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Metanoia: The Revolution of Change

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

That sounds so simple, straightforward and clear, doesn’t it?  If you just pick up your Bible and read it, there’s nothing shocking here.  Nothing surprising.  It even sounds kind of innocent.

But how would you hear it if I were to tell you that this simple opening sentence is, in fact, one of the most subversive and seditious sentences ever written?  What does it sound like when you learn that this simple opening sentence, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” is a shot across the bow of the Roman Empire, that it subversively twists the empire’s own language of dominance to launch an ongoing insurgence against both Rome and the temple establishment?  How innocent does it sound when you learn that, in fact, the entire Gospel of Mark, which was written during the dangerous and dark days of the Jewish uprising against Rome, that it was written to be a manifesto to guide the followers of Jesus in nonviolent revolution.

The emperor Augustus was fond of calling himself, Divi filius, son of a God, and subsequent emperors held onto the title.  It was stamped on Rome’s coins so no one would forget.  So to call Jesus the Son of God was to usurp the emperor’s title.

Christos, Christ, literally means ‘the anointed one.’  It was the Greek version of messiah.  Rome’s emperors were anointed when they were raised to the rank of princeps, so the emperor was sometimes referred to as “the anointed one.”  In Jewish lore it was believed that Messiah, the Anointed One, would throw off Rome’s oppressive rule and lead Israel to a new era of independence.  So to call Jesus Christos was yet another treasonous claim in this subversive opening statement.

Even the term “good news” was appropriated from the empire.  The Greek word, euangelion, which we sometimes translate as gospel, was a word that was particularly important  to the cult of the divine emperor.  When an heir to the throne was born it was announced as “good news,” euangelion.  When he came of age another euangelion proclaimed the “good news” throughout the empire, and his eventual accession to the throne would be declared as “good news” in every corner of the empire.  But the euangelion, the “good news” which people heard most often was the “good news” announcement of military victory.  In the first century Roman world, euangelion, “good news,” had become a synonym for victory.

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.  The beginning of the victory of Jesus, the Anointed One, the Son of God.  When you begin to understand the social and political implications these words had as Mark was writing them, probably somewhere in Galilee while the Jewish uprising against Rome was nearing its disastrous climax, they lose their “once-upon-a-time” innocence and begin to sound more like a defiant declaration of resistance.  Which is exactly what they are.

So, the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is a declaration that the revolution is under way.  It is an announcement that, in Jesus, God is challenging all the coercive forces that oppress and distort our God-beloved lives in this God-beloved world. 

This is the good news of Jesus.  

But Mark, the writer telling us this story, doesn’t start with Jesus.  He reminds us that the story started before Jesus.  Long before Jesus.  He reminds us that Advent, before it was a season in the Church calendar, was a long season of history, centuries of waiting for Emmanuel to come.  He reminds us that during that long Advent of history God would speak through the prophets from time to time to remind the people that the covenant and promises that God had made with Abraham and Sarah and with Moses and with David had not been forgotten.  The prophets would remind them that God was with them in their times of trouble, and the day was coming when God would be with them more powerfully and personally and concretely than they dared to imagine.  

Mark reminds us that “the beginning of the good news of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God”—that this story had its real beginning long before Jesus arrived.  “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,” he writes, to remind us that even though Jesus is the title character of his story, he’s really not entering the stage until the second act.  The stage has to be set.  The way has to be prepared.

Even the announcement has to be announced. To give the prophetic voice extra weight, Mark gives Isaiah a preamble from Malachi and simply refers to them both as Isaiah because who said it is not as important as what is being said:

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

                  who will prepare your way;” – that’s Malachi–

         “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

                  ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

                  make his paths straight” –that’s Isaiah.

But it isn’t Jesus whom the prophets are announcing.  Not yet anyway.  Not here.

First, there is one last prophet we need to hear from: John, the Baptizer, dressed like Elijah and living off the land out in the wilderness where he can listen to God without distractions.  John the Baptizer who wants to be sure we’re ready, really ready for Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.  So he prepares the way by “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” and announcing—wait for it—that someone even more powerful is coming. 

Repentance.  It’s not something you would think would draw a big crowd.  But Mark tells us that “people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”  He must have been some kind of preacher, that John.

Repentance.  In English it’s a plodding and ponderous word filled with regret and contrition.  Repentance is a stinging backside, bruised knees and hunched shoulders.  Personally, I would like to ban the word and replace it with the Greek word: Metanoia.  

