Perhaps

Thomas Kleinert

Last Sunday, we closed our worship service with a hymn of quiet expectation:

O day of God, draw nigh
in beauty and in power;
come with thy timeless judgment now
to match our present hour.

We sang, O day of God, draw nigh — though earlier in the service, in a reading from the book of Amos, we had heard a warning:

Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?[1]

And yet we sang of our desire for that day:

Bring to our troubled minds,
uncertain and afraid,
the quiet of a steadfast faith,
calm of a call obeyed.

Bring to our world of strife
thy sovereign word of peace,
that war may haunt the earth no more,
and desolation cease.

We sang, grateful for the gift of words for our trouble, our fear, and our longing. In Amos’s day, some people in Israel, the northern part of the divided kingdom, particularly among the elite, were fond of invoking the day of the Lord, that great day when the divine warrior would bare his holy arm and defeat Israel’s enemies. Apparently it never occurred to them, that they themselves might be on the receiving end of God’s holy rage against their disobedient and oppressive ways.

“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies,” Amos shouted, giving voice to God’s anger.

Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

In the society of widespread oppression they had created, their festive worship, though religiously presented, was no fragrant offering of praise but only ugliness, noise and stench, the prophet declared. What they called worship wasn’t worship at all, but an expensive celebration of religious fantasies. Folks in Samaria, capital of the northern kingdom, came to the sanctuary bearing gifts, looking sharp, and smelling good, but nothing covered the rot underneath.

“You trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,” Amos cried. “You push the afflicted out of the way, you oppress the poor, and crush the needy. You hate the one who reproves in court and abhor the one who speaks the truth. You trample on the poor, afflict the righteous, and push aside the needy at the gate.”[2] You may think of yourselves as worshipers of the Lord, but you are tramplers, pushers, and crushers.

Liturgy in the absence of justice does not please God; it nauseates God.[3]

Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?

In 721 BCE, Samaria and the northern kingdom were defeated and became part of Assyria. Jerusalem and Judah, the tiny southern kingdom, sought ways to thrive in the shadow of Assyria to the north and Egypt to the south, and about a hundred years later, when the two regional superpowers showed signs of decline, King Josiah and a group of reformers saw an opportunity to push for greater political independence and renewed obedience to the God of Israel. That’s when Zephaniah addressed the Jerusalem leadership, and he expanded Amos’s critique of the misplaced confidence and joyful anticipation of ‘the day of the Lord.’ Rather than a day of rejoicing, it would be a day of deep anguish, because the people of Jerusalem and Judah, in their disobedience to the commandments demanding loyalty to God and neighbor, had broken the covenant and shown themselves to be enemies of God. And in Zephaniah’s view, much more is at stake than the wellbeing of a small nation when God’s covenant people confuse their religious fantasies with the worship of God, creator of heaven and earth. The collection of his oracles in the book bearing Zephaniah’s name begins with the undoing of creation:

I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth, says the Lord. I will sweep away humans and animals; I will sweep away the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. I will make the wicked stumble. I will cut off humanity from the face of the earth, says the Lord.[4]

Worship of the Lord in justice and righteousness, according to the prophet, is part of the created order itself, and without it, life on earth is not only diminished, but utterly swept away. Compared to our ancestors, we may hesitate to ascribe human emotions like jealousy and wrath to God, but we are in a position to know better than any generation before us, that our idolatries cause suffering across the whole web of life, in all the relationships between land, sea, forests, weather systems, animals, plants, and humans.

Today’s passage from Zephaniah takes us to the temple, and we hear a call to worship: Be silent before the Lord God, for the day of the Lord is at hand!

The call announces a day of sacrifice, only here the inversions, perversions, and confusions of human idolatries repeat and reveal themselves in a complete reversal of roles: God is the priest making sacrifice. The people of Judah are the implied sacrificial victim, and the guests invited to the appalling feast are the designated armies of destruction.

Some see this scene, including the slaughter of people, as a clever role reversal in a temple setting — I cannot bear the obscenity. Zephaniah’s words cannot support the weight of the wrath, distress, anguish, and devastation they are intended to mean, and thick darkness and gloom cover not only the scene but also the heart of the reader. With wars raging and people being slaughtered in Ukraine, in Sudan, and in the land Palestinians and Jews call home, and in the places that barely make the news, the vocabulary of Zephaniah’s ‘day of the Lord’ together with the cries of the dying, the broken, and the orphaned — and note that we do have a name for a child whose parents have died, but not for a father whose child is no more or a mother whose child has been abducted — these words and these cries do not illustrate the prophet’s clever use of ritual conventions in his proclamation of divine judgment. They confront us with reality. They show us the hideous trajectories of our idolatrous habits. Can they shock us into recognition? Can they wake us from slumber?

Yet even for Zephaniah, who saw the whole creation at stake in the ways a city honored God’s covenant demands or not, even for Zephaniah, the Day of the Lord did not represent the end of the world, but the possibility of a new future of faithfulness. The first chapter ends with the words, “In the fire of [the Lord’s] passion the whole earth shall be consumed, for a full, a terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.” And yet, only three verses into the next chapter, the prophet writes, “Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land who do his commands; seek righteousness, seek humility; perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the Lord’s wrath.”

Perhaps opens a window in the thick darkness of wrath, an opening for light to enter and provide shelter. And that hopeful, humble perhaps becomes a bold because in the proclamation of Paul. “You know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night,” he tells believers in Thessalonica. Those who say, “There is peace and security,” will be surprised, he tells them. “Peace and security” was a Roman slogan, stamped on Roman coinage to remind people that imperial power was the true source and guarantee of the world’s peace and security. Roman power presented itself as irresistible, inevitable, and, of course, divinely ordained, but the followers of Jesus lived in the world that Rome had made as citizens of the world to come. No matter how loudly the emperor cult declared Caesar to be Lord, they knew that the true Lord was coming, and Paul reminded them that his coming was inevitable, like labor pains, and unknown, like the arrival of a thief in the night. Only to them, Jesus’ coming wouldn’t be at all like a thief breaking in at night, because they were living in the day. For them, the night had ended and light had penetrated the thick darkness when God raised Jesus from the dead. And they belonged to Jesus.

Followers of Jesus are living in the day, because with Jesus risen from the dead, it’s a whole new world. Followers of Jesus are living as children of the day, because with Jesus risen from the dead, we are new people. The light of Christ is forever part of who we are. We don’t look to the Day of the Lord with fear, because for us it’s the culmination of the life we are already living.[5] Because we belong to Jesus, because he died our death, we live his life of complete obedience to the demands of covenant faithfulness – we practice obedience, we seek righteousness, we seek humility, and we leave the completion to him. We follow Jesus, confident that God has destined all of us not for wrath but for salvation through Christ — and if all of us, then indeed all of creation. And so we sing, O Day of God Draw Nigh, because the light of the world is risen and already shining in a million places. And we sing, All My Hope on God Is Founded.

[1] Amos 5:18,20

[2] See Amos 2:7; 4:1; 5:10,12.

[3] Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Justice as a condition of authentic liturgy,” Theology Today, Vol 48.1, 10.

[4] Zephaniah 1:2-3

[5] See Amy Peeler https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-33/commentary-on-1-thessalonians-51-11-5

Waiting wisely

Thomas Kleinert

When they ask you for a story about the kingdom of heaven, I hope it’s not this one that comes to mind first. I hope you’ll remember the stories about the sower, the gardener, and the workers in the vineyard. There are better stories to be told about God’s reign, stories that don’t involve oil that can’t be shared and locked doors that shut out those who knock. “Is this really how we want to define a wise person, as someone who only takes care of herself?” asks Anna Carter Florence, and we’re glad she does, because the cold, calculating ‘No’ of the five wise young women has long bothered us, too.[1]

There are better stories to be told first, which may be why Jesus told this one toward the end of their journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, and why he told it to the disciples in private, responding to their anxious desire for details about the end of days. “When will this be, and what will be the sign?”[2]

“No one knows about that day or hour,” he told them. “The love of many will grow cold, but the one who endures to the end will be saved,” he said.[3]

Endure, he said. Disciples need to be ready to be long-distance followers. Move, don’t rush. We need to be persistent. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”[4] He has taught us to pray and to persevere in prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

We have prayed. We have asked, we have searched, and we have knocked. And we have waited. How long? “Not long!” the enthusiastic ones among us shout. “Too long,” the tired and exhausted ones whisper, rubbing their knuckles, sore from knocking.

The story about the ten young women and their lamps is about waiting. Five of them are introduced as foolish at the beginning of the story, the other five as wise, and those labels stick. At the end of the story, the foolish five stand outside the banquet hall, knocking and pleading, “Lord, lord, open to us.” And the voice from behind the closed door declares, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.”

Chilling. Is Jesus suggesting that parts of his Sermon on the Mount need to be rewritten? “Knock, and the door will be opened for you—unless, of course, you run out of oil and can’t restock quickly enough and show up late for the banquet, in which case you may as well forget about the party. You’re out.”

