Neither The Day Nor The Hour

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Ordinary 32A

Text: Matthew 25:1-13

Theme: How normal (or normative) do we make our faith?

“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. ²Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. ³When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; ⁴but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. ⁵As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. ⁶But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ ⁷Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. ⁸The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ ⁹But the wise replied, ‘No! There will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ ¹⁰And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. ¹¹Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ ¹²But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ ¹³Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

A question for us this morning:  when I read phrases like “the bridegroom”, “the wedding banquet” and “neither the day nor the hour”, what do we associate that imagery and those phrases with most frequently? 

If you answered “the second coming” or “the rapture” or “Jesus’ return”, you wouldn’t be alone.  There are plenty of folks who would affirm unequivocally that this passage is a picture of the eschatological event – that is the theological term for the ‘end times’ – the eschaton – in which Jesus will return to and establish his reign on earth.

All the elements are there:  Jesus – the bridegroom – the wedding banquet – the celebration – and the reference to ‘neither the day nor the hour’ echoes in our minds with what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in answer to a direct question about that specifically, so therefore, THIS passage MUST ALSO be referring to the second coming, right?

You already know what my answer will be, don’t you?

I would invite us to look at this passage differently, and take into account what both the preceding and the following passages speak to as we look at these verses. 

In previous passages, Jesus has gone into a haunting vision of what that time will be like – that unexpected but predicted return – put to music by Larry Norman in his song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”; two men walking up a hill, one disappears and one’s left standing still … I wish we’d all been ready, a man and wife asleep in bed, she hears a noise and turns her head, he’s gone, … you get the picture.  The text is slightly different: “⁴⁰Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. ⁴¹Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” It is a description of something that happens suddenly and in the middle of everyday events.  

In what has become a relatively recent historical phenomenon that truly only developed since the 1830’s, we have this frenetic, morbid fascination with ‘end of the world’ scenarios.  Multimillion-dollar movies have been made about it, hundreds if not thousands of books have been written and sold about the subject.  We want to know what comes next. 

We have watched as claim after claim of the impending end of the world has come and gone.  While there was an expectation of Jesus’ prompt return among those first Christians in the early years of the growth of the movement of followers of Jesus, when time continued to pass and there WAS no triumphant return, no clouds rolling back, no thundering trumpets, people began to understand the true nature of Jesus’ remarks.

Most recently we heard predictions of the rapture to take place this past spring, and the end of the world to have taken place on October 21^st.  When nothing discernible happened in May, we were told it was not so much a physical rapture as it was a spiritual one … but that the end of the world was inevitably and irrevocably, going to take place right at three weeks ago. 

As you can tell, we’re still here.  So is the world.  Not much has changed. 

There were several headlines that ran a few days after the expected date that claimed that the man who made those predictions was sorry, that he was apologizing and repented of his false teaching. 

But a closer review of what his statement said reveals that, in the face of such a total negation of what he claimed was revealed to him in scripture, which WAS the exact time and date of the end of the world – rather than take responsibility for shattering peoples’ faith by first building their foundation not on Christ but on this prediction of a date after which there would be no need to worry about ANYTHING – bills to pay, families to feed, and clothes to wear, shelter to protect and a means by which to provide all of that, this man came out to say that, since God is in ultimate control of everything, then it must have been God that led him to come to the wrong conclusions regarding the rapture and the end of the world, and therefore it was not him but God who is to blame, and also to be trusted to not have abandoned us.

I ask you:  does a god who would do that appeal to you at all?  Does this man’s call to trust a god who would, in essence, mislead his followers in that way and yet expect them to trust him seem like a god worthy of our worship and praise? Our obedience?

So here is Jesus, painting this incredible word picture of all kinds of things happening at the end of the world, the Sun going dark, the moon not shining, wars and rumors of wars, the whole nine yards.  And at the end of this, after saying that THESE WILL BE THE SIGNS, BE READY, he includes this, “³⁶“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

It would seem our friend with the multiple failed predictions didn’t pay attention to that part of the Gospel.

Then Jesus begins to tell the stories of people paying attention and people… not.  People doing and LIVING the Gospel message and people … not.  People thinking they were on the inside but finding out that they were … not. 