Metanoia is climbing out of a dank hole into the sunlight.  Metanoia is being freed from the nasty habits that ruin your health and suck the life out of your wallet.  Metanoia is putting on new glasses with the right prescription and realizing that you had only been seeing a third of the details and half the colors in the world.  Metanoia  is shoes that fit right, have cushy insoles, perfect arch support, and take the cramp out of your lower back.  Metanoia is thinking new thoughts and behaving in new ways.  Metanoia is a change of mind, a change of heart, a change of life, a new direction.  

John came proclaiming a baptism of metanoia.  And to make sure the idea really stuck with people, he gave them an experience to go with it.  He dunked them in the river.  “There.  You were dry, now you’re wet.  You were going down the wrong road, now you’re on the right one.  You were dusty and crusty, now you’re clean.  You’re changed.  You’re new.  And just in time, too.  Because the One we’ve been waiting for is coming.  I’m just the warm-up band.  I dunked you in water.  He’s going to marinate you in the Holy Spirit.”

A voice cried out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord!”

Or…

A voice cried out! “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord!”

There is no punctuation in the ancient languages.  So the translators try to make sense of it for us.  Is it a voice in the wilderness calling us to prepare?  Or is it a voice calling us to prepare a way in the wilderness?  Isaiah has it one way, Mark has it the other way.

Either way the message is clear: this is a time to prepare.

Sue Monk Kidd wrote about how one year during Advent she decided to visit a monastery for a day to help put herself in the right frame of mind for a meaningful Christmas.  As she passed one of the monks she greeted him with, “Merry Christmas.”  He replied, “May Christ be born in you.”  His words caught her off guard and she found that she had to sit with them for a long time.  As she pondered what the monk had said, she realized that Advent is a time of preparation and transformation.  A time of metanoia.  It is a time, she wrote, “of discovering our soul and letting Christ be born from the waiting heart.”

What kind of metanoia do you need to open the path for Christmas, to make way for Christ to be born anew in your waiting heart?   

Sometimes it feels like we are still wandering in the wilderness.  Which star do we follow to find our path through a wilderness of political and social friction?   What signs will guide us through a wilderness of violent rhetoric and violent acts?  How do we prepare the way forward when the world keeps erupting into war and no side is entirely innocent?  What language will reach the hearts and minds of those who find progress threatening so they choose to be obstructive or destructive? 

Sometimes it has seemed that the way of Christ, the way ahead is not clear.  Except for this: the way of Christ is the way of love.  Love God. And love our neighbors as ourselves. 

It’s hard to love our neighbors when political tensions and social issues divide us. It’s hard to stand together when so many things try to pull us apart.  

But this, too, is part of our Advent.  This is part of our wilderness where we hear the voice cry out, calling us to prepare the way of the Lord.  This wilderness of dysfunction is where we are called to prepare the way for Christ be born in the waiting heart.  This is where we are transformed.  This is our metanoia.

When we were all isolated during the pandemic, people often talked about what they would do “when things get back to normal.”  Maybe this Advent, this Prepare the Way of the Lord time, this metanoia time is a good time to ask ourselves what our new normal should look like. 

Maybe this would be a good time to sit down together and talk about what being apart taught us about being together.  Maybe this would be a good time to share our hopes and dreams and visions of what Christ is calling us to do to make life richer and fuller and more manageable for everybody.  Maybe this is a good time to make a new path through the wilderness, a time for collective metanoia, a time to discover all the little ways we can work together to make the kin-dom of God a reality on earth as it is in heaven.

Hidden Talent

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Matthew 25:14-30

“For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them;  15 to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. At once 16 the one who had received the five talents went off and traded with them and made five more talents.  17 In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents.  18 But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.  19 After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them.  20 Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’  21 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things; I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’  22 And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’  23 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things; I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’  24 Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter, 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’  26But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow and gather where I did not scatter?  27 Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.  28 So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. 29 For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.  30 As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

I saw a video of a painting not long ago that was simply mind-boggling.  The painting, called Getting Old, is by the Spanish artist Sergi Cadenas who has developed a technique that allows him to paint multiple images on the same canvas so that if you view the painting from one angle you see one thing but if you see it from a different angle, you see something completely different.  For instance, in Getting Old, when you view the left side of the painting you see a portrait of a young woman, but as you move to the right you see her age.  And when you come all the way to the right side of the painting, you see her as an old woman.  In another one of his paintings, you see Marilyn Monroe morph into Albert Einstein as you move from left to right.  What you see in his paintings depends entirely on where you are standing. 

