Category: Sermon

I. World Communion Sunday — Favorite, but Appropriate?

I’ve told you before, I think, that my favorite Sunday of the year is World Communion Sunday.  Not just because it was my first time 11 years ago, in this pulpit.  But because I think of myself as a citizen of the world, because I think that we stagnate as local ministers of the word if we are not broad thinkers of the world.
But I must admit that Friday, as I sat down to think about what I might say to you this morning, I asked myself, what does World Communion Sunday have to do with us?  With who we are?  With what we’ve gone through?
My first response was, “it doesn’t — toss it and return to the local.”  Perhaps you’ve felt it too.  I know that it is easy, and even right, for a time, to be totally consumed by the tragedy in front of us.
But my reason for liking world communion Sunday so much is that our local ministries  are informed by our worldliness.
What does that mean?  Certainly I don’t mean worldliness in the sense of being aloof and above what is going on around us.  I use the notion of worldliness to give some expression to Jesus call to faith.  His call to faith is more than a call to be empathic.  He suggests in the usual reading of this familiar story about what it might be like to have faith as the ability to say to a mulberry seed, be uprooted and planted in the sea.
That illustration, you will observe comes on the heals of Jesus’ stunning description of what it means to be neighborly: be ready to forgive someone who sins against you forever . . .
Their jaws drop: how is this possible? their question has become, for me, the question transplantation.
First a bit of exegesis and then I’ll get back to this idea of transplantation.

II. Exegesis

I find the text, as the major translations put it off-putting.
Did Jesus really use such violent imagery? Such black and white, either/or metaphors? Either serve fully and well, or be drowned?
I took a closer look.  Not a Greek scholar anymore — but with the help of some other translations and my Greek text — it seems that the present indicative might have other options.
In Greek, verbs have a host of tenses English does not have.  So instead of translating “it would be better if a millstone were tied around your neck and you were thrown into the sea,” presumably to drown, the present indicative suggests that we’re not talking about an instance here of having been thrown into the sea to drown, but the effect through time of having a weight about your neck and trying to swim.
Chris Bojhalian was interviewed yesterday by a Vermont Public Radio personality about his new book The Night Strangers.  He spoke of writing the first scene in the book, an airplane attempting to land at the Burlington International Airport and having to crash land in Lake Champlain.  To prepare for writing that scene, he enrolled in a program used to train Marines where an adjustable and completely configurable plane fuselage is dropped into a 20,000 gallon tank with you strapped inside it.  In struggling to escape from the plane, he experienced what it was like to swim fully clothed.  When I was in High School I took life-guard training and had to swim 1/4 mile fully clothed.  There is a sense of immanent drowning, but you only know it as a struggle for life.
Jesus, instead of arguing for a drastic punishment, suggests that those who throw more difficulties in the way of disciples making first strokes toward God, ought to go swimming fully clothed, or with a brick about their neck.  Then they will know what they are doing to others.

III.  How Should We Behave?

The New Revised Standard Version from which we read this morning concludes this swimming image with the words, “Be on your guard!”  As if to emphasize that the power and might of God is not only powerful and mighty, but vindictive and erratic.  Again, this is left-over imagery from another, more medieval time. Behave or be killed!
More modern translations, like the one by JB Phillips simply says, “Be careful how you live.”  And the one I like most is from the Good as New Translation — “Make sure that your behavior is helpful at all times.”
This is a challenge — of course.  We find it relatively easy to be helpful during a local crisis. Just like we find it relatively easy to forgive one time or even 5 times.  but forever.

IV.  Sustainable Local Good Behavior

As you know, I manage the Waterbury Good Neighbor Fund.  The fund has been in existence for 20+ years.  I have not calculated the following figures exactly, but my guess must be close.  In one month, the fund grew by as much as it has grown since its inception.  When I took over shortly after my arrival in Waterbury we raised about $3,000 per year.  The last two years, our biggest years, we raised just over $10,000.  In the past month, we have raised $155,000.
And that’s a beautiful thing.  We offer what none of the other funds out there 0ffer — a listening ear, no paperwork, and almost immediate response.  For people struggling to put their lives back together after the flooding, this is an important thing.  Insurance money and FEMA money all take time.
Is this sustainable?  Of course it is.  If, in the interest of helping the sinking swimmers who struggle to make ends meet in our community year in and year out, each of us who live here and who have an invested interest in a healthy community, were to click on the paypal button on the Good Neighbor Fund and donate $10 a month every month, we could be better neighbors and have a stronger community to boot.
What it requires, in order to be sustainable is not a flush of empathy as we have all felt in the aftermath of the flood.  Empathy, argues Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at City University of New York, “is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.” Other scholars have called empathy a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern.  Empathy may get us going — and make us feel good.  But it has nothing to do with the larger debate about how to seek flourishing for ourselves while living in right relation with the rest of the world.