Here’s the deal:  we don’t live our lives – we don’t live the life of CHRIST in distraction mode.  We can’t. We are either present for Jesus and are about living a life that brings about reconciliation and forgiveness into the world beginning within the relationships in our own lives right here and right now or we are … not. 

If we are not outwardly expressing the experience that we claim to have inwardly, that disconnect is a really big deal.  We may then need to reexamine whether or not we actually believe what we say we believe about who Christ was and is, or maybe we need to reconnect with that person we were at that moment when it DID become clear to us that our righteousness is not our own, that it is fully and completely the gift of grace. 

If we have somewhere along the line forgotten that and come to believe that we are better than another because of something they have done, or failed to do, or because of a disagreement we may have had, and we have not taken active steps to mend that relationship, we are being as foolish and unprepared as the five bridesmaids who ran out of oil for their lamps.  

Our unpreparedness is our own responsibility.  We are each accountable.  And insofar as we as a community allow unpreparedness to remain, insofar as we don’t reach out in love and forgiveness to each other, we as a community are ALSO accountable. 

The passages following this one are the parable of the Talents and the parable of the Sheep and the Goats.  Familiar images again:  a landlord gives his servants different amounts of money to be responsible for while he is away, and two handle their responsibility faithfully.  One does not.  In the other, people are separated based on how they treated the weakest around them – the ones least able to help them in some way in return.   

In a nutshell, Jesus said he himself did not know when he’d be back, that only God does.       

In the meantime, we are to be about that business of reconciliation and forgiveness.  If that is missing from our lives, then we have entirely missed the point and the message and the LIFE of Jesus.

***

“Why do you do what you do?” 

The question comes up periodically as I go through my week, helping people that ask, or helping people whom I am asked TO help. 

I’ve not been able to boil the answer down to a concise, simple, memorable phrase or two.  Sometimes I simply answer, “It’s what I DO.”  Sometimes the answer is ‘because I can.’  Other times I try to go into the explanation – which is more complete, but is also a bit wordy:  “I do this (helping) because there are people in the churches who support me who want you to know that they care about you, your family and how you are doing.” 

On occasion, I’m ‘on’ enough to be able to answer, ‘I do this because God has shown me so much love through Jesus that this is one way in which I can show what that love feels like.”

Rarely is my answer one that includes the statement: ‘because I want to get into heaven after I die,’ or, ‘because if Jesus comes back, I want him to see me doing this instead of something else.’

I DO, but that’s beside the point.  J

The point is this:  We live the truth of reconciliation and forgiveness in our lives – that means in our relationships, how we respond, how we react, how we engage with each other and the community around us – because of or out of knowing that to be a reality in our own case in our own relationship with God.  Not because we see it as a formula for “If you do A, then B will happen, where A is ‘good things’ and B is ‘you’ll get into heaven’.” 

When we pray “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” that starts with us.  How else COULD it start, if WE’RE the ones praying?

Think on this fact:  God loves you.  God is in the process of redeeming you.  God cares for you and wants you to be who he created you to be.  Fully, completely engaged in living an abundant life that is free from bitterness and resentment and hatred; not free from struggle and hardship, but free to live in a joy that is so profound that it transcends our circumstances and taps into the same source that fires the sun and the billions of stars across the universe, that marks the beats of our hearts, that sets us spinning around each other in this beautiful dance of life that we’ve been given.

Let’s pray. 

Gentle Among You

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Ordinary 30A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, ²but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. ³For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, ⁴but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts. ⁵As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; ⁶nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, ⁷though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. ⁸So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

I want to start today with a confession.

I sometimes have to fight with that part of me that would rather turn inward and keep to myself, sometimes we refer to it as ‘introversion’, sometimes it ends up being perceived as aloofness, but either way, it is not always compatible with the duties and responsibilities that have become associated with being a pastor. 