Do we perhaps need to add footnotes to some of his earlier teachings? “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’”[5] But do worry about how much oil you have and how much you will need. Worry about your oil and let others worry about theirs, so you don’t end up standing outside in the darkness.

“Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” the story ends—well, nothing keeps us awake like worries do. Has sleeplessness suddenly become a Christian virtue? Are we to stay awake, worried about our personal oil supply while anxiously scanning the horizon for the Son of Man coming with power and great glory?[6]

I don’t think so. According to the Psalms, it is God who neither slumbers nor sleeps so that God’s people can lie down and sleep in peace.[7] According to those witnesses, the kingdom of God is like a child, sound asleep in her mother’s arms, safe and secure from all alarms, and not at all like frantic young women running through the night in search of fuel for their lamps.

Jesus’ story is about waiting wisely. To live in anticipation of God’s reign to be made manifest in fullness for all, is like waiting for the wedding celebration to begin. The bride and her attendants are at her parents’ home waiting for the arrival of the groom and his party. The young women are ready, their dresses are beautiful, their eyes sparkle with joy and expectation, their lamps are trimmed. As soon as the children outside announce with happy shouts the bridegroom’s arrival, the women will meet him at the end of the street and escort him with dance and ululations to the house of his beloved. From there, the joyful procession continues to the groom’s home, and the banquet begins — with music and dance, and an abundance of food and wine!

In Jesus’ story, the groom is delayed — it happens, everybody knows it. The groom is delayed: the seams of his tux split, he can’t find the rings, he broke a leg, the limo is stuck on West End — it happens all the time. After a while, the ten young women are a little less chatty, they go looking for a couch or a chair, they become drowsy and go to sleep. All ten of them take a nap before the big party, lamps by their sides, and looking at them, no one can tell which five are the foolish ones and which ones the wise.

At midnight, the shout: “He’s here!” Now we can tell. All of them waited with their lamps lighted. The wise ones simply are the ones who had anticipated that the groom might be delayed. The ones who didn’t expect the night of waiting to be long are the foolish ones.

What does it mean for followers of Jesus to live and wait wisely? Jesus has talked about lamps before. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches about the life of discipleship, and he says,

You are the light of the world. … No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.[8]

Let your light shine. Let it give light to all in the house. Let the world see your good works and glorify God.

The oil in our lamps is not some scarce commodity you can stockpile, steal, or borrow: it is the faith you nourish in community; it is the love you give to friend and stranger; it is the hope that keeps you going. Waiting for the fullness of God’s reign to be made manifest in fullness for all, on earth as it is in heaven — that’s not like waiting for the final season of the world’s favorite show to finally drop; it’s like improvising Jesus-inspired scenes every day, scenes that make fantastic trailers for the finale: kind, funny, deep, wild, quiet, loud, holy scenes. It’s like letting the mercy of God shine through. You can’t bottle it, you can’t borrow it, but you can live it in a million faithful ways. It’ll come to you like breath comes to the living.

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, and we notice the echoes in today’s story,

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.

To be wise, Jesus tells us, is to hear his words and act on them. It’s like building a house on rock. It’s like letting your life be a lamp for his light. To be wise is not to obsess, “When will he come?” but to lean more fully, with our whole being, into the promise that he will come, as he has come before, in the fullness of time, and that his final coming will complete the work of creation in justice and in peace.

In the meantime, and this we do know, because he has told us, he comes to us in every person who is hungry or thirsty, unsheltered or a stranger, or locked behind prison doors.[9] Fullness of time awaits us in each other, every encounter a moment for the light of God’s reign to shine. We know how it feels to stand outside in the dark, and because we know, we can open the doors we have the power to open.

I don’t like the story we have come to call the parable of the ten bridesmaids. And I imagine Jesus sitting across from me, laughing. “Who said you have to like it? You don’t have to like it. It’s enough that it makes you push back, wonder, and think. Just remember, you don’t have to live as though the fifty-fifty split at the end of the story is inevitable. Let your light shine. Move, don’t rush. Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Follow me.”

[1] Anna Carter Florence https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2002671/filling_stations

[2] Matthew 24:3

[3] Matthew 24:12-13, 36

[4] Matthew 7:7-8

[5] Matthew 6:31

[6] Matthew 24:30

[7] Psalms 4:8; 121:4-5

[8] Matthew 5:14-16

[9] Matthew 25:31-46

From One Hypocrite to Another

Margie Quinn

A few years ago, I got a Christmas bonus. I went into work and on my desk sat an envelope with five crisp $100 bills in it. I couldn’t believe it and was utterly floored by the generosity of my workplace. Later that day, I went to the post office right before it closed. I was the last person in line.  

I stood behind a woman who was speaking to the post office worker with such condescension and malice that my jaw literally dropped. The employee was graciously trying to figure out why her mail wasn’t being delivered to her P.O. Box. She continued to talk over him and argue with him even though this ordeal was not his fault. I was shocked that, at Christmas time when we are at least attempting be nicer than usual, she was being cruel.

I held my tongue, sent my package, and walked out of the post office. I got in my car only to notice the envelope with the Christmas bonus sitting on my front seat. I took out three of the $100 bills and put them in new envelopes before walking back to the post office to knock on the door.

“We’re closed,” the worker mouthed.

“I know, but this is for you!” I mouthed back.

He opened the door and took the envelopes, distributing two of them to his co-workers and keeping one for himself.

As I drove away from the post office I thought, “I’m amazing.”

I thought, I’m not going to tell anyone I did this, because scripture says to do these things in secret. I don’t need to be seen for the good acts that I am doing. I will not tell anyone how amazing I am.

It only took 24 hours for me to tell several friends and family members about my random act of kindness.

Now, this isn’t a story that I naturally thought of when I read our text for today. When I read the text, where the scribes and the Pharisees are being called out for doing good deeds only to be seen doing them, and for having heavy burdens that they should carry with the weak and vulnerable, though they don’t, I thought about all the scribes and Pharisees in our own world. I thought about pockets of Christianity, political groups, and people in power. I thought about frenemies of mine who, to me, represent the scribes and Pharisees more than I do, who don’t practice what they teach, who want respect in the marketplaces but don’t show it to anyone else. I was getting angry just thinking about these people. I was getting angry with Jesus as he admonishes the scribes and Pharisees in this passage.

Two chapters before this text, he drives out everyone who was selling and buying in the temple and overturns the tables of the money changers and the seats if those who sold doves. A couple of verses after that, he is questioned by the chief Priests and elders who want to know by what authority he is doing these things. After telling them several parables in order to answer their question, they want to arrest him. A chapter later, he calls them hypocrites and asks them “Why are you putting me to the test?” A few verses after that, once he has silenced the Sadducees, the scribes and Pharisees dare to quiz him on the commandments. So yeah, Jesus is angry.

We get to our text today and it begins with “Then.” Then, Jesus addressed the crowds and disciples. Which means he is already on an anger tour and then, with all of that being built up indignation inside of him, he looks out at the crowds and his friends and says this: “The scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat, therefore do whatever they teach you and follow it.” I want to pause there because this text can often be misinterpreted to promote antisemitism. When Jesus says, “the scribes sand the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat,” he’s validating their authority as teachers and interpreters of the law, given by Moses. They were people who cared deeply for the implication for the Law. Are you picking up the irony here? Jesus then says, “do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.” It was not Judaism that provoked this kind of hypocrisy but human nature (something you and I maybe know a little bit about).

“They tie up heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries (small, leather boxes strapped to the arm and forehead, containing parchment with texts from Torah) broad and their fringes long. Wearing these things is not wrong in itself, it is the misuse of touting these garments for show that makes Jesus angry.  

“They love to have the place of honor at the banquets and the best seats in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.”

At this point, as I’m reading this, I’m thinking, “You tell ‘em, Jesus! Go, Jesus!”

Then, I read something from a guy named Allen Wilson that said, “The temptation of the preacher is to read this text and point the finger. The invitation of the preacher is to speak from one hypocrite to another.”

So, from one hypocrite to another, I am convicted by this text. I would rather be exalted than humbled.

From one hypocrite to another, I read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that says, “Love is patient and kind” and by breakfast, I have exhibited both impatience and irritability.

From one hypocrite to another, I would rather instruct and teach than to listen or serve.

From one hypocrite to another, I want to tell you the story of how amazing I am.

What we don’t get to hear is what happens right after this passage. We’ve got the before (Jesus is slowly boiling with rage and anger) and after it, Jesus says “Woe to you, hypocrites,” seven times. Woe to you, hypocrites, you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. Woe to you, hypocrites! You tithe dill and mint but neglect the weighty matters of justice and mercy. Woe to you, hypocrites, you clean the outside of the cup and the plate but outside it is full of greed and self-indulgence. Woe to you, hypocrites! You brood of vipers, you blind guides, you whitewashed tombs. Woe to you!

It can be hard for me to insert myself in the text in the position of the person in authority and power who is missing it. I think this text points out two things that are happening:

1)    People teach the law well, but do not follow it. These are people who preach without going out and practicing what they say; people who say that you should be kind to your neighbor and do not do it.  