V. Transplantation

Perhaps the KJV scholars did us a service in their translation of the concluding portion of our text — the famous bit about a tree being uprooted and planted into the sea.
They have created an amazing reaction — much like the disciples’ reaction at Jesus’ encouragement to forgive.
The Greek language has notoriously tricky prepositions.  Of might mean in or on or of.  By might mean under or on-top-of or next to.   The rule in translating, is use the one that makes sense.  Most modern translations have take the phrase, “Planted in the sea” and translated it “planted by the sea.”
I don’t need to parse this metaphor for you.
I’ll just quote one of Martin Luther King’s more famous lines, of many(!). This from his letter from the Birmingham jail — “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Matthew 13:24-30
It was natural that such a position [of humility] would be deeply resented by many of [Jesus’] fellows, who were suffering even as he was.  To them it was a complete betrayal to the enemy.  It was to them a counsel of acquiescence, if not of despair, full to overflowing with a kind of groveling and stark cowardice.  Besides, it seemed like self-deception, like whistling in the dark.  All of this would have been quite true if Jesus had stopped there.  He did not.  He recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys of his destiny.  If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.  It is a man’s reaction to things that determines their ability to exercise power over him.  It seems clear that Jesus understood the anatomy of the relationship between his people and the Romans, and he interpreted that relationship against the background of the profoundest ethical insight of his own religious faith as he had found it in the heart of the prophets of Israel. – Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
 
I.
As I noted in the newsletter on Friday, I had initially assumed that our parable intended to praise the wisdom of the farmer, who, caught as he was between two difficult choices, made a choice that appeard to level the playing field. Many years ago, I thought I might always translate the Sunday morning texts from Greek into English for myself every week before I began writing a sermon.  Had I done this, I would have realized right away that the weeds were not just any weeds, but a kind of annual grass called darnel, the grains of which contain a strong toxin that will contaminate the good grain.  Had I done that, my earlier thoughts and attempts at a sermon might not have had to have been thrown out.
New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan says that it is not “self evidently wise to harvest darnel with wheat, because mixing the toxic grains of darnel with wheat ruins the quality of the grain and poses a health hazard to anyone eating flour so adulterated.”  Suddenly I was without a sermon.  I couldn’t praise the wisdom of the farmer. Instead of making the best of a bad situation he was making a bad situation worse.  Something else had to be at stake.
My initial thoughts are instructive.  Parables are tricky. They ask us to see things differently that we are likely to on our own. I was duped by my own advantaged position, in which even nasty things work out all right.  There is very little in my station in life that cannot somehow be made advantageous or at least learned from.  Nothing that will really do me in. But that is not the case for a great majority of the worlds people.
In thinking about this parable, I failed to remember the billions of people in the world today who have only the worst bits of land off of which to make a living; the peasants of Galilee who 40 years after Jesus’ execution, revolted against the extreme taxation and chose to die at Masada rather than pay another dinar in taxes.  I failed to remember that the folk Jesus ministered to day in and day out where the disinherited — not people like me with land and resources and wealth beyond the imagination of a person who earns a dollar a day.
II.
Perhaps the parable is more like this joke:
A judge calls the opposing lawyers into his chambers and says, “The reason we’re here is that both of you have given me a bribe.” Both lawyers squirm in their seats. “You, Alan, have given me $15,000. Phil, you gave me $10,000”
The judge hands Alan a check for $5,000 and says, “Now you’re even, and I am going to decide this case solely on its merits.”
