Mercy

Proper 20A 2017: Mercy Resentment

September 24, 2017 by Cam Miller

For children, life is a justice issue.
For many adults that never changes.
“Did I get what I deserve?”
“Did I get my reward?
“Did I get my share?”

My mom was a bit obsessive
when it came to making sure each of her five children
had exactly, and I mean exactly,
the same number of Christmas and birthday presents.
But even on a daily basis she made sure
that at dinner everyone had exactly the same
proportion of each serving –
more than once I saw her counting the green beans
on every dinner plate.

The book of Jonah
is a hilarious one-page book of the Bible
about a bean-counter extraordinaire.

I won’t regurgitate the whole story,
pun intended,
but for those that do not know this story,
God knocks on Jonah’s door (so to speak)
and tells him to go to a distant country called Nineveh,
and then tell the Ninevehvites
they are bad boys and girls
and they need to repent OR ELSE!

The ‘or else’ is God will “smite” them.
No one wants to be smitted.
No one really knows exactly what it feels like
to be smitted, but it sounds really bad.

We should remind ourselves
that in 4^th century BCE Mesopotamia,
a peasant listening to the Jonah story
would have no doubt that any one of dozens of gods
had the power to do some wicked smiting.

Try this small act of imagination.
Conjure up the horrendous images
of Texas towns under water,
or Caribbean islands after this week’s hurricane,
or Mexico City crushed by another earthquake.
Now imagine all the victims
of all that suffering
believing it was the result of a punishing God.
God tells Jonah
to go warn Nineveh they will be smitted,
unless something changes fast.

A 4^th century B.C.E. peasant most likely
would have lived through one or more smiting events in his or her lifetime,
and such a threat
would surly have caused them to shudder.

“Yeah, sure thing, I’ll do that right away,”
Jonah tells God,
then runs the other way.

Now as 21^st century folk who don’t believe in smiting,
we imagine all Biblical heroes are like Abraham,
who said, “Yeah sure,”
and then went above and beyond what God asked.
But not Jonah; not in this story –
and not in a bunch of other stories as well.

Jonah hops a on the nearest ship and sails away
to get as far beyond the reach of God as possible.

That is just one of the funny
and surprising parts of the story
if we were hearing it in the 4^th century BCE.

In those days, everyone knew that any god
was a god of place – a local god.
So you might be able to out run a god if you had to.
If it was a god you didn’t like, it was also a god
of that place
or those people
or that country.

Escape that place
and you might find a god more to your liking.

So Jonah gives God a head fake
and then makes a mad dash for somewhere else.

To make this short story even shorter,
God follows Jonah.
God agitates the ocean
that incites the sailors
that fling him overboard
that causes a big fish to gulp him down in one piece.

Now imagine Jonah’s surprise,
and the laughter of those hearing this story,
when the big fish belches him out.
Where? On the shores of Nineveh!

So now we are caught up
with the part of the story we read today.

What we heard this morning
answers the question about why Jonah
ran away from God in the first place.

Because, Jonah whines,
I knew you were a god of mercy not justice!

Jonah just knew
that after haranguing the Ninevehvites
about dire consequences,
God would show them mercy. Bah!

Jonah was just like us,
resentful and angry when the beans get miscounted.

Jonah is deeply disturbed
because God is going to be merciful
toward people he told, in no uncertain terms,
to change or get smitted.
“I knew it,” Jonah spits.
“I knew you were a sissy-god!
I knew you were a bleeding-heart liberal god!
Mercy, bah humbug!”

Now we can pretend,
sitting here in our very polite
and earnest Sunday-go-to-meeting mindset,
that we would not be angry and resentful,
but please, tell it to somebody else.

All of us have that juvenile penchant for justice living inside us.
4^th century BCE or 21^st century CE,
the Jonah story is about you and me;
a story about how we prefer justice to mercy, unless WE are the ones in need of mercy.

The Matthew story is more of the same,
without the humor.
We can bet that when the good ol’ boys
that had been working all day
heard the Line Boss paying the last hired
a FULL DAY’S PAY,
they were salivating for the windfall headed their way.
Who wouldn’t?

But then the Line Boss
pays them exactly what was contracted for.
They were incensed.
They were furious.
They were resentful –
all because they got paid what was expected,
while someone else got mercy.

Mercy is perfectly fine if WE are the recipients,
but if someone else gets mercy
when we only get justice,
look out!

Mercy.
The last few weeks
we have been stuttering on mercy and forgiveness
because that is where the readings have pointed us.
It is a kind of worldview
rising up in the mist between the verses of the Bible
from the book of Genesis all the way to Matthew.