Sometimes the parables of Jesus are like that.  Mark Allen Powell once talked about how his students in different countries interpreted the Parable of the Prodigal Son very differently.  When he asked his students, “Why did the prodigal have nothing to eat?”  His students in Tanzania replied, “Because no one gave him anything.” To them the idea that no one would give a hungry person something to eat was a shocking moment in the story.   His students in St. Petersburg in Russia replied, “Because there was a famine in the land.”  They still had a cultural memory of the famine of World War II, so that was the element of the story that stood out to them.  His American students said he had nothing to eat Because he wasted his father’s money.  That’s the thing that stood out most to them.  All those things are in the text of the story, but people heard the same story very differently because of their history, their culture, and their location.

“How you hear a parable,” said Barbara Brown Taylor, “has a lot to do with where you are hearing it from.”  It’s like a Sergi Cadenas painting: what you see depends on where you’re standing.

I think when it comes to this parable, which we usually call the Parable of the Talents, most of us have been standing in the same spot and hearing it or seeing it pretty much the same way all our lives.  We hear it primarily as a stewardship parable and an allegory.  The Master, who represents God, gives each of us certain gifts and resources and capabilities—talents—each according to our abilities.  We’re supposed to use our talents—our resources, gifts and abilities—to build up the church and further the kingdom of God.  Someday, either when Jesus returns or when we meet our Maker, there will be an accounting, and you surely do not want to be the “wicked and lazy slave” who just buried your talent in the ground.

There are some real strengths in hearing the parable this way.  We can focus on those first two slaves who apparently have a high opinion of their master and want to follow his example.  We can put our talents to good use.  We can put our abilities to good use.  We can multiply and enlarge them.  We can follow the master’s example, and in the end, we can be praised and rewarded for doing so. 

That raises the issue of how we see and understand God and God’s generosity, and that is always a good thing for each of us to spend some time thinking about.  

You’ll notice that at the beginning of the parable the Master doesn’t give the slaves any instructions as he doles out the money, nor does he give any warnings about consequences.  The actions the slaves take depend entirely on how well they know the master and what they think about him.  And what they think is expected of them.

It’s the same for us.  The action we take or fail to take with the gifts and resources God has placed in our hands depends entirely on how well we know God, how much we trust God, how we see God, how we understand God, how much we love God.  

The first two slaves seem to have a positive opinion of their master and act accordingly.  They follow his example. The third slave regards his master as “a harsh man” and something of a thief, and so acts accordingly.  

So how do you picture God?  What kind of God are you responding to as you use the talents that are at your disposal?  Are you responding in trust to a benevolent God of grace and generosity or are you responding in timid fear to a God of harsh judgment?  Or are you just obliviously toodling along in life and not giving much thought to either God or your gifts?

God gives us talents and resources to help make God’s kin-dom a reality on earth as it is in heaven and to build up the church as the nucleus and example of that new reality.  You’ve been blessed so you can be a blessing.  

And I suppose I should stop right there and ask you to get out your checkbooks and pass around sign-up sheets so you can volunteer for various ministries, because what I’ve said so far is pretty much the bottom line of good stewardship, and it’s always good to be reminded about good stewardship.  

As I implied earlier, however, there is another way to hear this parable.  There is another place to stand so that we see the story differently, but to get there we need to move our ears and minds into a very different time and place. 

If we’re going to try to hear this parable the same way the original listeners heard it as they sat at Jesus’ feet 2000 years ago, one of the first things we need to know is that a talent was an enormous amount of money.  One talent was equivalent to twenty years’ wages.  So, there’s a bit of shock value right at the beginning of the story.  

A man going on a journey summons three slaves.  He gives the first one of the equivalent of 100 years’ wages.  He gives the next one 40 years’ wages.  The third one gets 20 years’ wages.  It’s tempting to try to calculate what that would be in our money in our time, but it’s really kind of pointless because the other differences between their culture and ours and their economy and ours are just too vast for the numbers to really have any meaning.  Just know that we’re talking about a lot of money.

The next thing we need to know if we’re going to try to hear this story the way Jesus’ audience was hearing it is that most people in the first century Mediterranean world had a “limited good” understanding of everyday economics.  

Recent research by Bruce Malina, Richard Rohrbaugh, Will Herzog, Amy-Jill Levine and others has shown that Palestinian Jews in the first century believed that there was only so much of the pie to go around.  So, if someone had a great deal of the worlds goods it meant that someone else had been deprived.  Or ripped off.  Honorable people did not try to get more and those who did were regarded as thieves, even if their means were technically legal.  According to Malina and Rohrbaugh, “Noblemen avoided such accusations of getting rich at the expense of others by having their slaves handle their financial affairs. Such behavior could be condoned in slaves, since slaves were without honor anyway.” [1]

In Torah, Jews are expressly forbidden to charge interest to other Jews[2] although Deuteronomy says that interest may be charged to a foreigner.  Here again the wealthy used their slaves to bypass the law, making loans to the poor, even fellow Jews, at interest rates anywhere from 60% to as high as 200%.  According to Will Herzog,[3] the poor would put their fields up as security and when they couldn’t pay the exorbitant interest, the wealthy would take their land.  So those first century people gathered around Jesus listening to this parable would probably assume that this is the way the wealthy master and his two slaves doubled their money.

