living with no hope and Jesus said: God sees you, and even if you are driven down and into the outer darkness by the evils of the world, be brave and live in righteousness because you are still loved by God.  So let us be brave like the third servant.  Let us use our talents, not for the betterment of ourselves at the cost of others; but for the betterment of others, and maybe even ourselves.  Let us say NO to the world of corruption and greed, and YES to a commitment to giving charity, and to loving and renewing actions in the name of Christ.  And if we do, we will be building a world where there is no outer darkness, and the Kingdom of God will be closer than ever.    

Ready and Waiting

March 3, 2024           3^rd Sunday of Lent

Psalm 37: 7-11            Matthew 25:1-13

When I was younger, I thought: Why was Jesus telling this very mean story about five bridesmaids who wouldn’t share their oil with five other bridesmaids?  I had been raised to always share my resources with people and to help others when I could.  That, after all, is what a Christian is supposed to do.  I couldn’t imagine that Jesus was teaching us to be selfish and uncooperative.  But of course, when I was young, I didn’t know the story’s the context.  

Jesus has been preaching for a few days in and around Jerusalem.  On this day the disciples are admiring how beautiful the Temple is, and Jesus tells them that they shouldn’t get too attached to the sight because it will be destroyed sooner or later.  This leads to a discussion about the end-times, and the coming of God and His kingdom on this earth.  

The end-times was a very prevalent topic during Jesus’ day.  There was a lot of debate as to what the end-times would look like and when it would happen.  There were serious scholars who tried to predict the date of the event through numerology and the movement of the stars.  There were cults which separated themselves from the rest of the population so that they could be pure and holy when the great apocalypse arrived.  There was even a best seller about the apocalypse called the Book of Enoch, which people took very seriously.  Hmmm – Does any of this sound familiar to you? 

So it’s not surprising that Jesus’ disciples and the people surrounding him would jump on this comment about the impermanence of the Temple and start to ask him: When is the apocalypse coming and what is it going to look like? 

Jesus, being Jesus, doesn’t answer with specifics.  Instead, he tells them a series of parables related to the end times, which focus on the here and now rather than on a specific date. One is this story that’s called The Ten Bridesmaidsor The Wise and Foolish Virgins.  

The story is centered on a common event that would take place during a wedding.  When two people were married the initial ceremony would take place at the bride’s family home.  Usually married elders of the groom’s family, both husbands and wives, would go to the bride’s house and celebrate in the morning with the bride’s family.  This part of the celebration might take a day or two, depending on the size of the family and how far away the families lived.  After the bride’s side of the celebration was done, the bride and the groom would be escorted to the groom’s house and the bride would be welcomed into his family with another party.  

Young, unmarried ladies from the groom’s family wouldn’t have gone to the bride’s party.  That would be improper.  Their role in the wedding was to welcome the new bride and groom, who would usually arrive in the early evening, and this is why the ladies are carrying lamps.  They’re supposed to stand outside the house and light the way to the gate, and greet the bride as her new family and friends.  I think that this is a lovely custom of welcome for a new bride into her new home.  So there are the ten bridesmaid with their lamps, stationed by the front gate or door of the house.  They have probably been there since dusk, which was the normal time for the wedding party to arrive. 

Jesus’ audience would have recognized this common scenario, but they would have also understood that this was about the coming end-times because he says right at the beginning: Then the Kingdom of heaven will be like this.  That use of the verb, WILL BE, is very important because it makes the action coming-into-being.  Also, the idea of the wedding was a common metaphor for the marriage and commitment of God with his people.  God was always described as the bridegroom and the people, or nation, of Israel was always the bride.  God, the Groom, brings his bride, the people, home to His kingdom, to live with him eternally.  

Now five of the bridesmaids have come prepared with extra flasks of oil.  The fact that they’ve thought about bringing extra oil tells me that the wedding party is coming from far away.  Well, God does come from far away.  These ladies have thought ahead: What if the party is late?  If the groom is coming from far away, and we don’t know the time, if we bring extra oil, then we will still be ready.  Jesus is giving the idea that we must be ready for God’s coming, no matter what the hour.  God is going to arrive at His time, not at the time that we appoint for him.

The other five ladies have not thought ahead.  They’ve just assumed that the wedding party will be there around the beginning of the evening, so they have enough oil in their lamps to last.  No worries.  Besides if the party is late, well we can just ask the other ladies for some oil.  It will be okay.  

Here Jesus is contrasting two types of devout people.  I want you to note that these are not believers and unbelievers.  All the ladies believe that the wedding party is coming, and they want to be there to greet it.  But Jesus is saying it’s not enough to be devout and to be willing to light your lamp.  You need to be prepared for every eventuality because, like the bridesmaids, you don’t know the hour that God is going to show up.