There is a particular person, a member of our community, that for a number of reasons it has been a challenge for me to visit as a part of my weekly routine.  The question of whether I have a routine is open for discussion, though with Leslie’s help and insistence, that seems to be becoming more and more a reality in my life.  To my shame, at times weeks if not months would go by without my going to see him.  A few weeks ago, I finally found myself driving down the road on my way to his house.  Part of the dynamic that happens as you try to convince yourself that you need to go see this person is that you begin to imagine how that initial conversation is going to play out.  And you create these images in your mind of these conversations being awkward, being pointed and angry, being frustrated, and as someone who like most of us doesn’t particularly enjoy confrontation, the imagination does more than enough to dissuade one from going into that situation where you THINK there might be a confrontation.  As I got closer, I was wondering how the visit would go, and I got a little anxious.  I knew what I needed to do.  I was already praying for grace during the visit, so I asked God to help me see the man through his eyes, not mine, nor my own perceptions of him.  Show me how YOU feel about him.

What came over me as I made one of the last turns before reaching the house, was this deep yearning, a longing to spend time with him that I don’t remember ever experiencing before. 

It was such a strong emotion that I began to cry.  By the time I reached the door to the house, I couldn’t wait to get inside and speak to him and see how he was doing and what he’d been up to. 

It wasn’t particularly outstanding in content – as it turned out, nothing extraordinary was happening in his life.  Well, there were a couple of things, but nothing out of the ordinary for a normal Christian’s life.  Some health issues, which are to be expected in a person of his age, but otherwise, a routine visit. But for me, the visit turned out to be one of the most meaningful and sweet experiences of my life.

What made it different was how I ended up approaching it.  I didn’t go into it with a sense of ‘this has to happen because it hasn’t happened for so long’ – though it WAS the case – but I believe that God answered my prayer really quickly that afternoon.  He made it so that I could tap into HIS heart, and in tapping into his heart, I found where my heart needed to be.

***

We know from other references in the New Testament that Paul was able to spend at most a month – most likely just three weeks – with the people who became the church in Thessalonica, so the depth of the emotion that he conveys in his letter to them can seem in some ways disproportionate.  Usually, you become close to people when you spend a lot of time with them, not a short amount of time. 

But that can vary considerably. 

A crucible is, for lack of a better term, a pressure cooker.

I experienced that, as I’ve shared with you before, during my time in training before going overseas as a Journeyman to Spain.  The sixty-five people that I went through those five and a half weeks with, even though we don’t keep in touch that often, we have that shared connection, that shared bond, that was formed over those brief weeks, twenty-six years ago, and we still pick up where we left off.  I’ve heard countless similar stories from people who’ve gone through various, intense experiences as a part of a small group.  The shared experience – and hardship – does something to the group dynamic that bonds them in ways that would normally not happen in a stress-free setting. 

But Paul seems to have bonded with the people of the church in Thessalonica in such a way that he needed to touch base with them again. 

We have only these two letters as a testimony to that ‘touching base’ in scripture.  Many scholars believe that what we call the first letter is the only letter we have that was actually written by Paul himself.  It is a tantalizing question as to whether he wrote other letters to them, letters that have been lost to history.  But we DO have these.  And this is what we go from. 

A few weeks ago I reconnected with a childhood friend.  He was the person I considered my best friend growing up.  Our parents were fellow missionaries, and we went to school together, though he was a year and then two behind me. 

In the years since we graduated from high school, we maintained some connection as younger adults, but hadn’t spoken in nearly ten years.  His father passed away a few weeks after Hannah was born, and we traveled to go to his funeral, but since then, we’d pretty much dropped out of each others’ lives. 

Our mothers talk periodically on the phone, so I was able to keep up with him at a distance.  I knew he’d been in and out of rehab, struggling with drug and alcohol addictions.  But on this particular day I was on the road, and I had his number loaded in my phone.  I knew I was going to be driving for a while, so I called and spoke briefly with his wife, and then he came on, and it was a conversation like we’ve never had.  It was from the heart. 

We had heart to heart conversations as teenagers, but you know how that can go.    

He sounded … so  … grown up, so mature, so centered.  Before, he was always goofing around, even when the topic of conversation was serious.  This conversation consisted of us sharing from our hearts.  We apologized to each other for not keeping in touch.  He shared with me about his work as a lab technician in a local hospital, and how much he loved it, but that his supervisor was excessively controlling… nothing new there.  About how he’d like to be a part of an MK reunion that we’re hoping to put together in the not too distant future, about how his family is, his sons and his wife. 