The slave who buried his Master’s talent in the ground, on the other hand, was actually acting in accordance with Jewish law and custom.  The Talmud states that this is the safest way to safeguard someone else’s money.  As for the suggestion the master makes that he should have left the talent with the bankers so it could have at least made some interest, that idea would be regarded with suspicion because it might violate Torah if the bankers were generating interest from fellow Jews.

So, for those listening to Jesus on that long-ago day, the master who is wealthy enough to hand his slaves such staggering amounts of money must be a crook, because how else would he ever come by so much wealth?  He gives his money to his slaves to invest because that’s what rich people do to sidestep Torah and avoid getting their own hands dirty.  

Two of the slaves embrace this economic scheme wholeheartedly and manage to double their master’s money.  If you’re in the crowd listening to Jesus, you’re going to assume that they did this on the backs of the poor.  

So how do we hear this parable now?  And what do we do with it?  What does it mean for us if the third slave—the one the master calls wicked and lazy, the one who hid the talent in the ground—what does it mean if the third slave is really the hero of the story? 

What if, when he says, “Master, I knew you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed,” –what if he’s simply calling his master out and telling the truth?  What if Jesus is simply saying, then and now, this is how the system works, folks; this is what the money people do?  This is why the CEO makes 300 times what the assembly line worker makes.

Will Herzog, Amy-Jill Levine, Malina & Rohrbaugh and others have pointed out that, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus was often using parables to highlight the disparities, inequities and injustices of the political and economic systems of his time…and ours.  

And yes, the third slave is punished.  His talent is taken away and given to the one who has ten.  Even though he does the right thing, according to the Talmud, he’s thrown out “into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  

How do we understand that? What does it mean that the good guy gets punished? Does it help to remember that a few days after telling this story, at least in Matthew’s chronology, after turning over the tables of the money changers, and after standing up to both political and religious authorities, Jesus, himself, is thrown to the “outer darkness” of crucifixion and death and then buried like the third slave’s talent.  

So how do you hear this parable now?

Do you hear it as a call to stewardship?  Do you hear it as a call to take stock of the gifts God has entrusted to you, a call to evaluate how you have been using those gifts?  That’s still a perfectly good way to hear it.

Do you hear it as an invitation to consider how you have been thinking about and seeing God and how you respond to your picture of God?  

Do you hear this parable as an invitation to take another look at how our economic systems work—to look at who benefits and who gets the shaft, and what role you play in all that?

Is it possible that Jesus is giving us a snapshot of the abusive way business-as-usual works in this world so that we can see how vital it is to be part of the better way, the Way that Jesus called the kingdom of heaven or kingdom of God? 

Could this parable be an invitation from Jesus to embrace a life, an ethic, a way of being that is based on cooperation and not merely on competition, a life that mirrors God’s generosity instead of the world’s incessant drive to grab onto more and more of everything?

Could it be that Jesus is telling us a cautionary tale to show us how desperately we need to immerse ourselves in the beloved community, the congregation dedicated to grace and generosity, because the world of business-as-usual won’t think twice about eating us alive?

So maybe this is a stewardship story after all—just not the one we expected.

There is more than one way to hear it.  There is more than one face to see in this painting.

And that is just so Jesus.

Regardless of how you hear it, how are you going to respond to it?

If you’re wondering about what you should do with your talents, the wonderful gifts that God has placed in your hands, I suggest that it’s much safer to “bury” them in the beloved community, the family of faith, the congregation that is trying to live in the Way of Jesus, than to risk them with business as usual.  Ironically, if you bury your gifts in the Beloved Community, that will actually put them to work, because in this fertile ground they will grow and produce much fruit.

In Jesus’ name.  

[1] Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, p. 149

[2] Exodus 22:25 and Deuteronomy 23:19; 23:20

[3] William Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed.

Out of Love for the Truth

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 8:31-36

“Out of love for the truth and from a desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer therein at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place.  Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter.  In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.”