2)    People are doing acts only to receive praise. These are people who want to be seen at the event only to be photographed; people who do a random act of kindness only to tell an entire congregation about it. Those people.

Someone told me once that the Church is, if nothing more, made up of 100% hypocrites. That is disheartening…and for me, it’s also freeing. It means that when you heard that post office story, you could relate. It means that maybe, like me, you come here knowing that you have a bunch of crap you’re not proud of but somehow you’re forgiven anyway. It means that, maybe, like me, you need to be humbled week after week for the ways in which you may be wrongly exalted.  

On All Saints Sunday, I take a minute to reflect on people who have passed on who did practice what they preached. I think of Saint Tallu, my late sister-in-law, who was never actually ordained as a minister, yet was the best pastor I know. She wrote about the power of a stole. She said,

“a stole is most commonly interpreted as a religious symbol and typically made of fabric and worn by a minister or priest around their neck. It marks the priesthood as an identity that is set apart. I learned the origin of the stole connects back to the actual use and function of a humble cloth draped around a neck to wipe a mouth, mop up a spill, bandage a wound, or dry someone’s washed feet. 

In a traditional ordination service, the candidate for ordination steps forward in front of his or her community and, along with their stole, and receives a laying on of hand. But it typically happens inside of a church sanctuary with its white walls and sterile air, and there is no grit or grime of the very work we are most deeply called to do. 

There are those ordained by the community of the church and those ordained by the grit and grime of life. My laying on of hands has just been the day-to-day of ordinary work, alongside extraordinary friends, which I believe is sacred in and of itself. And we wipe those hands on the ragged and faded dishcloths from the kitchen cupboard--the stoles which mark our identities.”

 Imagine, that instead of my stole I wore a dishrag and after washing your feet, I wiped them with something so practical and holy.

Tallu knew something about humility and for that, she is exalted.

I think about Saint Johnathan Daniels. He was a civil rights activist and an Episcopal seminarian. In 1965, he was killed by a county deputy after using his body as a human shield for seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. When I went to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute a few years ago, I saw a portrait of Johnathan with a quote underneath: His greatest sermon was his life.

I think about Saint Risley Lawrence, whose life we honored yesterday here, a man that I sadly never got to meet. During the service, his granddaughter Amanda shared some words about him and told us, “He lived what we’re after.”

And, I think about a Saint named Jesus, who didn’t always want to be called Jesus Christ, but sometimes went by Jesus of Nazareth. Who didn’t always want to be called the Son of God; sometimes he went by the Son of Man. Who preached the Sermon on the Mount and yet isn’t remembered for just that. He took his stole and washed dirty feet, he performed miracles in secret, and he knew something about carrying heaven burdens with and for the oppressed. Who didn’t care about being showy; a guy who “lived what we’re after.”

So, church, from one hypocrite to another, may we be humbled enough to try our best and do the same. To live like Risley, to live like Jesus and Johnathan Daniels and Tallu and for people to say of us, “Her best sermon? His best sermon? It was his whole life.

May it be so.

Sitting with the mothers

Thomas Kleinert

On Tuesday morning, a group of Nashville clergy met at Beech Creek Baptist Church, where my friend Davie Tucker is the pastor. Pat was there, our faithful convener; she grew up Southern Baptist and converted to Judaism many years ago. Imam Osama Bahloul from the Islamic Center joined us, along with pastors and counselors from various denominational backgrounds.

Davie had brought donuts and coffee, but he didn’t know that as the host he was supposed to provide a conversation starter for the group, a topic or a clip from the paper. He sat there for a moment, and then he said, and this is not an exact quote, he said, “I got nothing. Rachel weeping for her children, that’s where I’m at. I’m sitting with the mothers. A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. I’m sitting with the mothers whose children are no more.”[1]

I thought Davie said exactly what needed to be said, and all that needed to be said. I thought sitting with the mothers whose children are no more was an important thing to do, and, at the time, all that needed to be done; but when he finished talking – I was just half-way through taking a deep breath – a fast-moving discussion started about the need for communal lament, the trouble with lament in our culture, and the need to say something, the need for our group to say something, not to take sides, but to say something all of us could support, along with other faith leaders in the community, and how it would be almost impossible to come up with something that some of us wouldn’t perceive as either too pro-Israel or too pro-Palestinian, and refuse to sign. Clearly, we found it very hard to sit with the mothers whose children are no more.

On the radio, I listened to a young man, a Jewish settler from one of many illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. He said he wasn’t surprised by the attack by Hamas, that this was who they were, the Palestinians. He was armed with a machete, his buddy carried a gun. Did he carry it to defend himself from attackers, the reporter asked. Yes, of course, he said, but that he was looking forward to the day, and it would be soon, when he would use it to attack and drive all Palestinians from the land, “from the river to the sea,” and to kill those unwilling to leave. He was the exact mirror image of the fighter on the Palestinian side who dreams of a land without Jews, and with the name Israel wiped off the map of Middle East, from the river to the sea.

Who is willing to sit with the mothers whose children are no more? Who is willing to hold space for their grief? “Grief, I’ve learned, is … all the love you want to give, but cannot,” wrote Jamie Anderson. “All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”[2] Jamie’s words have resonated with many over the years since she posted them on her blog. All that love with no place to go. Sitting with the mothers we might all learn something, something that would allow our hearts to move beyond rage, beyond despair, and beyond visions of ethnic cleansing. From the mothers and with them, we might learn how love, at its own unique pace, finds new places to go, and how life becomes new.

Jesus teaches, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’”It doesn’t say so anywhere in the Torah, but we have certainly heard the commandment being received that way, that to love our neighbors still leaves plenty of room for hating our enemies. But Jesus says,

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”[3]

Nowhere and never does he teach that this is what we are to tell the mothers whose children are no more. I am quite confident that he would want us to sit with them and keep our mouths shut. Jesus invites us to ponder in their presence what love demands of us as his followers.

Somebody counted all the commandments God gave to Moses. We don’t know who it was, or when and where, nor how long it took, but the result of the count became part of Jewish teaching: 613 commandments.[4] Now you could make an argument that to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect means to carefully obey each commandment. The 613 include 365 you-shall-not’s, which is one for each day of the year, and 268 you-shall’s, which, according to tradition, is one for each bone of the human body. No doubt, there have been plenty of clever kids who insisted on a recount – either of the text or the bones – but there have also been, without a doubt, equally clever older folks who told them, “Go ahead, count them.” Sooner or later the youngsters would discover that the point of the tradition was not mathematical accuracy, but poetic truth: We are to know God’s will and word in our bones, with our whole being, and we are to embody God’s commandments faithfully every day of our life.

But who can remember all 613? Most of us are relieved when we can name the ten. And who can apply all of them faithfully in every circumstance? Elders amd teachers were commonly asked to summarize the commandments: What is the essence of the Torah? What is the defining center of human faithfulness to God? Is there one commandment in which all the others come together?

Rabbi Akiva said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself; this is the great principle of Torah.”[5] The Apostle Paul made similar statements in his writings. In his letter to the Galatians we read, “The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”[6] And in Romans, Paul declares, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”[7] Many Jewish and Christian teachers have given similar answers, identifying love’s demands as the heart of God’s law. Other voices urged caution: wasn’t it presumptuous of human beings to try and rank the divine commandments by priority?

Where was Jesus on this? Did he come down on the side of those who did see a way to sum up God’s Torah in something like a unifying principle, or did he stand with those who urged equal attention to all commandments?

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,” he tells us.

I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.[8]

Every letter of the law and the prophets matters; not even one stroke of a letter can be considered negligible, Jesus insists. However, he also warns us against not seeing the forest for all the trees. It’s too easy to have one’s attention completely absorbed by small stuff, by tithing, literally or metaphorically, every herb from the kitchen garden, while neglecting the weightier matters of the Torah: justice, mercy, and faith.[9] Tithing your parsley is quite alright, but not if it keeps you from noticing and addressing injustice in your community or the lack of mercy or the fading of hope.

When we ask Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” he names not just one. There are two, but the two belong inseparably together. Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself. The two are one. The Torah is a tree rooted in the heavens, and it has the love of God running through it from its roots. Love flows through the trunk and into every branch, into every twig and sprig and leaf: every commandment, every letter, every stroke of a letter pulsates with that love. As creatures made in the image of God and called to live in covenant with God we are to know this love in our bones and embody it every day in every aspect of our life – in wonder and trust, with our will and our mind, with our work and creativity, in how we receive and share what is given – in all things, love. Douglas Hare writes,

Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that [the commandment to love God] demands of us but rather … unwavering commitment. Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel affection for them. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously.[10]

The commandment, Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, is a dangerous one. Perfection as a standard for our actions sets us up for failure. Not so, however, when we recognize that perfectibility is an inherently hopeful term, that we can live each day with the desire to grow in our capacity to love. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously. Jesus challenges us to continually expand the boundaries of who we would consider our neighbor, and not to exclude even our enemies from such consideration. He challenges us to trust that love will find new places to go.