It is a worldview that claims
the Economy of God
is guided by the invisible hand of mercy.
That is different than our economy.

Anyone who took Econ. 101 knows
that our economic system is guided
by production and scarcity – not even justice.
That is radically different from God’s economy.

The Economy of God,
if the Bible is to be believed even a little,
is guided by the laws of
extravagant,
excessive,
profligate mercy.

If we stopped to think about it,
if we even believed it,
it would make us angry enough to spit.
It is almost humorous how infantile we can be
when it comes to justice and mercy.

Let’s take an esoteric and abstract example,
to give us a little emotional distance
from our penchant for justice,
so that we can see it in better focus.

When human beings have imagined
the other side of death,
invariably it is a scheme built on justice, not mercy.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity
all assert an intimate relationship between
how we live this life
and the quality of another life.
No matter which religion, or whether
it is an Afterlife or the Wheel of Life,
there is always a relationship between
here and now, and then and there.

Reincarnation,
Samsara,
Heaven and Hell,
whatever, are all based upon a connection
between our behavior (or consciousness) now,
in this life, and the next life or dimension.

But what if there is no connection?

What if God really is as radically gracious
as indicated in the parable of the Generous Employer?

What if God’s mercy bears no relationship to justice?

What if God embraces good guys and bad guys
with the same joy and tenderness?

If the Economy of God really does operate
by the invisible hand of mercy then…
well, then what?

Well then, we will have to find new reasons
to do what we think is right,
instead of trying to motivate ourselves
with fear, guilt, or shame.

So imagine no fear.
Imagine no fear of the law.
Imagine no fear of punishment.
Imagine no fear of being caught.
Imagine no fear of Hell.
Imagine no fear of judgment.

Suddenly, we would need to find another motivation.
Suddenly, we would need to find
additional drive and impulse
to live our lives by the core values we claim.

Imagine spirituality with no guilt and no shame:
no guilt that we did not live up to expectations,
and no shame that we have failed.

Imagine religion with no guilt that we did not do
whatever it was we were supposed to do,
and no shame that we are not what we had hoped.

We would need to find new motivations
for resisting the temptation to forsake our principles.
What would those motivations be?
What could possibly be more powerful
than fear, guilt, and shame?

Just this:

That the values we have chosen are the ones we love.
That the principles we acclaim,
we believe deep down in our bones,
are the best ones to live by;
That we are convinced of our core values because we have experienced their wisdom, rather than because someone else or some other authority told us they should be ours to hold.

No fear,
no guilt,
no shame; and instead,
because our values, principles, and beliefs
are the ones we love
and the faith we hold
and the principles we have discovered
are the right ones to live by.

Without fear, guilt or shame,
when we violate our principles, values, or faith –
which we will always do because we do not have a snowball’s chance in Hell of perfection –
we will fall into the arms of God’s mercy
and recover there.

And if we do that,
instead of dwell in the valley of fear, guilt, and shame,
we will be more merciful to others,
and let them off the hook
so they can keep trying too.

We could call a world like that, a Life-giving Cycle
in contrast to the current one,
which is a Vicious Cycle.

The Viscous Cycle is a downward spiral
of fear, guilt and shame
that actually makes it harder for us to recover
and live our core values and faith.
A Life-giving Cycle is an upward motion
healing us and empowering us
to live out our values and faith
even as we stumble over our failures.

A Life-giving Cycle
rests upon our embrace of mercy more than justice,
of loving-kindness more than reprisal,
of humility more than vindication.

And the good news is, the best news really,
it is our choice!

It really is our choice
whether we live by mercy or justice.
All of us have been raised in the justice-system,
and we have been infected with or wounded by,
fear, guilt, and shame.
But the great thing about growing up
and spiritual maturation,
is that we have choices to make.
We get to choose
whether to live in the kingdom of mercy
instead of chasing justice.
To be sure, it is a learning curve
and it takes a lifetime to learn and re-learn,
but it all begins with our choice.

We can be sitting here, even now,
like Jonah under the shade of resentment
and pouting about things we don’t like
or changes taking place,
and decide – actually, choose – to be different.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Proper 19A 2017: The Absurdity of Hell Anywhere But of Our Own Making

September 17, 2017 by Cam Miller

Link to Lectionary Readings: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu

This is a very ordinary, old sermon
about mercy and forgiveness.
It is no big deal really, just the kind of stuff
we have grown used to hearing about from Jesus
and other sources in the Bible.
It would hardly be worth mentioning again,
except that we have so much doggone trouble
understanding the one
and practicing the other.