The emotion that came along with that conversation is one that I don’t really know how to put into words.  The bond, the connection, the LOVE that was I guess rekindled is probably the word for it, because it was there before.  It’s not that it WASN’T … it didn’t just LEAVE… it didn’t disappear.  There has always been an affection and a love in our relationship, but it was just kind of put on a back burner and left there for a long time. 

As older teenagers we had our disagreements, we had our fights.  There was a time when we didn’t talk.  Intentionally didn’t talk out of anger with each other, but that was all gone on that Saturday. 

The reason I’m sharing this kind of sappy stuff is because when Paul writes “we were gentle among you like a nurse caring to her own children” that struck a chord.  It underscored for me how important it is to handle each other with kid gloves, but it also pointed out the fact that we are people who will fly off the handle.  That’s part of our nature.  With some of us words spoken in anger are words that bring profound regret.  I know there are words spoken to my children that I would give anything to take back.

And yet it still comes back around to the grace of being able to say ‘I love you’ and receive that love back in return. 

I would encourage us all to tread lightly, to tread gently but TO tread; to BE in each other’s lives. Because that what it means to be family, that what it means to be community, that’s what it means to BE the body of Christ. 

That what we say and what we do expresses care and concern always, and always, love. 

Let’s pray.

The Worth of the Gift

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Matthew 22:15-22

To what do we ascribe value, and to whom do we give it?

¹⁵Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. ¹⁶So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. ¹⁷Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” ¹⁸But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? ¹⁹Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. ²⁰Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” ²¹They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” ²²When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

Tony, have you stopped beating your wife?

How are you supposed to answer that question?  You answer ‘no’, and it sounds like you still spend some part of your day using your wife as a punching bag.  You answer ‘yes’, and it is an only marginally better answer, since it seems as though, by implication, you DID, at some point, beat your wife. 

To them, it was that kind of question.  

The disciples of the religious leaders and the men who supported the rule of the Herods – each of them (hence the name) – those who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and their own positions of power and influence, of course, could only conceive of two possible answers, ‘yes’ and ‘no’. 

They figured, if Jesus answers ‘yes, it IS lawful to pay taxes to Caesar’ then he’d lose the base of support of everyone who was itching for a fight with the occupying forces, who could, potentially, cause a LOT of problems for THEM if Jesus just put out the word that it was time to take up arms against the Romans.  If he answered ‘no, it ISN’T lawful to pay taxes to Caesar’, it was a simple matter of treason, and they could dispose of him based on THAT charge. 

What they didn’t understand was that Jesus understood that place from which the question originated.  Something they themselves probably weren’t even aware of until this confrontation. 

It’s that place where we all live when we try to figure out at any given moment in our day how we translate our spiritual convictions into real life living. 

Almost everyone here today was born in this country, under this flag (US flag to the right).  But part of why we are here in this room this morning is because, at some point in our lives, we have accepted the one whom THIS flag (Christian flag on the left) represents as our Lord and Savior, we have pledged ourselves to HIM. 

But we still live in this world and in this country and under this flag and all that that entails.  

Part of what I think makes this passage a little harder for us to grasp in it’s original impact is that we live in a country where we enjoy – where we benefit from – the separation of Church and State. 

Even now, two hundred years and more into this grand experiment of a country, we are still living in the exception to the rule when it comes to how the State and the Church functioned in society throughout history.  Centuries before Jesus, and through the vast majority of the last two thousand years, cultures the world over have joined the two together into a seamless unit.

It was no different in the Roman Empire.  Caesar, the emperor, was, by definition, a self-proclaimed divinity – a god, to be worshipped and revered along with all the other gods in the pantheon of gods that the Romans had picked up through their expansions and annexations of territory.  His very title, Caesar, meant ‘Lord’.  When you exclaimed ‘Hail Caesar’ you were literally saying ‘Praise the lord!’ and it carried with it both a political AND a religious connotation.  In other words, you were stating a political allegiance AND a spiritual conviction at the same time. 

THAT is why early Christians got into so much trouble when, before they were baptized, as we have heard in this sanctuary or at a baptism at the river, they were asked to proclaim their faith, and their response was three words, the same that we hear today when we celebrate a baptism:  “Jesus is Lord.” They were making not ONLY a spiritual statement, but a political one as well.