[1] See Jeremiah 31:15 see also Matthew 2:18

[2] https://atkinsbookshelf.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/grief-is-just-love-with-no-place-to-go/

[3] See Matthew 5:43-48

[4]Tanhuma 16b

[5] Kedoshim 4:12

[6] Galatians 5:14

[7] Romans 13:10

[8] Matthew 5:17-20

[9] See Matthew 23:23

[10] Douglas Hare, Matthew (Interpretation Commentaries), 260.

Whose image?

Thomas Kleinert

“We know that you are sincere,” they said to Jesus. “We know that you teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one.” How nice of them to say that.

“You teach the way of God in accordance with truth.” That’s quite an endorsement. Had the narrator not warned us at the beginning that we were about to witness a plot designed to entrap Jesus, we might have innocently assumed that they meant what they said. Pharisees and Herodians make odd bedfellows, but stranger things have happened in politics. The name Herodians is shorthand for supporters of the political status quo in first-century Judea, people who, pragmatically or with conviction, collaborated with the Roman rulers. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were not openly opposed to Roman rule like some nationalist groups, but they were certainly not in favor of it.  The Roman occupation of the land may not have been their primary concern, but it definitely was not part of their vision for Israel. What brought the two groups together in this scene, was Jesus and his teachings about the kingdom of God.

Matthew paints a picture of Jesus facing broad opposition. Pious Pharisees and hardball Herodians put aside their significant differences for a moment, and they set up a clever trap. First they buttered him up, and then they dropped the verbal equivalent of a landmine: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Say yes, and it blows up. Say no, and it blows up.

Judea was a province of the Roman Empire, had been since the year 6 CE, and the population was heavily taxed. Estimates range between ca. 20-50 percent of peasant and artisan production was removed through taxes, a significant and damaging amount for those living near subsistence levels.[1] The tax in question was a poll-tax, payable by all subjects of the empire, and in Roman currency. Rome collected it, not for anything like the common good, but to assert its supremacy, and to subjugate, humiliate, and punish the population.[2]

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” If Jesus says, yes, it’s lawful, he loses credibility with the majority of the population, including most of his followers, who deeply resent the occupation. If he says, no, it’s not lawful, he’ll be denounced by his opponents for inciting insurrection and arrested.

It’s a brilliant set-up, only Jesus doesn’t play their game. “Show me the coin used for the tax,” he says, and his opponents don’t seem to have any trouble finding a denarius. Clearly they are much more connected to the imperial economy than Jesus whose pockets are empty.

“Whose image is this, and whose title?” he asks.

“The emperor’s,” they say.

Very likely the coin bore the image of emperor Tiberius, and the inscription was more than just a title. Emperor Tiberius, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest.[3] Text and image declared the emperor’s divine authority, and to most Jews, the coin represented a glaring example of gentile idolatry. They probably couldn’t avoid handling it – too much of the economy was under Roman control – but it was an insult, a constant reminder of their subjugation.

Jesus’ opponents were looking for a simple yes or no answer, but he wouldn’t play their simple, either/or game. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,” he told them, “and to God the things that are God’s.”

For Jesus and his followers, for all servants of God’s reign, the choice was and is more complicated than simply condoning violent oppression or engaging in outright insurrection. “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves,” Jesus told us, knowing the difficult choices we would be facing as witnesses to God’s reign on earth, “so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”[4] Jesus plays, wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. He doesn’t solve the dilemma his opponents presented by carving out separate domains of human loyalty, one where God’s in charge, and another where Caesar rules. He doesn’t sketch parallel responsibilities, in parallel dominions, neat and tidy, no, he turns up the light and heightens the contrast and declares the radical nature of God’s claim over against Caesar’s. I hear echoes of Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” That coin? It bears Caesar’s name and image, so let him have it; give it back to him. But don’t you forget that the earth does not belong to Caesar, despite Rome’s claims of global dominion that the tax represents.[5] And don’t you forget that you do not belong to Caesar, but to God. Don’t you forget whose image you bear, that you have been made in the image and likeness of God. Give to God what is God’s — your life, your breath, your loyalty. Give to Caesar what it Caesar’s, wise as serpents and innocent as doves, but serve God’s reign on earth — always aware that it is fundamentally at odds with Caesar’s because its currency isn’t coercion and control.

We are made in the image of God, yet we do forget. Richard Spalding writes,

When we look at each other, or in the mirror, we tend to see the inscription that our business with the world has left on us: you are what you look like, what you have, what you wear, what you do, the company you keep. Nevertheless, underneath all those inscriptions is a much deeper mark.[6]

Underneath all those inscriptions that our business with the world has left on us is a much deeper mark. But we forget. We are made in the image of God, but other inscriptions and images continually overwrite our identity as God’s own with layers of falsehood, and sometimes we can’t look past them, or we refuse to look past them, and all we see are the labels. Jew. Palestinian. American. Fat. Muslim. Immigrant. Arab. Black. Trans. Not a person, fearfully and wonderfully made, created in the image of God, but an inscription. An old white man in Illinois goes and stabs a young mother and her child, stabs this 6-year-old child 26 times, because he’s afraid of Palestinians.[7] In Berlin, a synagogue is firebombed, because, don’t you know it, it’s all the Jews’ fault.[8] Ancient inscriptions. Layers of falsehood. Violent denials of any stories but mine.

Jesus says, Give to Caesar what it Caesar’s, wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and serve God’s reign on earth — always aware that it is fundamentally at odds with Caesar’s because its currency isn’t coercion or fear. Serve God’s reign, give to God the things that are God’s, and let that claim put all other demands made on you in perspective.

As part of every baptism, not just here at Vine Street, just after the person desiring to be baptized emerges from the water, we make the sign of the cross on their forehead, we speak their name and say, “Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” In baptism, the life of Christ becomes ours. We become citizens of the kingdom of God, and with Christ we give to God the things that are God’s — our life, our breath, our days and nights, our whole and broken selves. In the company of Jesus, we live, and learn to live, as citizens of God’s dominion, as people who know that we are not our own, nor anyone else’s, but God’s, and that this is the truth not just about us, but about every human being.

Some of you will ask, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s — what if Caesar is Stalin or Hitler or some other wannabe emperor?” When Caesar was Hitler, and Hitler attempted to bring the protestant churches under his control as so-called “German Christians,” a small group within the church in Germany resisted. In a carefully worded statement they declared,

As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures.

We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords — areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.[9]

The Confessing Church was persecuted and driven underground, and its pastors were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The church that counts Dietrich Bonhoeffer among its martyrs was small in numbers, but it faithfully refused to give to other lords the things that were God’s – first and foremost themselves. They were ordinary people who left us a gift that is extraordinary in its simplicity and power: They show us that a life fully at home in the love of God is a life of fearless clarity. Even amid the waves of terror and anxiety which the empires and wannabe emperors of the world so skillfully create and manipulate, love lights a path toward life.

What will topple the false idols? Whatever brings wholeness and healing to fractured communities is a form of resistance to the imperial ethos of domination. Whatever encourages us and others to speak truth and seek justice, to see one another and hear one another out, undermines the imperial logic of invasion and control. That is what we seek to do as servants of God’s reign – wise as serpents and innocent as doves, trusting the love that will not let us go.

[1] Warren Carter, NIBD, Vol. 5, 479.

[2] Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire, 142. 

[3] TIBERIUS CAESAR DIVI AUGUSTI FILIUS AUGUSTUS PONTIFEX MAXIMUS; see Eugene Boring, Matthew – Mark, The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 8 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 420.

[4] Matthew 10:16

[5] Carter, NIBD, 479.

[6] Richard Spalding, Feasting, Year A, Vol. 4, 192.

[7]  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/us/muslim-boy-stabbed-landlord-chicago.html

[8] https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-chancellor-olaf-scholz-condemn-synagogue-attack-berlin/

[9] http://www.ekd.de/english/barmen_theological_declaration.html

The Golden Calf

Margie Quinn

The story of the Golden Calf is filled with a whole bunch of bull.

Last week I spoke of my best friend and roommate’s dog, Olive. For those of you not here, we honored the Feast Day of St. Francis, a saint known for his love of animals. Madeleine’s church hosted a blessing of the animals and as she preached in front of her congregation, Olive sat obediently next to Madeleine. What a good girl! Olive ain’t always a good girl, though.

One day, when Madeleine went out of town, she left me to watch Olive, which I done countless times. Unfortunately, I had one of those days where I left home early and didn’t get back until late. When I got back to the house that night, I found that Olive had climbed up on a chair and reached up for the kitchen counter and taken a full loaf of bread and eaten the whole thing, not to mention a few other carbs in our pantry. I freaked out and called Madeleine immediately. “Ugh, she must have gotten anxious that no one was there and started snooping around.” Olive didn’t know what to do in our absence, so she picked something out of desperation to give her comfort when she couldn’t see us—a loaf of bread.

Now, Olive gets fed every morning and every night like clockwork, so don’t get it twisted. But on this day, she seemed to have forgotten the promise her mother and auntie had given to her: we will provide for you, and sometimes you gotta wait.