As befits two very different topics,
mercy and forgiveness,
we also have two really different stories:
Joseph giving some mercy to his brothers,
and Jesus urging the practice of forgiveness
to his friends.

Now mercy and forgiveness
may seem like Siamese twins,
but truly, they are not even identical
or fraternal twins.
They are two significantly different
categories of relationship and healing.

Today’s first story, about Joseph,
is a small little cog
in a much bigger wheel.
It is part of a much larger narrative
that links a big cycle of stories together,
all of them about the First Families of Israel.

These big fat Old Testament stories
have some juicy little morsels in them
but they are almost accidental to the grand narrative.

Sometimes, when we read these Hebrew texts,
we get overly interested in the subplots,
but it is the bigger story that is more important.
If we do get caught up in the detail,
it may cause us to focus on a little current,
like today’s story about Joseph,
but miss the bigger picture.
With Matthew and the Gospels,
it is just the opposite.
Matthew’s story is a simple little parable
that was turned into something
much bigger and more complex,
and our objective is to dig in and find
the little bits of ore.

I’ll start with Matthew,
and something I’ve mentioned before,
because it is worth the reminder.

Jesus and the other itinerant rabbis
of his generation,
taught with parables.
Parables were pithy little stories
with one simple point
aimed like a spear
to get stuck in the brains of their audience.
The reason they taught in parables
was because most of them could not read or write
and most of their audience could not read or write.

Parables were one-point stories
told with a sharp edge
that cut into the brain.
They lodged there like a hatchet
never to be removed.

The story we heard today in Matthew
has a parable hidden in it somewhere
but in the telling of it,
as it was passed down over a couple of generations
before Matthew put it into writing,
the simple little parable
morphed into a complex allegory.

I’m repeating something I have mentioned before,
I know, but it’s important.

While parables were a unique linguistic form,
used by first century rabbis,
allegories were a story-form used
by educated Greeks and Romans
in their philosophy, religion, and literature.

What I just read from Matthew is an allegory.
It is an example of a parable
that rolled like a snowball out of Galilee
and became a big fat snowman in Rome.

The point of Matthew’s allegory
is that God is like a king
who forgives his slave of an impossible debt.
Then, in the complexity of the story, the king
discovers the very slave whose debt was forgiven,
did not model the king’s generosity.
Instead, the slave had a fellow slave
imprisoned and tortured
because he was owed money.

That sounds odd in our world,
but in those brutal days,
they tortured debtors to find out
if they were hiding money somewhere.
It was a pretty grim system.

In Matthew’s allegory,
God is a king who forgives our impossibly huge debt.
The slave is us,
if we do not forgive those
who have trespassed against us.
The slave’s punishment will be our punishment
as the allegory goes –
each character and event reflecting
the promise and threat of our relationship with God.

We will be thrown into prison and tortured
if we behave badly –
presumably in Hell and by fire.

In other words,
according to Matthew’s allegory,
God’s forgiveness
is conditional
and completely dependent
upon our forgiving others.

But let’s face it,
that kind of logic and conditionality
only makes sense if we believe God is a cosmic judge
or stern parent with a big, horrendous paddle in hand.
To me, a God driven by that kind of
stingy, niggling conditionality
sounds too narrowly human
to be the God of all that is –
the God and Creator of the Cosmos.

But my opinion is not the only reason
to suspect that Matthew’s version of the parable,
now an allegory,
dramatically changed from Jesus’ original.
Think about Jesus.

He was a populist teacher
and revolutionary,
talking to peasants who were brutally oppressed.
If we keep their miserable social context in mind,
it is hard to imagine Jesus saying:
You know, God is like a king
who threatens imprisonment and torture
to those who don’t do what he says.

Where is the good news in that?

For peasants living under the Roman Empire
and abused by their local corrupt tyrant,
Matthew’s description makes God
just more of the same.

Somehow that doesn’t have the ring of Jesus to it.

Please, do not imagine I am picking on Matthew,
but rather, trying to understand him.
It is in understanding Matthew better
that we excavate our way back to Jesus –
who died half-a-century before Matthew.

But there is another place to dig
in both the Jesus and Joseph stories,
and it has to do with the difference
between mercy and forgiveness.

In Joseph’s day,
and still in Jesus’ day too,
there was a culture of blood-libel.