Because we live in a country where those two spheres of influence have been separated (and rightly so), we don’t hear our faith terminology as political, we hear it as simply … words that express our faith.  It doesn’t register that we are making statements about our political convictions – and sometimes we don’t think of them as that – as well as our convictions of the Spirit because of the gulf that exists between the sanctuary and the county seat, or the state capital, or the national capital. 

But that wasn’t the case when these people approached Jesus and tried to trick him into that yes or no answer.  In that day and age, to speak of religion was to speak of the empire – and the emperor.  

That is why Jesus’ response was so brilliant.  He knew they were trying to trick him.  He knew they were trying in some way to get him give them an excuse to validate their view of the power structure and their place in it. 

But Jesus didn’t give them the satisfaction.  He knew that, at its heart, the question was REALLY about ultimate allegiance. 

And that question applies as much today as it did then:  Who are we going to let define who we are.  Who establishes our value, our worth?

When he asked them to show him a denarius, what would be as common as a quarter in today’s currency, they had one available and presented it. 

Keep in mind, this is happening in the temple, these were folks who considered it a matter of pride to adhere – to STRICTLY adhere – to the letter of the law.  Including the first two of the Decalogue – the Ten Commandments.  The first is ‘You shall have no other Gods before me’ and the second is ‘You shall not make any idols to worship’.  The denarius of his day carried the image of Caesar – the ‘lord’ – along with his face in profile – his image. 

I have this picture in my head of Jesus asking for a denarius, and two or three of the guys reaching into their robes for their coin purses, and one manages to get into his faster than the others, and eagerly flips the coin towards Jesus, and as the coin is arching through the air, glinting in the sun, the realization hits this young man that ‘DOH!’  He’s just revealed the emptiness behind the question… something that can actually be read between the lines leading up to the question itself, the insincerity virtually drips off the page as we read,

“Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.”

As we talked about on Wednesday evening, Jesus could have stopped right there, and walked away. He could have left them hanging.  Everybody in the place realized the obvious moral bankruptcy that the fact of that coin being present in the temple represented.  They weren’t concerned about how the law did or didn’t apply to THEM, they were more concerned with how they could manipulate it for their benefit.  His point would have been obvious to everyone there.  He could have driven the knife in even deeper and asked a very simple question of them that would have left them squirming, twisting in the wind:  “what are you doing carrying around an idol in the temple of the most high God, creator of the universe, of the stars and the planets, the earth and all that is in it?”

But he didn’t ask that.  He let those obvious points be exposed without even mentioning them.   When he DID ask his question, I wonder if they hesitated with their answer:  because here is how it went:

Jesus:  “Whose face is this, and what is his title?”

Herodians: “Uh … the um … well, the emperor’s.”

Emperor and Caesar were interchangeable terms.  To even call anyone other than God ‘Caesar’ in Latin, “Lord” in English, was a sin.   The very utterance of those words within the confines of the Temple would have sounded thin and meaningless in the ears of those standing around, because if they were true Hebrews, they would KNOW that there WAS no way to create an image of God, and that nobody – not even the most powerful man in the world at the time, could be called Lord except God – Yahweh.

So with that thin excuse of an answer ringing in everyone’s ears, Jesus concludes the encounter saying, “Then give to the emperor what belongs to him and give to God what belongs to God.”

For effect, let me rephrase that statement: “Give to the Easter Bunny what belongs to the Easter Bunny, and give to God what belongs to God.” 

He had exposed the fallacy of power.

What was and is being communicated here is not an apportionment plan – Jesus isn’t saying “23% of what you own and earn belongs to Caesar, so give him that, and give God the 10% that belongs to God.” No.  What Jesus has just pointed out is that Caesar is a straw man – that the earthly power structure is a temporary fabrication, that whatever supposed power they wield over us is nothing but a fiction.  They may have the power to take work and property and perhaps even life, but that which is of ultimate value, of infinite worth – to God – is something that can ONLY belong to God – us – our spirits. 