In today’s passage, all the way down the mountain, there’s a whole bunch of bull going on. Just like Olive, the Israelites have been waiting around for what seems like a long time and have seen no sign of Moses or God. They start to wonder if he has forgotten them. Despite this being the same man who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, who advocated on behalf of them for manna, quail, water (and more water), and the man who threw away his class privilege as an Egyptian to return to them in solidarity and liberate them from their oppressors, they begin to whisper again. “He didn’t grow up with us,” they grumble, ‘he doesn’t understand our lived experience; he doesn’t know what it’s like to wait and sometimes he even speaks for us to God.’”

They see that he has been delayed (he is a tiny bit busy up there) and they go to who we might as well think of as their Associate Pastor, Aaron, Aaron is, relatably, a people-pleasure and a guy who gives into peer pressure. “We don’t see our God!” they shout. “We don’t see our leader! We’re desperate out here! But we see you. Make something for us that we can use for security, comfort and adoration in place of God’s presence.”

They’re doing it, as Karoline Lewis writes, because of an absence of Moses and an absence of God. To what do we resort when we experience that absence or when we question God’s presence?

So, Aaron takes their jewelry and molds it into a golden calf. They worship it and remind each other that these are the gods who brought us out of the land of Egypt, right?

Up on the mountain, God’s blood is boiling with anger. Get back down there, Moses and fix this mess, God commands. Your people are believing a whole lot of bull. They are stick-necked people who raid the pantry like a desperate dog, gorging themselves on bread instead of remembering my promise: that I would be there in the midst of them and provide for them every step of the way. Leave me alone up here so that I can stew up here in my wrath. You know what, I’ll go ahead and consume all of them but with you, I’ll make a great nation.

What a bunch of bull God tempts Moses with. It’s everyone’s dream to clone a nation exactly like us, where we take all of the people who hold different opinions, political beliefs and we toss them aside to create a whole army of Margie’s who go around with their clones, voting the same way, worshipping the same way and thinking the same way. God, Moses says, I see right through your bull.  

Moses implores God: turn away from your wrath, change your mind, and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember my ancestors, who you made a promise to—to multiply their descendants like the stars, not to consume them with your anger, even if they are down there with all of their bull.  

And church, we are here with our bull, too. The bull I’m tempted to worship is the bull of whiteness, blame, money, fame, power, revenge, and violence for the sake of violence. The bull of knowing that I’m right and you’re wrong. The bull of worshiping other people’s opinions or getting jealous of their possessions. The bull of worshipping people who don’t love us or even respect us. We devote our time, our money, our resources and our passion to everyone and everything but God.

Sometimes, America’s bull has become the church’s bull.

We worship anthems and flags idolizing patriotism, sometimes even in church. We prioritize them over God and God’s priorities and over the flourishing and wellbeing of God’s children, as Reverend Will Gafney writes.

Yet down here in our bull, there is a guy up on the mountain who stands up to God and defends his enemies. He defends the very people who keep turning away from him, despite his constant provision. Up on the mountain, a man of slow speech and of slow tongue stands face to face with God, as Exodus 33:11 says, and makes his case. Change your mind, God.

I’m so jealous that Moses gets to see God face to face. While I don’t know what God looks like, I’ve read a lot in the Bible about who God is. God isn’t a manipulative object, made from gold. God can’t be produced. God isn’t stagnant or unchanging. God doesn’t expect perfection or blind conformity from God’s people. God doesn’t reward our golden calves of exhaustion from working too hard or committing to too much; doesn’t reward our greedy accumulation that keeps us further isolated from the least of these; doesn’t boast when we equate our worth with the titles we hold or the grades we make. God knows that’s a whole bunch of bull.

While I don’t know what God looks like, I’ve read a lot in the Bible about who God is. God is willing to change her mind. God is a Shepherd, a soul-restorer, a comforter like Psalm 23 says. God enfolds us in her wings as Isaiah remind us, allowing us to take refuge from the harshness of life. God has compassion on the suffering, has inscribed us on the palms of his hands—each of our names. God is love, 1 John says, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in them. God is a still, small voice as 1 King says. God is a man who took all of our bull to the cross and was executed by the state so that we may feel the sting of liberating love. God forgives us, even when we create things to worship in the absence of God’s love.

Even what I haven’t read about God in the Bible, here is what I imagine God to be:

God is that cardinal sitting on the telephone wire. God is when someone hugs you longer than you think they will, and it breaks your heart open that they held on for a while. God is right there with us when we fumble or fail. God is when you hold a baby and stare at its fingernails. God is when you feel seen, known, heard; when you hear a chord and then another chord and put your hand to your face and realize you’ve been silently crying. 

God is un-nameable and free and uncontainable and never ever leaves us. God is an old woman in a rocking chair, smiling contentedly at us, eternally. God is whatever makes you suddenly, surprisingly, reach out toward the other.
God is the realization that things like money, success, or career are just nouns that may nestle you to sleep but won’t be around when your dad dies or when your friends gets sicker than sick. God is the best artist out there, painting the sky with a different watercolor palette every morning and night.  
God isn’t he or she. God is bigger than language and softer than silk.
God is the oldest friend you’ve got, who just knows you and knows what to say. That’s God to me.

So Moses changes God’s mind and reminds God and us of the “hard way forward,” as Anatheia Portier Young puts it. The hard way forward, she writes, reckons with a divine presence who continues to elude us. The hard way forward is the most honest prayer we can pray that gives God a piece of our mind. The hard way forward trusts, however reluctantly, in the slow work of God. The hard way forward, church, invites us to keep the pantry closed, to put down the bread and to set our bull aside; to believe in God’s forgiveness and to believe that goodness and mercy, as Psalm 23 says, will follow us all the days of our life in the house of God forever.

May it be so.

Shared joy

Thomas Kleinert

In the town where I grew up, the hillsides facing west and south were covered with vineyards, and one of the churches I served on the Swiss border was surrounded by them. Vineyard is a word that takes me home. I see hills with rows of vines, bathed by the sun. I remember the summer silence between the rows, where all you can hear is the buzz of bees and bugs. I remember seeing workers in the winter, pruning back last year’s branches; workers in the spring, tying the tender, new growth to support wires; workers in the summer, removing some of the grape clusters to direct the vine’s nutrients to the remaining ones; and I remember workers in the fall, carrying huge buckets on their backs and harvesting the fruit of their labor, and of the sun and the rain and the soil and the generous grace of God.

A vineyard is not just another field where this year you grow soybeans, and next year you grow corn, and the year after you switch to alfalfa. Vines can live for over a hundred years, and while the yield begins to decline after twenty years, the character of the grapes doesn’t. A vineyard isn’t a patch of dirt that could easily be used otherwise; it is a planting intended to stay and bear fruit.

Vineyard is a much more common metaphor in scripture than, say, barley field. I wonder if it is because the true fruit of a vineyard aren’t grapes, but wine - wine to gladden the human heart.[1] Fields are for daily bread, but a vineyard is for joy, shared joy.

When you are at a wedding reception, you expect the best man to rise at some point and give a toast, and after you’ve been to a couple of weddings, you kinda know what you may look forward to when he gets up. Likewise, in ancient Israel when a man stood and said, “Let me sing for my friend a love song about his vineyard!” everybody knew that it would be a song about the groom and his bride. Any song that begins, My friend had a vineyard on a very fertile hill, holds great promise. Isaiah’s song tells of hard work and careful preparation, and in the listeners’ minds images emerge of a young man who showers his bride with love and attention, who does just about anything anyone could imagine to please her. But suddenly the music ends and the song is over. The vineyard didn’t yield sweet grapes but only sour little things. Not much of a love story – and what follows sounds terrifying.

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. Isaiah didn’t sing a love song about a friend of his and his bride, he spoke in a parable about God and God’s people Israel. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? Was it wrong to expect a harvest of joy? Well, if not, what went wrong?

God came looking for justice, but instead found bloodshed; for righteousness, but instead heard cries of distress. In the Hebrew this is a vivid pun: God came looking for mishpat, and instead found mispach; for tsedaqah, but there was only tse’aqah. Change just one letter, and you get something very different. Change just one letter and village turns into pillage, laughter into slaughter; a friend into a fiend. God came looking for justice and righteousness, but found only bloodshed and the cries of the oppressed. There was no harvest of shared joy, and here the prophet’s song turns from themes of loving care to violent rage:

I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a wasteland;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns.

Jesus told the temple leaders in Jerusalem a parable about a landowner who carefully planted a vineyard, and they knew right away he was riffing on a theme from Isaiah. They heard him add tenants to the familiar metaphor of the vineyard, wicked tenants who abused and killed the slaves sent by the landowner to collect the expected fruit, but there was only bloodshed. They noticed the not so subtle allusion to Israel’s leaders not only refusing to heed the warnings of the prophets and repent, but silencing them. Jesus told the temple leaders in Jerusalem this parable on Tuesday, three days before he would be executed.