We hear the commandment,
‘eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’
and think it is primitive and vengeful, but
in its time and place
it was radically progressive.

The rule of an ‘eye for an eye’
indicated to the ancients, that
if you kill my sister
I do not have the right
to bring my clan over to your village
and wipe out your whole family.”

Retribution had to be proportional!

Taken in its context,
of a bloody and violent culture of blood retribution,
this was a huge social improvement.
As a law and custom,
‘an eye for an eye’
reigned in unrestrained brutality and violence
that was commonplace in blood feuds.

Jesus’ takes the ‘eye for an eye’ teaching
and refines it in the parable we imagine is
buried underneath Matthew’s allegory.

Jesus declares that mercy
is a higher value than vengeance.
Mercy, in fact, replaces even measured retribution
as the core-value for Jesus’ community.

We may hear these stories and think, “well duh,”
but if we look at how our own institutions
of law and governance function,
I’m not so sure we have actually bought into
the supremacy of mercy.

Jesus was preaching forgiveness
as a radical strategy
that would free the minds
of brutalized peasants from the toxic consequences
of bitterness and resentment.
But Jesus preaching that to his peers
is a lot different than the Church preaching that
to marginalized people.

You see, the Church preaching forgiveness
has often been the tool of oppression.
The Roman Church,
that came to be the religion of Caesars;
and the Roman Catholic Church,
that inflicted horrid violence on its world
in the form of such things as Inquisition;
the Anglican Church,
that acted as partner in British Colonialism
to raped indigenous cultures it colonized;
and The Episcopal Church,
that tagged along with the U.S. government
to convert the leftovers of Native American genocide;
were major perpetrators of violence and abuse.

It is a very different thing
from Jesus talking with his peers,
for powerful institutions with a history of violence against their subjects,
to insist that their victims
forgive and forget, and show mercy.
Only those with the power to execute punishment
have the ability to show mercy –
victims cannot show mercy toward their abusers
unless the power arrangement has been reversed.
Herein lies a difference between
forgiveness and mercy.

While forgiveness
is something all people can practice,
mercy is something that implies a power differential.

Mercy is a gift granted from one person
who possesses the power to give it,
to another person
who does not have the power
to grant mercy to themselves.

See how that works?
But forgiveness is not a gift.

Victims of oppression
can practice forgiveness,
but when they do, it is not for the perpetrators;
nor is forgiveness a gift to the perpetrator.
Forgiveness is a strategy
to free the heart and mind
of the one who has been wounded or abused.

Forgiveness is a strategy
for those who have been transgressed against
so they can move forward,
without the corrosive effects of resentment,
and the acidic bile of bitterness
continuing to wreak injury to themselves.

We cringe at the idea of forgiving someone
because it feels like
we are giving him or her a gift,
a gift they do not deserve.
It feels like we’re letting them off the hook.

“Why should I forgive him or her?”

It is an almost instinctual response
that reveals our indignation
at the idea of giving something
when WE should be the one
getting something in recompense.

But Jesus does not suggest we give anything away
when urging us to forgive,
rather, he is recommending a strategy.

I would go so far as to say that forgiveness
is the practice of self-health,
or the act of caring for oneself.

Forgiveness, as Jesus teaches it,
is not a moral achievement
but rather a protocol for one’s own
healing and recovery.

Forgiveness is not an ethical principle
or test of our moral purity,
it is a tactical maneuver in spiritual warfare.

As we read about forgiveness and mercy in the Bible
we need to always remember the context.

Joseph could show mercy
only because he had power.
He exemplified forgiveness earlier in his life
when he used it to free himself of bitterness
and hatred toward his brother’s for their betrayal.

But later on, when he was powerful,
he could grant mercy –
and perhaps did so
because he had already practiced forgiveness.

Likewise, Peter asks Jesus
how many times he has to forgive some jerk in their community,
and Jesus answers, “Seventy-seven times.”
What he is really saying is,
“Well, how long do you want to suffer
under the effects of resentment, bitterness, and anger?”

Peter is asking for a rule
and Jesus gives him a functional strategy for living:
“How much acid do you want in your heart?”

Forgiveness is not a rule or commandment
it is a strategy for health,
and a weapon of spiritual warfare.

Please do not think of forgiveness
as something we do for someone else, but instead,
think of it as something we practice for ourselves.

Mercy is something we grant
when we have the power to do so,
but forgiveness is something we practice
because it heals us as we practice it.
The difference is significant.