I think we chuckle because the lawyers who think they can buy their client’s winning privileges and still take home enough of a cut to make it worth their while, seem so smart. They play on a field far above what you and I can play on.  In order to laugh at the joke we have to understand the stereotype of the lawyer — a stereotype that goes like this:
A lawyer sends a note to his client:
“Dear Frank: I thought I saw you downtown yesterday. I crossed the street to say hello, but it wasn’t you. One-tenth of an hour: $50.”
The reality for Jesus and for his fellows, as Howard Thurman noted in his classic work, Jesus and the Disinherited, was that Rome was the stereotype of the lawyer.  “Rome was the enemy; Rome symbolized total frustration; Rome was the great barrier to peace of mind. And Rome was everywhere. No Jewish person of the period could deal with the question of his practical life, his vocation, his place in society, until first he had settled deep within himself this critical issue . . . was any attitude [toward the imperium] possible that would be morally tolerable and would at the same time preserve a basic self-esteem” (Thurman).
Recognition of this imperial reality provides the starting point for engaging the Gospels. Consider, for instance, Jesus’ frequent conflicts with the political and spiritual leaders of Jerusalem, the Roman imperial seat in Israel. We clergy have  typically regarded the “priests and scribes” as exclusively “religious leaders” and their disputes with Jesus as concerning religious or spiritual issues. But we would do well to note that these were the elite, well-educated, of Jerusalem, and part of the very power structure that supported the Roman Imperium.
These allied groups shaped society to promote and protect their mutual interests at the expense of the remaining taxable ninety-five percent of society. It seems reasonable, then, to understand the gospels’ presentation of Jesus’ conflicts with the Jerusalem-centered, temple-based chief priests and scribes as concerning not only “religious issues,” but social visions,  structures and practices, arrangements of power.
It turns out that our parable this morning has one more little detail that cinches the case for me. And that is that while darnel is a common weed, occurring in all soils,  for peasant farmers, who farm less than optimal soils away from the coast, darnel is fairly easily controlled.  But in a wet year, darnel can infest the best fields near the coast — the fields owned by large landowners, by the Imperium.  Darnell is only a problem for the elite.
III.
Jesus resists the Roman Imperium not with arms or force.  In using the language he does to speak about God’s rule in the world, which is the same language a Roman would use to refer to the emperor’s rule in the Roman Empire, Jesus bets on love to survive and encourages his hearers to resist the way of power and violence and learn from the weed.  The Roman Empire may use its force to tax the peasant population of Judea into near oblivion, but it has no control over the quality of his or her inner life. For the disinherited who constantly face the question of the Roman Empire, it’s an idea that humility can level the playing field without that humility becoming an odious acquiescence.  It’s clever, like the judge. And it works.
An article in the New York Times yesterday noted that a year ago, President Obama declared to the United Nations General Assembly: “When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations — an independent sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”  For the Middle East this last year has been an extraordinary year of the darnel.  Imperiums have fallen and the ordinary Arab on the street now has his or her freedom.
But none of this has trickled over to Palestine.  Why not?
The answer to that question is likely far more complex than what I can imagine.  But I think the articles nails the biggest nail on the head.
I quote Roger Cohen, “There is no alternative to resolving this most agonizing of conflicts but neither party ever quite gets to that realization. After 63 years the balance of power is overwhelmingly skewed in Israel’s favor and the one country that might redress that balance — the United States — is unwilling to because its politics allow no room for that. In general when power is so skewed between two parties peace is elusive.”
The kingdom of God, Jesus might say today, is like Jews and Palestinians living together.
The subtext for those with ears to hear, is that we in the position of power, are being called to stop yanking up the darnel.  We are being called to skew the power between parties back into line.  The imperium of God is different than we expect.
Amen.