It is so easy for us to talk about something belonging to us or to someone else, the concept of property – private property – is one that has been ingrained into us from infancy.  But Jesus is putting it in perspective.

If we look around and begin to qualify that which surrounds us as belonging to this person or that person, to this group of people or that group, to that organization or to another, … and this may sound extreme, but … go with me … what we are saying is that ‘that person, group, or organization’ is Lord over that item, this place, or piece of furniture, or book, or idea …

Do you see how radical Jesus’ pronouncement is?  He is clarifying a point that we can sometimes so easily forget and it bears being reminded:  A: There is no other Lord but the Lord God, and B: EVERYTHING CAME from him, so, ultimately, everything BELONGS to him.  So we give God that which is most valuable to him of all that.  We give him what he came for:  ourselves. 

The words of the hymn come to mind:  “My life, my heart, my all I bring, to Christ, who loves me so, he is my Master, Lord, and King, wherever he leads I’ll go.”

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

How DO we give to God what belongs to God?  How DO we make an eternal truth a reality in a finite world?  We do it by living counter culturally – against the prevailing culture – against a culture that equates wealth with importance, and poverty with irrelevance, that gives more power to the rich and pays lip service to not say ignores the poor and the hungry, that assigns worth according to fame rather than by virtue of a simple shared humanity.  We do it by rejecting the idea that God cares any less or any more for ANYONE over ANYONE else for ANY reason. 

Scripture tells us, the gospel of John, the verse we all memorized, chapter 3, verse 16: ‘For God so loved THE WORLD’. 

Our task is to do likewise. 

Let’s pray.

 

    

Hearing and Understanding

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Ordinary 15A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton) Warsaw VA

Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. ²Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. ³And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. ⁴And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. ⁵Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. ⁶But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. ⁷Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. ⁸Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. ⁹Let anyone with ears listen!” ¹⁸“Hear then the parable of the sower. ¹⁹When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. ²⁰As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; ²¹yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. ²²As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. ²³But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

What would be considered a ‘wise’ farmer?  Scripture itself speaks of wisdom expressed in the careful assessment of the pros and cons of a situation, and acting accordingly. 

So I think we could agree that a ‘wise’ farmer would be one who made a clear-eyed assessment of the land to be used, and to plant accordingly.  To avoid the rocky soil, the soil that is too hard, the soil that is prone to be invaded by thorns and weeds, choking the tender shoots of the grain to be harvested.

So it almost seems contrary to the rest of the Gospel to read about this Sower, who heedlessly tosses his grain behind him, seemingly not paying attention to where it falls.   

After all, we have to ask, is that a wise use of what he’s been given?  Is he acting as a responsible steward of the resources God gave him? 

We need to be reminded of a couple of things in this reading:  first, it is a parable.  It is a story with a moral or a teaching purpose.  Second, the Sower is, at least at first glance, a representation of Jesus, and through him, of God.  So we need to pay attention to the details, and we need to pay attention to the deeper truths that might be found in the story. 

Wednesday evening I shared a thought that came to me as I was reviewing the passage, and it is that, contrary to our inclination to assign each type of soil to a particular type of person, which usually results in US being the ‘good soil’ (funny how that works, isn’t it?), I suggested that we begin to think in terms of each type of soil being present in each of us at different points in our lives – whether due to circumstance or personality – I think an argument can be made for the possibility that, at any given moment, for any given teaching that Jesus presented, we can be one or the other kind of soil. 

I know that even now there are some teachings for which I would be, at best, rocky soil, that receives a teaching with joy, but that doesn’t allow it to take deep root in the soil of my heart, and it withers and dies because of that.  I’d more readily enjoy sharing with you a teaching that ‘fits me’, that I can readily agree with, and thus become good soil for, allowing it to grow deep roots into my being and produce a hundred fold fruit in my life. 

But it’s not quite that simple.

In order to be fallow, soil has to be turned, tilled, somehow disturbed, and made ready to receive the seed.  The first soil that is described is the hard soil of the path.  Paths are those lines, if you will, of hard packed soil that can be as hard as concrete.  Paths around the Neck are what were first made by animals – deer or other foraging animals – who made their way from one place to another, and were eventually followed by people, walking along those same paths, which just naturally followed the lay of the land, followed the path of least resistance (no pun intended), and eventually turned into roads, and roads turn into highways, and highways get paved. 