Proper 11 A, 2017:The problems we’re born with are the ones we die with

July 23, 2017 by Cam Miller

TEXTS for Preaching: Sunday, July 23, 2017

Wisdom of Solomon 12:13, 16-19

There is no god besides you, whose care is for all people,
to whom you should prove that you have not judged unjustly;
for your strength is the source of righteousness,
and your sovereignty over all causes you to spare all.
For you show your strength when people doubt the completeness of your power,
and you rebuke any insolence among those who know it.
Although you are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness,
and with great forbearance you govern us;
for you have power to act whenever you choose.

Through such works you have taught your people
that the righteous must be kind,
and you have filled your children with good hope,
because you give repentance for sins.

Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Jesus put before the crowdanother parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”

Sermon

Your power over all, O God,
causes you to spare all and judge with mildness.
We’ll get back to that sweet little line from
the Book of Wisdom.

We have before us a parable
that has been so well chewed by the oral tradition –

by which I mean that river of years meandering
from the death of Jesus to when
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John edited his words
forty to eighty years later –
that whatever Jesus’ original intent or meaning was,
it is now lost to us forever.
The consequence is that Cam Miller at Trinity,
and Deb Lind at the Presby Church,
and Donald Golden at Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church,
can all get up into their pulpits on the same day,
preaching on the same parable,
and say very different things.
But that is the interpretive nature of Scripture.
It does not stand on its own and speak for itself.
And that is the human experience as well,
each of us encountering one and the same thing
and walking away with sometimes wildly different perceptions.

I am about to do a little de-construction with this parable,
but as I do, I should admit up front
that I am not a big believer in the apocalyptic promise
of a Second Coming.
“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,”
is only one of the many lines
of the Nicene Creed that I choke on.
The idea that Jesus will arrive at the end of history
to separate the good guys from the bad guys –
which, by the way, is also an orthodox Muslim belief –
just doesn’t compute for me.

I stand instead,
in the modernist tradition of scholarship
that does not see anything in the teaching of Jesus,
to suggest that Jesus thought he was coming back
when the clock stops ticking.
Some Gospel editors clearly believed Jesus would be back,
but they were doing some expansive interpretation
in order to get there.

I prefer the Book of Wisdom’s take on things:
Your power over all, O God,
causes you to spare all and judge with mildness.

Now we know, from modern Biblical scholarship,
that Jesus’ stories and parables
circulated by word of mouth for two or three generations
before they were written down.
And over the course of that span of years
the world changed quite dramatically.

In other words,
the world of the gospel-writers
was quite different from the world Jesus lived in.

Think of it this way.
I was born in 1953,
and my youngest child, James, was born in 1994.
That is roughly the same span of time
that passed between Jesus’ death
and when Mark’s gospel was written.
Think about how much the world changed
between 1953 and 1994.
Think how the presumptions of my world
are different from the presumptions of his world:
The Cold War.
The crumbling of Colonialism.
The expansion and then decline of Communism.
The receding of nationalized economies and the birth of globalism.
The globalization of American culture
and the evaporation of American dominance.
Space travel.
Earth travel.
Studebaker to Prius to self-driving cars.
Mainframe computers that filled a warehouse
reduced to a laptop computer,and then again to tablet size computing,
and now a phone with nearly as much speed and memory
as the old mainframe.
From industrialization, to the explosion of information,
to the crisis of climate change.

We could go on and on
naming how the world has changed,
and how many human assumptions have changed with it,
in that brief lapse of time between when I was born
and the year James was born.

But we should not make the mistake of modern hubris,
and say to ourselves that our world is changing
so much faster than the world of Jesus’ day,
and that of the New Testament writers
writing forty to eighty years after him.
While our rate of technological change
is light years more rapid,
history always races by
from the perspective of those living it.

You see, between Jesus and Matthew,
there opened up a chasm as wide as the one
between my world and James’.

A war of Jewish insurrection
against Roman domination,
led to the near elimination of what Jews had come to know
as Judaism – and their religion
was nearly extinguished altogether.
The social and political landscape
changed radically from Jesus to Matthew,
and if we do not know about those changes
then we cannot fully understand the Gospels.

Matthew and his Jewish contemporaries
believed they were living close to the apocalypse,
at the near end of history.
But the world Jesus lived in
was still open-ended and full of possibilities.

That difference alone
shows how Jesus’ parable evolved
into a metaphor about Christian community
even though Christians and Christianity did not exist
when Jesus walked the earth.

As told by Matthew,
Jesus’ parable deals with the question
of how something so good,
like church,
can have such yucky people in it.