This was the introduction to the 95 Theses which Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Wittenberg University Chapel on Wednesday, October 31, 1517.   We sometimes think that nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the church was an act of rebellion, and in retrospect it was powerfully symbolic.  But it was actually a normal practice.  The church door served as a kind of bulletin board for the academic community.  If you wanted to propose a debate, that’s where you posted the notice, along with the propositions you wanted to discuss.

Luther didn’t intend for the 95 Theses to be a manifesto for rebellion.  He had no idea that his challenge to the practice of selling indulgences would spark a revolutionary movement that would sweep across Europe leading to enormous changes in religion, politics, education, and everyday life, but once that movement started, he gave himself to it body and soul because he was committed to the truth of the Gospel and the love of Christ. 

The truth quite literally set him free from the heavy-handed authority of Rome—the Pope excommunicated him—but the truth also bound him to the proclamation of salvation by God’s grace through faith and to the authority of God’s word in the scriptures.

Out of love for the truth and from a desire to elucidate it…  

According to the Gospel of John, when Jesus was on trial before Pontius Pilate, Pilate then asked him, “What is truth?”  

In some respects that seems like an almost ridiculous question.  We know what truth is.  We learn about truth almost as soon as we learn to talk.  Sadly, that’s also when we learn to lie, because we learn pretty quickly that the truth may reveal things that we would prefer to keep hidden.  We learn very early on that sometimes truth has consequences that we would like to avoid, and that those consequences might be unpleasant or even painful.  

Truth, the dictionary tells us, is the true or actual state of a matter.  Something is true when it conforms with reality.  To put it another way, reality determines what is true.

Truth means that my desires or imagination do not have the final word in determining what is reality and what is not.

There are twenty-seven verses in the gospels that contain the word truth.  Twenty-one of those verses are in the Gospel of John where truth is not only a central theme, it is anchored in and identified with the person of Jesus.  In John 1:14 we read, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”  Three verses later, John puts aside the figurative language of the Word to make it clear who he is talking about: “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

When Jesus sat discussing theology with the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s Well, he told her that “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”  In chapter 14, not long after he has told Thomas that he, himself, is “the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of truth” and in chapter 16 he tells his disciples that “when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”  In chapter 17, as he prays for the disciples, Jesus asks that they would be sanctified and consecrated in truth.

“For this I was born,” Jesus told Pilate, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

In today’s Gospel reading from chapter 8 of John’s gospel, we see a hint that some of those who were listening to Jesus were unsure about continuing to follow him.  Some scholars think that this passage may hint at some tension between Jewish and Gentile believers or between Judean and Galilean followers of Jesus in the community where this gospel was written, and John, the writer, is calling both sides back to the middle ground of the truth found in the person and teaching of Jesus.  

“Jesus said to the Judeans who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word—if you remain faithful to my teachings—then you are truly my disciples.  And you will come to know the truth.  And the truth will set you free.”  When they protested that they were descendants of Abraham and had never been enslaved by anyone—apparently they forgot about their own history with Babylon and Egypt—Jesus went on to make it clear that he was talking about the truth setting them—and us—free from our slavery to sin.

But how does the truth set us free from sin?  

Martin Luther defined sin as the state of being curved in on the self.  Sin is when I put my preferences, my desires, my ideas, my plans, my goals above and before everyone and everything else.  Sin is me, me, me, me, me taken to the extent that it harms or disenfranchises or marginalizes or disempowers or diminishes or neglects you, you, you, you, you.  Sin creates a false reality, an illusion centered on my desires, my fears, my imagination—the way I want things to be.  And that illusion is seductive and captivating.  It ensnares.  It enslaves.  It makes me believe that I am the center of the universe, that what I think or believe or even just what I want very, very badly to be true is what is real.

Truth disabuses me of that illusion.

Once again: Truth means that my desires or imagination do not have the final word in determining what is reality and what is not.

We are currently struggling through a time when truth is endangered in our culture.  There’s nothing new about that.  People have always preferred to put their own spin on facts that confront their biases or preconceived ideas.  People throughout history have taken refuge in denial when events or outcomes don’t fit the way they wanted things to happen or give them the results they wanted.  What’s new is how widespread this devaluation of the truth has become.  

When lies and spin become so prevalent that they begin to undermine any common understanding of basic facts, the world becomes a more dangerous place.  When people refuse to accept observable facts, when there is no longer the common cultural ground of truth based on fact, then there is no longer a starting point for discussion or compromise.  There is no way to move past confrontation and opposed binary positions that divide us.  When people lift up conspiracy theories and “alternative facts” as justification for their actions or opinions then we stand on the precipice of political violence. 

Sadly, we have seen too many clear examples of that in the last few years.  It has become the sin of our society.