Not only is the party late; it’s really late.  It’s so late that everyone falls asleep waiting.  And then there’s a shout – Oh, the bridegroom is coming with his new bride.  And the ten ladies go to get their lamps ready, so that they can stand outside and welcome the party, and the five who didn’t bring extra oil realize that their oil has run out.   

Now the line in the story says: Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps.  I did some research and I found out that the common lamps worked the best when the oil is continually replenished.  When you top off the oil, the wick doesn’t dry out as quickly, so it doesn’t burn away as quickly.  Trimming the wicks of the lamps is how the unprepared ladies find out that their wicks have dried up and they’ve lost the oil.  The implication is that the wise and prepared ladies have probably been topping off their oil during the wait so that the wicks haven’t burned away.  So, we have this image of being prepared and also of paying attention and tending to your spiritual light while we are waiting for God’s coming.  It’s not enough to have devotion, to have the light of God with you; you also need to take care of it while you’re waiting to meet God.  

So you see, the line: No! there will not be enough for you and for us, isn’t selfish – it’s simply that they don’t have any more oil to spare because they’ve been using it to keep their lamps going.  There’s a lesson in that refusal: That we can’t borrow the devoutness of other people for ourselves.  We have to be responsible for our own spiritual lights.  We can set good examples, we can give suggestions – like go buy more oil – but our relationship with God is ours and no one else’s, and we can’t be responsible for the spiritual actions of others.   

            So, the five bridesmaids go and buy their oil and fix their lamps.  But in the meantime, the bridegroom has come, the wedding party is in the house celebrating, the door has been shut, and the bridesmaid now can’t get in.  I admit that does seem a little harsh, but Jesus is trying to tell people that there is a time when there is going to be a reckoning, and those people who are just playing at being devout, but who aren’t doing what needs to be done to keep that devoutness active, are going to find that they aren’t ready for God’s kingdom.

            This isn’t to say that God and Christ aren’t forgiving of our follies. But we just don’t become baptized, or confirmed, or saved in Christ, and that’s it, we’re all set.  Spirituality and spiritual growth is a life-long process of tending, and learning, and connecting with God. 

            And that’s what Lent is about: It is a time for us to tend to the lights of our spirit.  Tending to your connection with God is not a selfish thing to do.  It is not selfish to want to give yourself time to pray or meditate every day.  It’s not wasting time if you read the Bible or a book that might help you understand yourself and God a little bit better.  It’s not neglecting your work if you take a 20-minute walk to connect with God’s creation.  If you connect to God through journaling, or art, or knitting, or riding your bike, or even playing basketball with your kids, that is tending your light.  And that is an important and beautiful thing to do. 

            Jesus tells us that we will not know the day or the hour, because Jesus doesn’t want us to get caught up in the crazy predictions and stress about the end-times.  What he wants us to do is to live in these moments right now and tend our lamps of light and love.  And that way we will keep our hearts and souls strong and always be ready for him whenever he comes.          

Accepting the Invitation

February 25, 2024                 2^nd Sunday of Lent

Psalm 106:1-5             Matthew 22:1-14

       The day after Jesus’ triumphant entry into the Jerusalem, he went into the Temple, picked out a spot with his disciples and other members of the public, and sat down to teach.  At one point the Temple elders came and questioned his authority.  Jesus answered them with the parable of the two sons: One who says NO and then works in the vineyard; and one who say YES and then doesn’t show.  

Jesus then continues with two more parables.  The first is about a man who has tenants who are working his vineyard.  When he sends his servants and son to collect his rent the tenants beat the servants and kill the son.  Jesus asks the elders what the owner will do, and they reply that the owner will punish the tenants with a miserable death.  Jesus implies that like the tenants, anyone who does not honor the agreement with the Father, and tries to claim that what is not theirs, will be punished in the end.  

Jesus then continues with the parable of the wedding banquet, which he starts by saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.”

In the last two parables Jesus has not started with the kingdom of heaven.  He does say that the prostitutes and tax collectors are going to enter the kingdom, and the hypocrites and murderers are not.   Now remember, parables usually have three levels: the in-daily-life story, the theological story, and the spiritual story.  By starting out with The Kingdom of Heaven is like, Jesus is right away making this story about our spirituality and our connection to God, even though he’s using an occurrence that might happen in real life: A king whose son is getting married.   The elders and the people listening to Jesus would know that the king is representing God, and that theologically the son might be representing the Messiah.  

Also, as the parables go along Jesus has been expanding the Father figure.  The first owner of the vineyard is a simple landowner who wants his sons to work in the vineyard.  Then you have a landowner who is absent in another country but rents the vineyard to tenants.  But now we have a king, the father and ruler of a whole nation, whose son is going to be married.   And all Father figures have a collection of people who don’t do what he wishes them to do. 