Matthew is concerned about how Christians
will define themselves over and against the world:
making clear that Christians are the good guys
and the rest of the world, bad guys.
And if that is true, Matthew wonders,
then how do some of those bad guys
get into the good guys club?
If they get in,
does that spoil the goodness of the whole club?
The answer Matthew comes up with,
is the Devil done it.
A mysterious enemy snuck in by night
and planted the bad guys.

So that is how Matthew
interpreted a parable told by Jesus
fifty years earlier;
and how he then passed it on to us
with implications quite different from Jesus’ original.

Now if we were to strip away
the presumption of Matthew’s world –
and remember that for Jesus there was no Church
and there were no Christians,
nor even a dawning apocalypse –
we might hear a different punch line from Matthew’s.

In other words,
if we shift the context of the parable
away from Matthew’s post Jewish/Roman war –
when Judaism no longer existed in Judah and Galilee,
and was hanging by a thread everywhere else –
and we listen to it back to Jesus’ day,
what we notice right away
is that the workers are downright edgy and anxious
when they go out and find weeds in the field.

That is an important clue
as to what the parable was about for Jesus.

Remember, they are peasant-farmers
and so they are worried
about being blamed and punished.
They know they are innocent –
they know they didn’t plant the bad seeds.
So they start to calculate the possibilities
like a fugitive fox sniffing hounds in the wind.

They race through the questions:
Does the presence of weeds
mean the farmer mixed in the weeds with the seeds?
Will we be blamed?
Maybe people will think
we pocketed some of the good seed for our own plots,
and then filled in with weeds.
Should we purify the field now,
protect what good seeds are left so we don’t get blamed?

They anxiously question the integrity of the farmer,
raise doubts about their own credibility with others,
and worry about what to do now.
We know from our own experience
that the presence of ugliness and evil causes us to be anxious,
and to question any goodness we had presumed.

Now here is the counterpoint
I suspect Jesus wanted us to hear in the parable
before Matthew got ahold of it.

The farmer enters the scene.
The farmer owns the land.
The farmer owns the peasants.
The farmer owns the produce.
The farmer, who is sovereign,
practices non-anxious presence,
or as the Book of Wisdom declares: Mildness.
“No! Don’t purify the field,” the farmer calls out,
“you have no idea what is a weed
and what is potential fruit!
Leave it alone and let the harvesters deal with it.”

That is the Jesus we see in so much of the gospels –
the one who stands without anxiety
while everyone around him frets about, “What if?”
In the presence of a knee-jerk temptation
to separate the good guys from the bad guys,
Jesus, standing in the middle of them all,
sits down for supper.

When confronted with a demand for purity,

Jesus remembers the Book of Wisdom:
Your power over all, O God,
causes you to spare all
and judge with mildness.
That is not apocalyptic.
There is no fear of God as judge in that ancient wisdom.
The world, from that point of view,
does not end with judgement, if it ends at all.

Let’s think about that parable of Jesus’
on a very personal level.
We could use it on a macro level to think about
institutions like the church,
but let’s go micro today.

We have character defects,
you and I.
All of us, right?
We all have defects of character.
We all have significant problems
that keep re-emerging in our lives
like mildew keeps coming back.

We have painful limitations
and flaws,
ones that have followed and cursed us
all throughout our lives.
They are weeds that won’t disappear
no matter how much we work at it,
any more than plastic surgery will overcome aging.

So to this weediness of ours,
to those ugly and embarrassing parts of ourselves
that have become entangled with the fruit we bear,
Jesus whispers to us from out of this parable:
Do not try to purge yourself.
What you think is a weed may bear fruit.
Live with it.
Watch it grow.
Tend it.
Let it be.
One day, God will wipe away every tear,
and then you will know peace.
For now, let it be.

Here is what I take away from this parable.

Most of what we struggle with
was planted there in the beginning,
or deposited along the way by others,
and we will not get rid of it.
In other words,
the problems we are born with
are likely the same ones to keep us company
on our death bed.
Live with them.
Learn from them.

Grow with them.
Find ways to compensate for them.
Seek to live non-anxiously alongside them.
Assume that God, one day,
will heal us with unspeakable love
but until then,
make due with the presence of weeds in our garden.

“Your power over all
causes you to spare all
and judge with mildness.”
Let us go and do likewise.

At The Fish Tank: Proper 19C

September 11, 2016 by Cam Miller

Her face is round
and before she was aware of my presence
I saw her staring at the fish tank
as she sat in the entryway outside my former office.