Sin convinces me that I stand apart from the rest of humanity.  But the truth, the fact, is that I am deeply and intimately connected to the rest of humanity and, in fact, to all of creation.  Standing apart is an illusion.  Rugged individualism is a destructive myth—destructive because it undermines and negates the relationships that keep us alive in every sense of the word.

“We must all overcome the illusion of separateness,” said Richard Rohr.  “It is the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls the state of separateness ‘sin.’ God’s job description is to draw us back into primal and intimate relationship. As 1 John 3:2 reminds us, ‘My dear people, we are already children of God; what we will be in the future has not yet been fully revealed, and all I do know is that we shall be like God.’”

As followers of Jesus, we are called to live in the imitation of Christ.  We are called to observe what God is doing all the time and everywhere and then do the same.  We are called to be generous because God is generous.  We are called to be creative because God is creative.  We are called to embrace diversity because God revels in diversity so much that no two things are exactly alike in the entire universe.  But above and beyond everything else, we are called to love.  Because God loves.  God is love.  And, as Richard Rohr has said, God does not love us if and when we change.  God loves us so that we can change.

That is grace—the grace that makes us whole, the grace that heals us, the grace that reunites us, the grace that saves us.  

Claim it.  Revel in it.  Believe it.  Embrace it.

It’s the truth…and it’s the only thing that can set us free.

Whose Side Are You On?

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Matthew 22:15-22

Whose side are you on?

Do you lean right, or do you lean left?

Do you favor autocracy or democracy?

Are you a Republican or a Democrat?  

Do you favor the Freedom Caucus or the Moderates?  

Are you aligned with the Progressives or the Conservatives?

Are you Pro-Life or Pro-Choice?

Do you support the separation of Church and State or are you a Christian Nationalist?

I don’t know about you, but these kinds of questions make me wary.  These are loaded questions.  Binary questions.  Sorting questions.  These are questions with an agenda.  These are questions that are designed to make you reveal if you are friend or foe.  

Right now, the big sorting question in much of our country is are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian.  Are you sympathetic to the people of Israel who have suffered so much pain and loss, so much death and destruction from the sudden and vicious attack by Hamas?  Or are you sympathetic to the six million Palestinian refugees of Gaza who have lived for decades under the oppressive thumb of Israel and are now being bombed into submission?

Whose side are you on?

Loaded questions.  Gotcha questions.  These binary questions are designed to sort you into one camp or another and they are as old and merciless as politics.  

In today’s gospel lesson, we get a terrific example of a political sorting question calculated to get Jesus in trouble one way or another. The really fascinating thing about it is that two political factions who usually wanted nothing to do with each other came together to ask this question.  That’s how much they wanted Jesus out of the way.  That’s how much they wanted to discredit him.

After buttering him up with a comment about his impeccable impartiality they drop their bomb, their loaded question:  “Is it proper to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”  

The particular tax they’re asking about is the poll tax, a tax of one denarius per year levied on every adult man and woman in the empire.  This tax had been instituted by Tiberius not long before Jesus was born as part of his overall reform of Rome’s taxation system and its specific purpose was to pay for the occupation and administration of Rome’s conquered territories.

The Herodians were big supporters Herod Antipas and Herod Antipas was a big supporter of Rome, so the Herodians were all in favor of the tax as a way to help pay for what they saw as the many benefits of being part of the empire—decent roads, improved trade, aqueducts, heavy-handed law and order, and so on.  

The Pharisees, on the other hand, were not supporters of their Roman overlords and not at all happy about the tax that paid for these conquerors to dominate them and every aspect of their lives in their own homeland.  One of the things that they found particularly objectionable, though, was Roman money.  

Roman currency was not just money, it was also a reminder that Rome had complete control of the economy.  It was also political propaganda. On one side of the Roman denarius was a portrait of the emperor, Tiberius, so every coin was a reminder of who was in charge.  The other side of the coin depicted a seated woman in the role of Pax, the goddess of peace, a reminder that Rome kept the peace.  

To devout Jews like the Pharisees, the images stamped on these coins represented a kind of idolatry.  But worse than the images was the inscription on the coins: Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus, Pontifex Maximus.  

The coin proclaimed not only that the emperor was the son of a god, but also the high priest of the empire’s religions.  All of the empire’s religions.  Including theirs.

When the Pharisees and the Herodians team up to ask Jesus their loaded question, they think they have him trapped.  If he says, “No, it’s not right to pay this tax,” he’ll make the Pharisees and a lot of others in the crowd happy, but he’ll be guilty of sedition against Rome and the Herodians won’t waste a minute bringing it to Pilate’s attention.  If he says, “Yes, it’s perfectly fine to pay the tax,” then he’ll disappoint the crowd and give the Pharisees ammunition to discredit him.  