The story becomes painfully transparent for Matthew’s readers. Having killed the landowner’s slaves, the tenants, dreaming of taking possession of the vineyard, killed the landowner’s son. The story ends with Jesus asking, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” And the chief priests and elders jumped right in: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

Those were their words, not his. It was their way of making right what had gone terribly wrong, not his. And Jesus didn’t say, “You are the wretches, and you have judged yourselves.”[2]

When Matthew’s community told this Jesus story, the fledgling Christian community was beginning to separate from other Jewish groups. In the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., followers of Jesus and other Jewish groups were trying to make sense of the traumatic experience. Matthew’s community and others saw the violent devastation as divine punishment for the temple leadership’s role in Jesus’ death – and that perspective colored how the stories of Jesus’ conflict with the leaders were told. Some of the scenes, including this one, sound like the narrator is not only talking about Jesus’ arguments with the chief priests and elders, but about the tensions between  Matthew’s own small Christian community and the Pharisees who were also seeking to rebuild Jewish life after the destruction of the temple. They were in the process of separating, and we don’t tell our best stories about each other when we are going through a separation.

Matthew has Jesus tell the chief priests and Pharisees, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” Matthew wants his small community, made up of Jews and a few Gentiles who followed the teachings of Jesus, to recognize themselves as the “people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” The statement was an affirming and empowering one for a community under pressure and in conflict with other groups over how to live faithfully as God’s people. The tenants of the vineyard, the Jerusalem leadership, had failed to cultivate justice and righteousness, and now it would be the small band of Jesus-followers’ turn to bear fruit in righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees.[3]

At the time when Matthew’s gospel was taught, composed and written down, this thought was lifting up the lowly, but when the Christian movement went from underdog to most-favored-cult status in the Roman Empire, these words took on a very different flavor. Now they began to be heard as saying, “The kingdom of God has been taken away from the Jews and given to the church.” And the embrace of the idea that the church had replaced Israel as the chosen people of God, led to centuries of violence against Jews, all the way to the gates of the Nazi extermination camps and the harvest of terror, death and ashes. And it didn’t end there. The spirit of supersessionism has shaped European cultures in deep ways over centuries, contributing to ideologies of chosenness and supremacy that poison our life together to this day.

We must read the texts that are sacred to us very, very carefully. We must read them in the Spirit of Jesus. Let’s take another look at the owner of the vineyard. We’re not expected to see him as just another agricultural investor who happens to behave in very peculiar ways. We’re meant to see God, just as in Isaiah’s song of the vineyard. God who sent prophets so God’s people would repent, and our life together would be shaped by justice and righteousness. The owner doesn’t say much in this story; his only line is, “They will respect my son.”

But the tenants didn’t — we didn’t. For as long as we can remember, human beings have looked for ways not to be God’ tenants with sacred responsibilities toward the land, its owner, and toward each other. We’d rather be the owners ourselves. We’re the children of Adam and Eve, created to till and keep the garden, but we’d rather make the whole place our own.

The story ends with the death of the son, the son who asks us who have heard him live and tell it, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” Again, we’re not meant to stay inside the story, because if we did, we’d have to ask, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will those tenants do to him? Why would he expect to be treated with any more respect than the people he sent, including his son?”

In our own imagination, we are quick to envision an ending following the logic of violent retribution, but God is free to write a different ending to the story. We believe and affirm that God has done so by raising Jesus from the dead. We believe and affirm that God’s response to our violence is not more violence, overwhelming violence to end all violence like the war to end all wars. We believe and affirm that God’s response to our violent rejection is life: life in the distinct shape of Jesus. Life in the shape of a community that embraces God’s vision of justice and righteousness, rejecting any visions of supremacy and domination. We believe and affirm that Jesus is Lord, and so we give thanks and repent. And we begin to follow again, humbly and with courage, for the sake of life, the shared joy of life in God’s reign.

[1] Psalm 104:15

[2] See Nathan and David 2 Samuel 12

[3] Matthew 5:20

Strike the Rock

Margie Quinn

One hundred hours. That’s the commonly cited statistic for how long a human body can typically survive at “average” temperatures without access to water. That is roughly four days. The temperature in the Sinai Peninsula, where Moses leads the people in this story, is 81 degrees today. You can imagine how hot it was just a few months ago and even 81 degrees in the desert…I would be grumbling. In such extreme heat and exposure to sun, the timeline for survival shortens considerably. Claude Piantadosi writes: “At 90°F survival time with limited activity easily can be decreased by a factor of two.”

Now we’re down to fifty hours. Exertion — such as walking long distances in the day time, carrying one’s belongings, tents, and small children, and wrangling livestock along the way — shortens the timeline even further. “Sustained high sweat rates can reduce estimated survival time without drinking water to as little as seven hours, or approximately the time it takes to walk twenty miles,” Anathea Portier-Young writes. “One long, day’s march on an unusually, but not impossibly, hot, June day was all it would take to finish God’s people.” Because they had no water.          

On our immersion trip to Tuscon back in June, Jeff, Dair, Liam, Meda, Quinn, Calin and a few other friends and I learned the impact of what it looks like to walk in the desert with no water. One morning, we woke up very early and met up with a guy named Joel in the Sonoran Desert. Joel wore a baggy, Hawaiian shirt, aviator glasses and pants that were too big for him. He told us about his dog named Noodles. Joel wasn’t some flashy guy in a crisp uniform. He was just a concerned man who told me, “I don’t believe in any religion, I just don’t want people dying in the desert.”

 Joel was with an organization called Humane Borders, whose mission statement as it reads on the website is: to save desperate people from a horrible death by dehydration and exposure. Every week at the crack of dawn, even this week, Joel drives around in his beat-up truck in the Sonoran Desert, checking on the water barrels, testing the water pH and refilling any that need water because just in 2023 alone, we have lost 500 of our siblings in the desert to exposure and dehydration. Joel knows the name of every water barrel in the desert (they give all the barrels a nickname). He does this because he doesn’t want people dying in the desert. There should be water.  

When we meet our Israelites in Exodus today, they wonder, too, “Why is there no water?” But let’s back up.

In 15: 22, Moses has crossed the Red Sea, led the Israelites out of enslavement, saved them from the wrath of the Egyptians and after three days in the wilderness, they begin to complain. They can’t find any water and the water they DO find tastes bitter. So, Moses cries out to God who shows Moses a piece of wood. Moses throws it in the water and the water becomes sweet. And there is enough.

How quickly we forget that there is enough.

Two weeks later, the Israelites complain again, going as far as to long for their time in Egypt under captivity where at LEAST they could eat scraps of food, even if they were enslaved. So, God hears them and rains bread down from heaven, asking them to gather just enough for that day. They look at it and go, “What is it?” God tells them to gather what they need, no more and no less but of course some of them gather a little bit more, like those people who hoarded toilet paper during Covid. Rightfully so, the folks that gathered more than they needed looked at their leftover bread at nighttime and find worms in it. It’s like when I open my pantry and forget that I had purchased a loaf of bunny bread and see that is blue from mold. God makes their bread foul-smelling, too.

How quickly they forget that there is enough.

Right before we get to our passage today, we learn that God was going to provide manna for the Israelites for the next forty years. Now we get to Exodus 17, and again, the people start whining that there is no water to drink.  Interestingly enough, the Hebrew syntax here actually favors, “There was not enough water for the people to drink. In fact, geographically, if they had just turned the corner, they would have found a stream.

I call this “spiritual amnesia.” We forget the crossing of the Red Sea, the manna and quail, the bitter water turned sweet and God’s ever-present faithfulness to us in times of scarcity and need.

And yet, I would quarrel and grumble, too! I’m exhausted, my feet hurt, my mouth is parched and when I get to my next resting place, I discover again that there is no water.

Is God among me or not? As Anathea Portier-Young writes, “If God is supposedly with you, in the midst very organs, blood stream, and cells that require water for nutrition, metabolism, temperature regulation, waste removal, shock absorption and more — why is there no water?”
           So, Moses cries out to the Lord. The Hebrew word here is tsa’aq, a word that is exceptionally strong, often used in response to life-threatening circumstances, like when the Egyptians were gaining speed on the Israelites as they fled for the Red Sea and Moses cried out to the Lord.  “What am I to do?” Moses cries out here. “They’re gonna stone me!”

God’s response leaves Moses in a vulnerable position. God asks Moses to put himself out in front: “go on ahead of the people” (Exodus 17:5). The Hebrew verb is ‘br, “to cross over”, followed by the preposition liphnê, literally “to or before the face of.” That is, Moses must cross in front of the people, and witness their anger, fear, and insistence. “In so doing,” Anathea Portier-Young writes, “he will also see the need that is written upon their bodies and in their faces, and he will have to confront and respond to the magnitude of their thirst.” Moses takes that walk, probably one of the longest of his life, and heads up to the rock of Horeb.

He doesn’t go alone, though. He grabs his trusty shepherd’s staff, the same one that has played a role in multiple miracles involving snakes (Exodus 4:2-4), blood-red water (7:14–25), thunder and hail (9:23), locusts (10:13), and the splitting of the sea (14:16). Perhaps the staff is weathered and stained, like a well-worn Hawaiian shirt.