She was sitting very primly
as she stared at the fish,
evoking the image of a small girl
though she was not young.
Her girlish face held tired eyes
and she was riding that wide meridian
we call mid-life.

I knew her.
She was poor
and the aura of poverty was a gray cloud
through which her otherwise light presence shown.
Wide gaps between her teeth
whispered neglect like broken windows
on an abandoned house.

Her valiant attempt to make out-sized,
second and third hand clothing
appear neat and muss-free
could not conceal a limited capacity
for personal hygiene.

I knew her by name
and for a split second before she realized
I was there, I studied her face.

I knew her story, at least part of it.
She had labored at the most menial of jobs
but in her thirties became determined
she would go to school and earn an Associate’s degree.

Working full time
and going to school full time
seemed obvious to her.
What else would you do?

“Some people have parents,” she once confided to me
with reverential awe, and a slight
but barely perceptible hint of judgement,
“that don’t want their children working
at all during school.”

The concept seemed mystifying to her
and I hid my embarrassment
at my own parental and class prejudice on the subject.

The tiny bit of public assistance she received
was suspended when she lost her job.

“If you don’t work twenty hours a week,”
she explained to me,
her words drenched with earnestness,
“the county can’t help you with school.”

Then she looked down at the floor.
After a silence she mumbled that no one would hire her.
She had applied to more jobs than she could count.
Now, sitting outside my office,
she was out of school,
out of work,
out of a place to live,
out of money,
out of food.

She looked at the floor again
as she asked if I had any food cards left.
She probably remembered that the last time she was in
I turned her down.
But before I could answer her question,
she asked me another.

It wasn’t a casual question either,
not something that just popped out of her head.
Clearly she had been thinking about this question
for a while.
She had been stewing on this question –
its moist heat sweating through her thoughts.

She straightened up her already prim posture,
hands still folded neatly in her lap
and ankles crossed as if some long ago lesson
from Catholic school.
Then she looked me straight in the eyes,
her eyes big and wide open with expectancy.

“What parent,” she wanted to know,
“would sit and watch her baby fall?”
She pointed to an imaginary toddler in the room with us
as if she were the mother
watching an imaginary baby fall down.
I could tell she knew that I knew what she was asking,
but I allowed silence to hang there between us.
“What parent would do that, just sit there, I mean,
and watch his baby fall?”

I asked her point blank, “What do you think?
“I don’t want to think bad thoughts,” she whimpered.
“I don’t want to think bad thoughts about, you know;
I don’t want to think bad thoughts about…God.”

Just then the fish tank bubbled and burped.
It’s funny how we remember little details
and so often forget the big ones.

Maybe you want to know what I told her, but maybe
you would rather think about your own answer.
Your own answer is a lot more important than mine.
Maybe there is no answer?

You see, one of the hallmarks of 21st century
Christian spirituality
is that we are faced with asking really big questions
but we do not get really big answers.
And another hallmark of Christian spirituality
in the 21st century is that we are able
to live within the tension of those two things:
really big questions and little or no answers.

In this century, in post-modern, secular society
we have to ask a question like,
“Why would God
watch us fall on our face
and not do anything about it?”

Then, when we acknowledge we do not really have
an adequate answer to that question,
we are still able to live in the faith that God loves us,
and even wants every good thing for us.
It is a crazy faith that is stubborn and flexible enough
to live between a rock and a hard place.

Does a loving parent watch as his or her child
fall hard and not do anything about it?
Not just fall,
but does God sit idly by
while that child is pushed and shoved
and trodden upon
by ordinary human greed?

Does a loving God do anything
to help an earnest single woman
simply struggling to work for a living?
Here is what I said to her.

I told her that I don’t know the answer to her question.
I told her it confuses me too.
I told her that it is easier for me to imagine
her troubles are the result of human failure and neglect more than God’s indifference –
and by human failure,
I told her I meant prejudice and greed
and hardness of heart.

I told her it was a good question to ask,
and that everything I ever read about God in the Bible
indicates that God can handle our anger
and even our suspicion.

I told her that I get angry with God fairly often;
and that I question God’s judgment on a regular basis,
even as I laugh at myself for doing it.
I told her that all of my confusion
and anger
and frustration with God
usually leads me right back to thinking about people;
about how we act
and when we are negligent
and what differences we could make
if we had a mind to make a difference.

Here is the thing that mucks up our thinking
about God
and human evil
and why bad things happen to good people.
We think it is supposed to be a well-ordered universe
in which the good guys get rewarded
and the bad guys get punished.
We can see that is not true
but we keep trying to think that way
because that is the way most of us were raised:
rewarded for good things
and punished for bad.
We earned praise and approval
and we received discipline and punishment.
That is the world we want
because it is predictable
and seems fair.