It is the story of constant use making a walkway unsuitable for anything else – locking in an area of otherwise fertile soil and making it useful for only one thing – but not for … change … for nurturing growing, living things.

On the one hand, I can appreciate the need to have space to MOVE, to go from one place to another.  On the other hand, what growth are we choking off by the simple fact that we close that ground off to the possibility of nurturing life? 

Beyond that, and in confessional mode, there are teachings that I read of Jesus’ and it is an almost conscious decision to receive them conditionally.  ‘We’ll see how it goes with this one’.  If it is too challenging, then I’ll set it aside and (maybe) come back to it later. 

So it is with this whole business of ‘sacrificing myself’ for another.  It is THE central teaching and example of Jesus’ life – and today it is exemplified in what we are observing as a central part of our worship service – celebrating communion. 

What is our attitude towards this most central part of the Gospel?  Are we hard soil, packed down by years of wear and routine?  Or are we rocky soil, willing to entertain the notion that we DO need to be willing to sacrifice OUR wellbeing for the wellbeing of a brother or sister, but when the rubber meets the road we find out that our priorities … shift?  Or we find ourselves to be thorny soil, more susceptible to the whims of our culture and society than we would care to admit, until again we come to a point of having to choose, and in a moment of weakness we choose … the easy way, the comfortable way, the … popular way?

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? 

It means that what we choose today isn’t set in stone, that choices we’ve made in the past don’t define our future.  They do INFLUENCE it, but they don’t define it.  God the sower of all good seed is a God who continues to toss the see out to his people, continually renewing his call on our lives to germinate and grow, to become that strong stalk of wheat that produces thirty or sixty or a hundred fold of what was planted … we serve a God who is extravagant both in expectation and in generosity of Spirit – who pours out his Spirit and lets it germinate where it will – even in the unlikeliest of places, in places that might not have been welcoming before, but which are welcoming now. 

We serve a God who keeps calling us regardless of the kind of soil we’ve been in the past, who keeps giving us a chance to be that good soil that he keeps looking for, and preparing for, and who actually DOES the preparing OF …

Let’s pray.   

(communion)

Whoever Welcomes

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Ordinary 13A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton)

Matthew 10:40-42

⁴⁰“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. ⁴¹Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; ⁴²and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

Can anyone tell me what the bottom line on our sign out front says?  The last word is a little cattywompus, since the brackets that hold the letters are slightly warped, but can you tell me what it says?  (All Welcome)

We like to think of ourselves as a welcoming people.  In fact, we’ve been affirmed in that conviction on more than one occasion, when a visitor has joined us in worship and later has commented on how friendly and warm we are.  I mention that partially to brag on you, but also to ask this question:  where does that come from? 

In our order of worship we have the word ‘Welcome’ listed right after our opening greeting, and when we share the hand of fellowship and greeting a few minutes later, what we say to each other are frequently words of welcome, but where is that welcoming spirit born? 

In English the word finds its roots in a compounding of "well" and "come," though with slightly different connotations that we tend to use today. The root of "well" could go in two directions: it could mean something close to our current understanding of "wellness" or "well-being," but it could be stronger than that, implying desire or pleasure. Some scholars see a link between "well" and "weal," the root of our word "wealth," and thus perhaps the word offers a kind of blessing. "Come" finds its roots in an Old English word "comer," that is, one who arrives or, perhaps closer to the Greek, one who is received. Thus "welcome" can offer in its earliest sense an invitation to come and be well, or to be well in coming. Either way, it is an invitation to be received into the goodness of this new place, this place here that one has just arrived.

While we use the word casually and commercially, making one welcome is not as simple as offering a word, though it often starts there. The art of making one welcome is rooted in the ancient practices of hospitality.

Preparing to welcome someone takes thought and intention, even discipline. Some practitioners of hospitality are masters of the art; they're always ready with the bits and pieces of welcome: an appropriate beverage, food, a comfortable chair, a few thoughtful and respectful questions of the "comer."