In any case, God commands Moses to go to Horeb with some of the elders of Israel. Remember, this is the same place where Moses got his call, where God met Moses from within a burning bush, “signaling both God’s attention to the people’s suffering and God’s choice to be in the fiery midst of it,” Anathea Portier-Young continues. God shows up in this surprising way as if to say, “I see you, and I am right here.” God’s standing before Moses upon the rock is a bodily testament to God’s presence in the place of contention and thirst.

Strike the rock, God says, and water will come out of it for the people to drink. And it will be enough. Moses obeys, even begrudgingly as he decides to name the place Massa and Meribah: testing and quarreling. This is a reminder to God’s people that when they continue to ask, “Is the Lord among us?” the answer is always yes.

 Yes, there IS enough. There is enough water from the rock. There is enough manna and quail. There is enough from a mysterious man who takes a little boy’s loaf and fish and turns it into plenty. There is enough from a guy named Joel in a Hawaiian shirt who checks those water barrels even today. There is enough.

The life-giving gift of water is symbolic of the ultimate goal that God’s children may not only survive in this wilderness but that they might flourish. Even as they remain in a wilderness place, God provides water and says that there is enough.  

Today is world communion Sunday. As we celebrate this table with Christians all over the world, I feel convicted that for me, there has always been enough. Today, not everyone in our world has enough bread or enough juice to partake in this Holy feast with us. I think I want to remain convicted as I come to the table every week that my commitment as a Christian is to take as much as I need (and not more) and then to go out and to strike the rock so that others, like our friends at Room in the Inn, like our friends in Flint and Louisiana and in Grundy County might have enough. I come to the table, and I try not to take more than I need and then I go out and find my own staff and put on my own Hawaiin shirt or my own wacky pair of earrings and I look for places where there is still thirst, where people are still asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?”    

Church, who are those in your midst who thirst for water, who lack what they need to survive? What surprising resources will your landscape yield to meet their needs? On what rock are we as the Church ensuring that everyone may know that the Lord is among us because the Lord is working through us. We aren’t waiting for people “out there” to do it. We are going out to the woods and finding our own stick, whittling it down and looking for the places in our lives where people thirst. We come to this table to get reinvigorated and re-fed and then to go out and have enough stamina and courage, like Joel, to check the water barrels and to be reminded week after week that when we sit with our friends at Room in the Inn, when we find the places where people thirst in Nashville and beyond, that the Lord is among us and working through us. All we have to do is strike the rock. Amen.

A desire for shared joy

Frans de Waal is a biologist who teaches in the psychology department at Emory. He and his team taught a group of capuchin monkeys to trade pebbles for pieces of food. I watched a video of a monkey in a crate, separated from the lab worker by an acrylic panel with a few holes in it, large enough for the monkey’s hand. The monkey reaches into a small box of pebbles, takes one, offers it to the lab worker, and receives a juicy piece of cucumber. All of the monkeys in the group have learned this behavior, and when they’re not already full after breakfast, they happily exchange pebbles for food, a dozen times or more in a row.

The team modified the experiment so there were two monkeys in separate crates, side by side.[1] The monkey on the right offers a pebble to the lab worker and receives a piece of cucumber. The monkey on the left watches. Then the monkey on the left offers the lab worker a pebble and gets a piece of cucumber. All is well.

Now the monkey on the right offers the lab worker another pebble and gets a grape – that’s like monkey candy. And the monkey on the left is watching. Now he reaches through the hole, pebble in hand, and the lab worker gives him a piece of cucumber. You can tell he’s not happy. He takes half a bite, and throws the rest into the corner, his eyes on the scene in the other crate, where his buddy gives a pebble and gets a grape.

The monkey on the left gets agitated, grabs a pebble, eagerly reaches through the hole, and puts it into the lab worker’s hand. He gets a piece of cucumber, again, and this time he doesn’t even take a bite: he throws it back through the hole, visibly angry, and starts shaking his crate in protest.

All the capuchins in the group do this. They happily munch on pieces of cucumber until they see their buddy in the other crate who gets to eat a grape and they don’t. It violates what we would call their sense of fairness.

Had the workers in the vineyard not seen what the others were paid, all would have gone home happy, we may safely presume, from the first to the last. It’s like the owner of the vineyard did all he could to make the lack of fairness obvious.

Managers and business owners hear this story and wonder what kind of operation the owner of the vineyard is running. How does he recoup his labor costs?

Union reps listen, and they are adamant that you can’t pay some workers for one hour’s work what their fellow-workers make in an entire day.

Take the story to the corner of the parking lot at Home Depot where out-of-work people gather, waiting for someone to hire them, and they smile. They know how hard it is to make a full day’s wage with hourly pay. They know the desperate disappointment of watching truck after truck drive by.

When Jesus first told this parable, many farmers in Galilee had lost their land, and they had to make a living as day laborers. Mid-size and large farms, many of them owned by absentee landlords, were usually operated with day labor rather than slaves; it was much cheaper, and there was an abundance of landless peasants. “Day-laborers constituted a limitless and disposable fuel … that made the ancient economy run,” writes Stanley Saunders.[2] Day-laborers in Galilee were poor, underemployed, and heavily taxed by the Roman authorities. One denarius, a small Roman coin, appears to have been the going rate for a day of field labor, but a denarius was a poverty wage. For a denarius, you could buy bread to feed a family of four for about three days. For a lamb you had to pay 3-4 denarii; for a simple set of clothes, 30 denarii.[3]

The landowner in the story is peculiar. He goes out early in the morning to hire laborers, which was the usual time. But then he comes back at 9 to hire more, and you say to yourself, “Well, he must have realized that he needed more hands to get the work done.” When he comes back again at noon, you wonder if he knows what he’s doing or if he is one of those rich guys who got himself a vineyard and a winery as a hobby. And then he comes back in the middle of the afternoon. It’s hot, everybody is dreaming about quitting time, and he keeps hiring. You’re running out of explanations that would make sense of this kind of behavior. Is he perhaps not quite right in the head? But that’s not the end of it. The sun is already low in the west when he returns again to the marketplace, and he hires every last worker he can find. In this story, the day begins in the familiar setting of the tough Galilean rural economy, but it ends in a world that looks and feels very different.

Imagine you got up at dawn to go to the corner where they pick up day laborers. You know that if you get hired, you can get some bread on the way home and your family will eat dinner. But you don’t get picked in the first round. You go to the other side, hoping to have better luck over there, but you don’t. The younger ones are hired first. The stronger ones are hired first. So you wait, you got nothing else to do, and just when you decide to call it a day and go home, this landowner shows up and asks you, “Why are you standing here idle all day?”

That stings. You already feel like a left-over person, no longer needed, unnoticed, forgotten, and this man calls you idle. This man who doesn’t know how long you have been on your feet, how hard you have tried to find work, or how hungry you are, and how much you dread coming home tonight with empty hands.

“We’re here because no one has hired us,” you say.

“You also go into the vineyard,” the landowner replies. And you go. You’re not doing it for the money, you don’t even ask him how much he’s paying. You go because … who knows. Perhaps it’s just to show him that he can’t call you idle when all you are is underemployed. You go and work in the vineyard.

Soon the manager calls everybody to line up, starting with those hired last, starting with you. You barely got your hands dirty. How much could it be for an hour’s work? It doesn’t really matter. It won’t be enough anyway. And then the manager puts a coin in your hand, and it’s a full day’s pay.

The news travels fast to the end of the line, where the ones hired first are waiting to be paid. Now imagine you’re one of them. You’ve worked twelve long, hard hours. You are dirty, sweaty, your clothes are sticking to your skin and your back is aching. But you’ve seen the ones who got paid first. You’ve seen their faces, how their eyes lit up with surprise, and your back is already starting to feel better. You move to the front of the line, and the manager puts a coin in your hand. It’s a denarius. One denarius.

You turn to the people around you, and they are just as upset as you are. “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” You have made them equal to us. You have offended our sense of justice and fairness. Sure, you can do as you please with what is yours, you’re the boss. The air is charged, a thunderstorm is brewing. As a reader, I’m waiting for somebody to step forward and say the words that bring relief and ease the tension. But this is the end of the story: this uncomfortable silence after the landowner asked, “Are you envious because I am generous?” When Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like this, what does he mean?

The story holds the pain of those in every generation who have been treated as disposable people in the marketplace, unwanted, no longer needed, overlooked, and it holds their hope that a very different kind of payday is coming, when no one counts the hours they have put in, and when all receive the full reward. It also holds the pain and the hope of those in the company of sinners whom no one considers worthy of divine reward, and whom Jesus calls and welcomes into the kingdom.

But this story also holds the anger and resentment of those in every generation who worry that too much mercy for others will only breed further lack of effort on their part. All those in the company of the self-made upright who cannot imagine themselves as recipients of gifts they didn’t earn, but whom Jesus calls and welcomes with equal compassion as he welcomes notorious sinners.