On the other hand,
we know from experience
that is not the world we have
and we presume something went wrong
because we do not think God wants it this way either.
But then we have a Gospel story like the one from Luke.
It really messes with our penchant for order.

“Now the tax collectors and sinners,” it says,
“were coming near to listen to Jesus.
And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling:
‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them!’”

That little word in Luke
that Elizabethan English preferred to translate
as “sinners”
is rooted in a more ancient Hebrew word: Resha’im.
Resha’im refers to people who have
“sinned willfully and heinously and who did not repent.”
(J.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism).

In rabbinical literature,
Resh’im is always translated as, “the wicked.”
What Luke is saying with the accusation in this story
is that Jesus welcomed and ate with the wicked.

Now in Jesus’ world the wicked
were mostly people who had professionalized their sins:
not only did they do bad stuff
but they made money doing it!

The wicked refers to
prostitutes,
crack and meth dealers,
pornographers,
Executives of credit card companies,
people who sold those ridiculously bad mortgages
to customers they knew could not afford them.
You name it,
any professionalized sin we can think of
and it qualifies for the category of the wicked.

Jesus, Luke says without debating it,
welcomed the wicked to his table,
to our table actually.
You see, in Christianity,
we adopted that silly formula that
IF we repent
and change our sinful ways,
THEN God will forgive us.
It is a very nice, very tidy,
almost economic formula that works pretty well for us:
Do the right thing
and get the reward.

It is a great formula
if what we are aiming for
is a well-ordered society or
a Church that insists upon orthodoxy:
God will like us
IF we have the right belief.
And conversely,
if we do not believe the right things,
THEN no matter what we do
we will not be able to gain God’s forgiveness.

IF…THEN: a conditional phrase
that makes clear what the bargain is.
But Jesus mucks it all up.
He says: “God forgives you, NOW go and repent.”
Hear the difference?

You are forgiven IF,
which is our formula,
and Jesus’ formula: You are forgiven, now go…

This is a critical difference.

Jesus declares that the wicked,
not just the every day, ordinary old sinners like us,
but the wicked,
those who haven’t repented yet,
are included in the kingdom of God
whether or not they repent.

The wicked are welcome at the table.
The wicked are brought into the kingdom of God
even while they are still wicked.
The wicked are welcome even before they make restitution,
even before they have confessed,
even before they pay for their crime.

How wrong is that?
It is a total violation of the way we like things.

According to Luke,
Jesus ate with the wicked while they were still wicked,
and Jesus announced that God loves them.
THEN – if you can believe it –
Jesus forgave them even before they had earned it!

What is the punch line for us? Go and do likewise.
So here is our predicament.

At the fish tank,
which is a metaphor for events and encounters
in every day life we do not anticipate or plan for,
we have to make decisions and act
with insufficient information
about what God does or does not do.

We have to choose answers
that do not come from above
and only belatedly, if we are lucky,
come from within.

In the absence of certainty
and without big answers to life’s big questions
we still have to decide
and we still have to choose
how to act
and whether to act.

Instead of making those decisions
based upon of what we will get for our reward
or if and how we will be punished for our crimes,
the more faithful
and just plain better human response,
will be based upon what we value
and what we care about.

We know the universe does not operate
on reward and punishment
so the question is whether we will be as radical
in our embrace as God is,
and whether or not we will make our decisions
based upon the values we claim to hold
rather than the hope of reward
or the threat of punishment.

Those are two big questions we can answer
because we hold the answer to them:
Will we be as radical
in our embrace of the wicked
as God is?
And will we base our decisions
on what we value
or the hope of reward and fear of punishment?

Honestly I do not know why
God would order a world
in which the wicked get loved and accepted
just as they are –
even before they have changed
and even if they never get punished for their sins.
But according to Jesus, that is our world.
If we are followers of Jesus,
that is also our value.

The question we face is if we will go with it or not?
Some days I do better than others
with God’s crazy and bizarre way of doing things,
and on other days, not so much.
It is on the other days,
the days I just can’t go along with God
that I am grateful even the wicked are loved.

Proper 20A 2017: Mercy Resentment

Proper 19A 2017: The Absurdity of Hell Anywhere But of Our Own Making

Proper 11 A, 2017:The problems we’re born with are the ones we die with

At The Fish Tank: Proper 19C

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