But instead of falling into their binary yes or no trap, Jesus exposes it.  He makes it clear that he is aware of their bad intentions.  He makes the crowd aware that there is no sincerity or honesty in their tricky question.  And just as they tried to entrap him with a question, he snares them and reveals their malice and antagonism with a question:  “Why are you trying to trap me, you hypocrites?”  

Jesus could expound on the theme of hypocrisy and attempted entrapment, but like all good rabbis, he knows a teaching moment when he sees one.  “Show me the coin used for the tax,” he says.  It seems clear that he doesn’t have one.  That’s an important detail that should not be overlooked. 

Jesus does not have the coin.  But someone does.  Someone, maybe one of the Herodians, hands him the silver denarius, and Jesus, holding it up for all to see, asks, “Whose head is this, and whose title?”  “Caesar’s,” they reply.  

I imagine this was a tense moment.  I can imagine him holding that coin in his hand, evaluating the stamped metal portrait in his palm for a long moment before he hands the coin back to whomever gave it to him and says, “Then give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

When they heard this, the text says, they were astonished, so  they left him and went away.

What exactly was Jesus saying?  What does it mean to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s?  On the face of it, it sounds simple.  On the face of it, it sounds like another simple binary division, like we can divide life into two compartments: on one side of the line are the things that belong to God, spiritual things, and on the other side of the line are secular things.  Like government.  Or economics.

It seems simple, but it’s not.  It is, in fact, immensely complicated.

“Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” doesn’t sidestep the tricky tax question.  Instead, it requires us to do some serious thinking.  Philosophical thinking.  Theological thinking.  And practical thinking.  It requires us to live with difficult questions and never settle for pat answers.

What really belongs to Caesar?  Does his own likeness?   Genesis tells us that we were created in the image and likeness of God, so in that sense, isn’t Caesar’s own likeness something that, in the end, belongs to God?  Does the silver in the coin that bears his picture belong to Caesar?  He may be in possession of it or exercise some control over its distribution, but isn’t God the one who brought both the silver and the man depicted into being?  Long after Caesar has been gathered to his ancestors, the silver will pass to other hands and be melted down for other uses and only God will know where it is.  When all is said and done, doesn’t everything belong to God in whom we live and move and have our being?

“Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” also has a practical side.  The coin that’s used to pay the tax in question is a perfect symbol of empire’s dominance.  

With the emperor’s likeness it proclaims his singular sovereignty.  With its depiction of the goddess Pax, it proclaims the empire’s definition of peace, a peace obtained and maintained by violence and force.  With its inscription that asserts the divinity of the emperor and affirms him as Pontifex Maximus, it declares the empire’s control of religion.  And the fact that this silver denarius is the standard day’s wage throughout the empire makes it the symbol of the empire’s vast economic power.  It is, in and of itself, a statement.  It says, “If you’re going to participate in the economy, you are participating in empire.  If you buy or sell anything, you are participating in empire.  When you go to the market to buy olives and flour and oil and fruit and lentils, the basic necessities of life, you are going to have to compromise your religious principles because you are going to use the empire’s coin to do it.”

And this is where it is important to remember that Jesus did not have the coin.

Jesus did not have the coin.  

What side are you on?  In a world that confronts us with so many binary choices, how do you decide where to stand?  Is there a side where you can stand like Rabbi Jesus, a side where you can not carry the coin of someone else’s dominance?  

In this time of yet another tragic war when the world seems to be insisting that we make another binary choice of Israel over Palestine or Palestine over Israel, is there a side that does not make us buy in to one dominance over another?

Yes, there is.  And Rabbi Irwin Keller describes it movingly in his poem, Taking Sides.

Today I Am taking sides.

I am taking the side of Peace.

Peace, which I will not abandon
even when its voice is drowned out
by hurt and hatred,
bitterness of loss,
cries of right and wrong.

I am taking the side of Peace
whose name has barely been spoken
in this winnerless war.

I will hold Peace in my arms,
and share my body’s breath,
lest Peace be added
to the body count.

I will call for de-escalation
even when I want nothing more 
than to get even.
I will do it
in the service of Peace.

I will make a clearing
in the overgrown 
thicket of cause and effect
so Peace can breathe 
for a minute
and reach for the sky.

I will do what I must
to save the life of Peace.
I will breathe through tears.
I will swallow pride.
I will bite my tongue.
I will offer love
without testing for deservingness.