The king sends out an invitation to all the important people in his country, not just once but twice.  But no one is interested in coming.  They’re all too busy with their own interests.  One city refuses once and then kills the servants when they come back the second time; this enrages the king so much that he burns the city to the ground.

Now remember I told you that parables have Whaaat? moments – Things that don’t seem to be logically right or a little extreme in their reactions.  Well, we’ve got one of those moments right at the beginning of this story.  Why would anyone refuse an invitation to a king who is throwing a wedding party for his son?  If I had gotten an invitation to Harry and Megan’s wedding, I would have been over to England like a shot.  I mean, are these people who don’t come really that busy?  But, when do you refuse an invitation?  Whenever you don’t think it’s important enough or worthwhile enough for you to attend.  

Then the king says, ‘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.’  The slaves go out and invite anyone they can find to the feast.  It doesn’t matter if these people are good or bad, what their job is, or what their economic or social status is.  Merchants and beggars, they’re all invited, and they all accept and come to the wedding and the feast.

The elders and the audience would see themselves in this story.  The elders are the important people who think that God isn’t important in their lives; that they can ignore the invitation to be holy or live rightly.  One of the prevalent beliefs of the day that Jesus spoke against was that if you had attained wealth and power that it meant that God had favored you and that your prosperity demonstrated that you were a good and worthy person.  If you were poor, it showed that God was punishing you for your sins.  This belief set up a theological caste system:  The rich who felt that God favored them, so they could keep on doing what they wanted to do and not worry about the consequences, and the poor who were made to believe that they somehow deserved their lot in life.  The rich think they have already it made so they don’t have to accept the invitation of the king, or God, or that they need to accept John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ offer of salvation.  

But Jesus turns those class assumptions over when the poor get invited to the wedding after the king sees how unworthy the rich and powerful actually are.  He challenges people to see who is really worthy to enter the palace of the king or the kingdom of God.  Everyone is given the invitation, but it is the people who accept the invitation who are allowed in for the feast. 

 What does it mean to accept the invitation to God’s Kingdom?  Well, if you look at the first two parables in this sequence you see that you have to be willing to do the work, not just say that you’re going to do it like the son who said YES but then never showed up.   The next question is: What is that work?   The best short answer to that question is to love our neighbors as we love ourselves and – to quote the prophet Micah –  to do justice, love kindness and to walk humbly with God. 

When you are passionate for justice you work to see that everyone is treated fairly and equally.  When you love kindness and act in kindness, you’re understanding of people’s needs.

Jesus is saying to his audience: Look at your lives.  Are you discriminating against anyone with your actions?   Are you cheating someone?  Do you think that you’re better than others and can therefore take advantage of them?  Are you helping the poor in your communities?  Are you assisting the homeless?  What are you doing to help others which will show love to your neighbors?  

The elders would have been very uncomfortable with these questions because they felt that they already had it made and were above all that work.  And there’s one more event in this parable that would have made them uncomfortable: The wedding guest who is kicked out.

The king comes to mingle with the guests and see if everyone is enjoying themselves.  But then he sees a man who doesn’t have the proper wedding robe.  In Jesus’ time it was customary for very wealthy people to give their guests a robe, or a mantle, or a scarf when they were given the invitation to the wedding.  It was a souvenir of the event but also a pass into the ceremonies.  If you didn’t have the designated robe, the door attendant wouldn’t admit you.  It was a way to keep people, who might want to take advantage of the food and drink, from sneaking into the wedding.  The wedding guest has probably used a similar looking robe to sneak in.  Like the tenants who refuse to pay their rent he is trying to get something for nothing.

Jesus’ audience would have recognized that he was talking about the priests and elders who in public put on a show of holiness, but actually behaved in less than holy ways: Using their positions to oppress people who they came into contact with or ignoring them when they could help them.   I’ve known a few people who claim to be Christians, who talk a good game and attend church, but the other six days of the week don’t act in a very Christian manner.  The people surrounding the sneaky guest might be fooled but the king isn’t.  

Everyone is invited to God’s heavenly feast in His kingdom.  The initial invitation is given to us, and like all the people in the story, rich or poor, good or bad, we have the choice to accept it.  We put on our robe when we accept Jesus as our teacher and guide to God.  We put on our robe when we accept the salvation that Jesus gave to us which keeps us from being chained permanently to our sins.  But every day we are also given subtle invitations by God to continue working in and for his kingdom.  

Every time you stand up for someone who is being treated unfairly; every time you help someone in need; every time you admit a mistake and try to get on the right course of action; every time you give someone or something kindness and love, you are accepting Jesus’ invitation and adding another brick to the kingdom of God here on earth.  Every act of generosity, renewal, and compassion is a YES to God’s eternal invitation.  And every one of those actions that you do further builds and strengthens your connection to God and his love.  

So accept the invitation from God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and put on your robe and  join them in the work of the kingdom.  And all during your life you will participating in the wedding feast.