A teacher of mine once wrote a memorable, pithy sentence in a book on the Beatitudes that has stuck.  He said that the Beatitudes are a toolkit allowing a disciple of Jesus to become a Jesus theologian.
Over the years I have understood this idea in a broad sense — applicable not just to the Beatitudes but to the words and deeds of Jesus more generally.  If I do not want to be a literalist as I deal with these stories of Jesus, and I don’t, then I have to have a plan for how to read them. This idea works.
Common sense suggests that the people who recorded these stories did so because the stories made a difference to them.  This common sense is supported by historical critical research on the gospels.  It is also pretty apparent that Jesus did not consider most of his teachings to be maxims that needed to be memorized.  His stories were instead presented as different ways of getting at the same thing.  Many parables begin with the phrase, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like . . . ”  Several parables end with, “Those with ears to hear . .”
He didn’t offer what we might consider plain exposition, but offered instead fluid sometimes even confusing stories, because what Jesus wanted to teach, and how he taught it had to work together.
For Jesus, the question that matters, the only question that matters, is the question of the meaning and purpose of life. By that I do not mean grand philosophical theories, I mean basic self-understanding or self-awareness. The kinds of questions Jesus seems to be asking are not the same for any two people in any two circumstances. How do I live my life most truly, most honestly most openly? That’s the kind of issue Jesus takes up in the parables before us in these next few weeks.
II.
What about these kinds of questions does our parable have to do this morning?  Here’s an idea.  Jesus tells this parable at the end of a long and difficult day.  He’s talked to people who are only interested in trapping him.  Scribes and Pharisees who doggedly chase him, challenging his legitimacy, questioning his authority and trying to turn the crowds against him. His work with these guys has been a failure.
As if these were not enough, who should appear but his mother and brothers, who want a word with him.  He’s just making some headway with the crowds — can’t he be left alone?
In frustration, Jesus tells the messenger to relate to his mom and his brothers, that, as far as family matters go, the disciples had become his genuine family. He has no time for them now.
(As someone leery about the grand proclamation by some Christians about family values, I find this an amusing moment!)
Perhaps the parable is a response to the failures and frustrations of that particular day for Jesus. After all, how we live with failure is just as important as how we deal with success. Why shouldn’t Jesus address it?
Basic to our human condition, basic to the questions we continually ask and answer for ourselves, is the fact that we are never smart enough, never wise enough, never far-sighted enough.  Circle II got into a conversation Thursday about the end of the Lord’s prayer — “Thine is the kingdom and the power and glory forever.” “Is the doxology at the end, part of the original prayer?”  When asked, I offered that not only did Jesus apparently not say those words, the bible did not either, that the doxology was a non-biblical addition, and therefore would not show up in the King James Version.  I was wrong.  It is not likely to have been said by Jesus, and it was a later addition, but the King James translators did not just make it up to support their notion of church, as I had mistakenly argued.
This kind of failure is  pretty basic — and apart from the importance of having the humility enough to recognize errors in oneself and admit them, not terribly interesting or important.  It is a presupposition for everything we do as a church.
We should preface everything with the comment, “We could be wrong about this.”  This does not imply flabbiness or non-committedness.  On the contrary, it implies seriousness.  To presuppose infallibility for everything we do as a church implies just the opposite — we are not serious about what we claim, because seriousness  entails willingness to have conversation, to hear other stories and weigh facts.  To merely assert answers is not serious thinking.   In this way, a parable is the height of serious thinking.
There’s another kind of failure that is even more basic, and less understood.  That’s the idea that we are not and cannot be the solitary individual that has been at the center of western thinking.  It is impossible for us to attain to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideal of rugged individualism.  This kind of “failure” is even more important to deal with if we are to be serious about becoming disciples.
It was probably Aristotle, in 350 BC, and then, even more his student Plato, who first floated the idea that to be a human meant, literally to be — to be in possession of a range of qualities or essences that are you and will always be you.  Those essences could be added to over time which is what it meant, they assumed, to mature.
A good case can be made that this is too strict a view of identity.  I could argue, as the Spanish philosopher Julian Marias has, among others, that “A person is the same person through change, but not the same thing.”   This last point may seem niggling, but it has an important effect.  If indeed personal identity is strict, meaning that the present person I am is the same as the person I was and always have been, then Jesus’ great commandment that I should love God  with all my being, and my neighbor as myself, is impossible to understand, unless I translate it to read, “Love my neighbor nearly as myself.”  In other words, love for neighbor and self are to be on the same footing — the ideal is their equality.
III.
I’m not much a psychologist, so I went to Google, for help, and typed that into the search bar “qutotations on failure.”  I found articles of two types: one kind counseled denial of loss.  These articles suggest that we ought to think of loss as incomplete success, or that  every loss teaches us something about succeeding.  The problem with that, and Jesus is pretty clear in this parable — loss happens.   Plain, ordinary non-redemptive loss happens — the loss of a son or a daughter,  the loss of a parent or spouse, these we shall not easily or healthily brush aside.
The other set of quotes I found were the quotes out of the “me generation. ” One I particularly liked is a Japanese proverb that says “Fall down 7 times; stand up 8.”  Again — this is not bad advice, persistence pays off in the parable of the sower. My point here is that it is not simply all about you feeling good.
Both of these approaches, the “denial approach” and the “make-me-feel-good” approach, betray  the Gospel ideal that we are “members one of another,” and that this community of mutual membership lives and moves and has its being in God.
IV.
Let me end with  another parable — it comes from the Buddhist tradition — a tradition much less weighed down with the rugged individualism of Protestant Christianity and the feel good-ism of the me generation.
An ocean wave is made of other waves. You can discover the relationship between that wave and all the other waves with the principle of cause and effect.  But there is another level of relationship, and that is the relationship between the wave and the water.  The wave is aware that she is made of the other waves, and at the same time she realizes that she is made of water too.  It is very important for her to touch the water, the foundation of her being.  She realizes that all the other waves are also made of water and that the wave in front of her is there only because there is no distinct difference between her and the trough that separates her from her neighboring wave — there is no distinct difference between her success as a wave and her failure as a wave.
It is tempting to allegorize the parable of the sower and argue that the seed represents the word of God and the soils represent the different kinds of people who have differing abilities to receive the word.  It’s tempting because it’s easy and because it makes us feel good, us who are clearly the receivers of the word, and hence the good soil.  But it does not help us live with loss or with failure.
Might we instead, read this parable as a parable for us?  Might we see from it, that to fail in discipleship is not only a very real possibility, it is required if we are to be serious about it.  And then, might we see that to succeed in discipleship, like succeeding in being a wave depends on something beyond our own waveness?
Here, Jesus speaks of the continual, and non-judgmental blessings of God, so that we might run with them, without fear of failure.  The sower sows and the waves roll on and we are part of a something far greater than we can imagine.  Amen.