This kingdom story holds a mighty surprise, and whether we respond with joy or with grumbling depends entirely on how we see ourselves: Have I been working since the break of dawn, or am I only just beginning to learn how to be a worker in this vineyard where status and entitlement are meaningless?

We rarely complain, it seems to me, about getting more than we deserve. I watch a capuchin monkey happily munching on a grape while his buddy is shaking his crate in protest. The scene feels uncomfortably familiar, like looking into a mirror.

But there’s another scene, one that feels movingly familiar, also from the depths of evolutionary time. De Waal’s research team ran the same cucumber/grape experiment with chimpanzees; and they found that among chimpanzees, sometimes the one who gets the grape waits to see what his partner gets, and refuses the grape until his buddy also gets one.[4] Sometimes, care and concern for the other and a desire for shared joy are stronger than the lonely pleasure of a sweet grape without company.

Sometimes, when Jesus says, “the last will be first, and the first will be last,” it sounds like the great reversal, the cosmic turning of the tables, when the Mighty One brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly.

Sometimes, though, it sounds like a generous leveling, when “the last will be [just like] the first, and the first will be [just like] the last,” when far from anxious comparison and envy, we all rejoice when the work in the vineyard is done.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/08/15/338936897/do-animals-have-morals

[2] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-25/commentary-on-matthew-201-16-5

[3] Ulrich Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (EKK 1/3), 146.

[4] Guy Raz and Frans de Waal, TED Radio Hour, September 5, 2014 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/338936897

Only vegetables

Thomas Kleinert

In our Tuesday and Wednesday book groups we have been talking about Peter Gomes’s The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. Just last week we discussed his take on the famous acronym WWJD - What would Jesus do? Gomes argues that we can’t know what Jesus would do, no matter how convinced we are that Jesus, given the choice between a Hummer and a Prius, would drive the latter. Jesus got in a boat a few times, but he walked everywhere he went, and the one time he rode into town, it was on a borrowed donkey. According to Gomes, the better question to ask is, What would Jesus have me do? We are much less likely to speculate, and much more likely to take our own context into account.

I’m driving to work in a Honda van the size of a tank. I like it because he has room for my kayak and all my gear, and when I take the seats out there’s room for a bed in the rear. When I open the sun roof, I can lie on my back and look at the stars. With all the seats in, there’s room for six or more, but most days I drive around by myself. What would Jesus have me drive? Trade in the van for a used hybrid with twice the gas mileage? Leave the van in the garage and take the bus to work? Get an e-bike and only drive the van when I’m going to the river? What would Jesus have me do?

I’ll get to an answer, hopefully soon; one step closer to honoring God the way I believe God must be honored; one step closer to being a neighbor to my contemporaries and to the children of our children’s children. Others will perceive other demands in their desire to honor God; others will ask, What would Jesus have me do? and arrive at different answers.

I believe the late Peter Gomes, chaplain and professor at Harvard, would have loved the story about Ruth Graham, or Mrs. Billy Graham as she would have been properly addressed back in the 1970s when she attended a ladies’ luncheon with wives of conservative pastors in Germany. She dressed for the event as you would expect a white woman of her background and public position in 70s America to dress. A nice suit, modest, but not Amish; something with a little color and a brooch on the lapel. Simple shoes, short heels, well-coiffed hair, nothing showy. The lipstick she had chosen went well with her blue eyeshadow – she had stopped by the ladies’ room to make sure everything was just so, and she was pleased: she looked nice! The German pastors’ wives didn’t believe women should wear makeup at all, or anything that made them look too worldly. One of them, sitting across the table from Mrs. Graham, was so upset by the shameful attire of the famous evangelist’s wife, tears rolled down her cheeks – right into her beer. Mrs. Graham had no idea what upset the woman so. She was too busy trying to contain herself. “What self-respecting pastor’s wife drinks beer, at lunch, at a gathering dedicated to help bring people to Jesus?”

I don’t know if this story would make it past the fact-checkers, but it is a good one.[1] What would Jesus have us do? We come up with very different answers, and what to us is so very important and obvious, may not even be in the picture for others. That’s how Paul ended up writing about vegetables.

Paul wrote a lengthy missive to God’s beloved in Rome to introduce himself. He hadn’t founded the church there, but he was planning to visit soon, and he was hoping for their support. Paul was on a mission to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to Jews and Gentiles all across the empire, and the Lord willing, he would travel as far as Spain. He needed letters of introduction. He needed help with travel arrangements. He needed funding. And he may have been wondering if the churches in Rome would be open to supporting him and his work. There were rumors that his gospel of grace undermined moral behavior, that he was preaching lawlessness. And those rumors weren’t just fake news made up by opponents to discredit him. There was evidence to give substance to the charges. In Corinth, some of the baptized understood salvation by grace to mean that all things were lawful, and he had to push back forcefully against their boastful, self-centered attitudes and actions.[2] 

And beyond the rumors of Paul promoting lawlessness, there was the ongoing challenge in the fledgling churches of having people from all kinds of religious, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds come together in worship and share a meal, the Lord’s supper – Ruth Graham’s ladies’ luncheon was a walk in the park in comparison. So Paul wrote about an issue that we know had been particularly disruptive in Corinth and Antioch: what to eat and who to eat with when Jesus is Lord.[3]

“Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.” It may sound like a line from a foodie blog, but those believers weren’t fussing over the health benefits of a vegetarian diet or the ecological impact of meat production. In the first-century Mediterranean world most animals were routinely offered to one god or another when they were killed. There were no stockyards or meat packing plants to supply the cities, there were temples. For some Christians, eating meat that was part of a pagan sacrifice was no problem; to them, there was only one God, creator of heaven and earth, and so, with thanks to God the giver, they ate their meat.

For others, this was unthinkable. To them, it amounted to participating in the worship of other gods, and some would only consider consuming meat that had been slaughtered and processed according to Jewish law, and so they reckoned it was best to steer clear of meat altogether. Only veggies; veggies were safe. But from that scrupulously maintained conviction it was only a small step to condemning others for watering down their commitment to Jesus and God’s law by not separating themselves more rigorously from pagan practices.

And those who did eat with thanksgiving whatever was served? They were awfully close to looking down with contempt on their less-enlightened fellow-believers who didn’t grasp the true meaning of Christian freedom.

In those early years, the Lord’s Supper wasn’t just bread and wine; it was a full meal. Can you imagine what may have been said when they came together to break bread? Can you imagine the looks and the things that weren’t said? Paul had his own views, but he didn’t take sides or adjudicate the disagreement. Nor did he suggest that meat-eaters and vegetarians organize themselves into separate house churches so they would be able to worship with like-minded believers. Instead, he reminded those who would hear his words read in the assembly, that both those who ate meat and those who abstained, did so to honor the Lord. It didn’t matter if they ate or abstained, but that they did so convinced in their own minds that this was what the Lord would have them do. What did matter, and did in fact matter greatly, was that they not judge one another, nor condemn or belittle each other, but rather welcome each other as God welcomed them.

Paul wants us to realize that we belong to each other as members of God’s household, not because of our shared piety, our shared love for certain hymns or prayer books, or our shared preference for certain theological traditions: we belong to each other because Christ has made us his own and we belong to him. What matters is that rather than sitting in judgment over each other for the ways in which we honor God with our lives, we submit together to the lordship of Jesus, the Messiah of God. In submitting together we will become better able to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us, for the glory of God.

“Owe no one anything,” Paul wrote in the previous chapter, “except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”[4] That is far from lawlessness, but it is equally far from pious law-enforcement, where what I perceive Jesus would have me do, suddenly becomes the rule for what you must do. No, all of us who confess that Jesus is Lord, must ask what this entails for our worship, and for our life together, and yes, our eating habits, driving habits, spending habits. We must ask and we must wrestle with the answers and help each other become aware of our biases and blindspots.

We Disciples love to quote the maxim, In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, love.[5] We love the statement, but we also know that one believer’s non-essentials are another’s essentials. Meat, makeup, beer, movies, dancing – the list goes on. When it comes to defining who we are, we are quick to elevate our own pious preferences to essentials, and equally quick to judge and dismiss the pieties of others as non-essentials or just plain weird.

But Paul will not let us walk away from each other and claim that it is necessary for the sake of faithfulness. We are one in Christ, one with God and with each other, because Christ has made us his own. That love is essential, and that love is meant to be manifest in all things, in every dimension of our life together.

The revolution of the cross is not about turning others into clones of our own convictions and calling it conversion. The revolution of the cross is about radical welcome, our welcoming each other as God has welcomed us. We risk who we think we are for love’s sake, and together we become who God made us to be.

[1] Based on Mark Reasoner’s account at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=130

[2] 1 Cor 10:23

[3] See 1 Cor 8:13; 10:25 and Gal 2:11-14.

[4] Rom 13:8

[5] For the history of this lovely statement see https://liberlocorumcommunium.blogspot.com/2010/03/in-necessariis-unitas-in-non.html; it may not have been penned first by Rupertus Meldenius (aka Peter Meiderlin) in 1627, but by Marco Antonio De Dominis in 1617 (“In necessariis unitas, in non necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas”).