Their very presence seems to wipe away the strangeness or awkwardness of social greeting and make one feel as if they are home. If you've ever been the recipient of such hospitality, you know exactly what I mean. If you are such a master practitioner of hospitality, please know that those of us who have received it notice, and we thank you.

Perhaps the measure of true welcome is the ability of the host to make the guest feel at home. There are some places where one can go and always feel at home. It may look different. It may smell different. It may be full of strangers. But, somehow, it just feels like home, and it is good to be there.

Our text this morning touches on a practice that was so ingrained in the fabric of the culture of first-century Palestine that it has carried through to today, and has, I believe, worked it’s way into our tradition here, and not only here, but in most if not all congregations around the world. 

In those days, when a traveler came through a town and stopped, there was no Holiday Inn Express or Best Western available to stay for the night.  The practice was that the traveler would go to the well, that focal point of town life, and stay there and wait.  It was the responsibility of the townspeople to take it upon themselves to welcome the stranger and provide him or her with a place to rest and food to eat. 

For Jews and Christians, such hospitality has always been a part of who we are. The call to welcome the stranger is anchored in the Torah and was a part of the measure of the Hebrew community's faithfulness to God.

How well they did that carried on to the neighboring communities, and that is how a town or city developed a reputation.  It was not a tradition that was practiced out of fear of how you would be thought of by others, but a very real understanding of the fact that if the roles were reversed, the current host would certainly hope to be treated in a similar way by the current traveler.

Simple practicality in the absence of any other way to deal with travelers and strangers.  Not only were they treated kindly, but you knew where they were as well. Hospitality balanced out and in most instances eradicated the natural fear of the stranger, since in the act of welcoming him, he went from being a stranger to being a guest.   

It is noteworthy that in the Greek, the word for stranger – xenos - is also the word for guest and host. In our age of contemporary tribal warfare, of Balkanization – that is, splitting ourselves into smaller and smaller groups based on certain aspects of our own individual cultures and societies and subgroup and gated communities, most of us are all too aware of the term "xenophobia," or fear of the stranger. Such a fear leads to nationalism, racism and even genocide. As many scholars have noted, however, Jesus' call to welcome another is a call to xenophilia, or love of stranger, the stranger who is also guest, who as the embodiment of Christ after a long walk on the Emmaus road with two disciples - also becomes host.

There is simplicity and straightforwardness in welcoming a stranger that speaks of the openness that we find in the love of God for all of humanity.  When we welcome the stranger, we don’t know who he or she is.  We don’t know what position they hold in their place of origin.  We don’t know what power they wield or don’t wield.  We don’t know who they know and how we could gain by hosting them.  We don’t know their history, their family, their story.  We simply see a person in need of welcome, and in providing it, we enter into this relational dynamic that is risky, certainly, but which has the potential to become so much more than a simple act of kindness.

In fact, what Jesus is telling us is that in the act of practicing hospitality, we are welcoming HIM even as we try to emulate him by doing it.  The examples he uses, in speaking to his disciples, spells it out.  Wherever they go, if they are welcomed, HE is welcomed.  And if THEY, the disciples, welcome someone, be it a prophet or a righteous person, and by implication, anyone else, on their terms – in other words – simply because that person they are welcoming is who they ARE – then in that act they are welcoming Jesus into their midst. 

This is not simply an affirmation of traditional Middle Eastern hospitality.  What Jesus is saying goes much deeper, and much wider.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

If in our way of being we are called to open our homes to strangers, whether we mean our individual homes or this place, our spiritual home, what Jesus is underscoring for us is the fact that a stranger is a brother or a sister whom we simply don’t yet know.  That we are all connected, even related.  That we are not that different from each other, however much we would tend to dwell on superficial and inconsequential differences.

By the same token, in light of the commission we received in last week’s text from the END of Matthew, that we are to GO as Christ’s representatives, then we are integrally involved in both sides of this scenario – we are to be the traveler, the stranger in a strange land, the wanderer, if you will, as well as the one who receives that same traveler.  Christ is present in both roles.  We are not allowed to choose one or the other, but are called to do both. 

That translates into having a willingness and an openness to take the risk of receiving a stranger as well as to take the risk of being one. 

As we share in our benediction, may God give us the grace to risk something BIG for something GOOD.

Let’s pray.