So don’t ask me to wave a flag today
unless it is the flag of Peace.
Don’t ask me to sing an anthem
unless it is a song of Peace.
Don’t ask me to take sides
unless it is the side of Peace.[1]

© Irwin Keller, Oct. 17, 2023

[1] https://www.irwinkeller.com/itzikswell/taking-sides?fbclid=IwAR36yqnCTwLI015qTgRrPYpZT9OKwHkBdnHrW2H5lWbLnUeNlYn9nGUqalA

A Guest at the Banquet

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Matthew 22:1-14

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying:  2 “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.  3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come.  4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’  5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business,  6 while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.  7 The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.  8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy.  9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’  10 Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. 

11  “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe,  12 and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless.  13 Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’  14 For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Fredrich Wilhelm I, the king of Prussia in the early 18th century, had a hot temper and a short fuse.  He would often walk unattended through the streets of Berlin and if people saw him coming they would try to make themselves scarce, because if anyone displeased him for even the slightest of reasons he would thrash them with his walking stick.  One day an unlucky man who didn’t see him coming in time attempted to slide into a doorway to avoid the crotchety king but King Fredrich spotted him before he could escape.

“You,” called Fredrich Wilhelm, “where are you going?”

“Into the house, Your Majesty,” replied the nervous man.

“Into the house?  Your house?” asked the king.

“No,” replied the poor man.

“Why are you entering it, then?” asked Fredrich Wilhelm.

The unfortunate man, afraid he might be accused of burglary, decided to tell the truth.  “I’m trying to avoid you, Your Majesty.”

Fredrich Wilhelm scowled. “To avoid me?  Why would you want to avoid me?”

“Because I fear you, Your Majesty.”

And that’s when King Fredrich just lost it.  He started to beat the poor man’s shoulders with his walking stick as he shouted, “You’re not supposed to fear me!  You’re supposed to love me!  Love me, you scum!  Love me!”

Sadly, I think a lot of people imagine that God is something like Fredrich Wilhelm—hot tempered with a short fuse, and ready to punish us for the slightest of “sins.”

I thought about that imagery as I revisited the ways we have traditionally interpreted the parable in this week’s gospel reading.

This parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew is notoriously challenging.  You will find problems and loose ends and pieces that just don’t fit just about any way you approach it.  David Lose said, “This parable seems just plain nasty. Not so much because it’s difficult to interpret – it is to some degree – though mostly, I think, because we don’t like what it says—but rather because of the indiscriminate violence in the passage.  What are we to make of it?”[1]

As with so many of Jesus’ parables, we have traditionally interpreted this story of the wedding banquet as an allegory so we have assigned traditional identities to the characters. 

In most traditional interpretations, the king who gives the banquet represents God and the bridegroom, the son, represents Jesus.  

In one traditional interpretation, the original invited guests who turn down the invitation represent the people of Israel, and the people brought in off the streets represent the Gentiles who are ushered into the feast when Israel turns down the invitation.  

In another traditional interpretation, the invited guests who refuse to come and abuse the messengers represent the Pharisees, and the street people who take their place represent the new Christian community, those people first hearing and reading Matthew’s gospel.

There is yet another interpretation—David Lose calls it the “Lutheran” interpretation—which  doesn’t dwell on those who decline the invitation or the street people who take their place at the banquet.  This interpretation focuses, instead, on the gracious generosity of the king who issues the invitation in the first place, first to the invited guests, then in opening it up to “everyone they found.” 

In all these interpretations, the wedding robe is understood to be God’s grace which clothes us in the imputed righteousness of Christ.  The guest who is thrown out into the outer darkness for failing to wear a wedding robe is understood to represent someone who refuses to accept God’s gift of grace. That’s pretty much how I always heard this parable preached or taught.  

These interpretations works well enough up to a point, but they also have some glaring problems.  So let’s look at some of those problems, the things we tend to gloss over if we keep hearing this story the same way we’ve always heard it before.

Let’s start with the son, the guest of honor at the banquet.  If this son of the king is Jesus—in this story being told by Jesus—he is oddly passive.  The son does nothing.  He does not deliver the invitation or announcement of the feast.  He does not supply the wedding robes which, in traditional interpretations represent being clothed in his grace.  He does not intervene on behalf of the guest being ejected into the outer darkness.  He is utterly and completely passive.  In fact, he is entirely in the background.  

Would Jesus have described himself that way?  Is that how you understand Christ?

What about the idea that those who first receive the invitation represent the Jews, the people of Israel, and the street people who take their place at the banquet are the Gentiles who would later dominate the church?  In this interpretation, the people of Israel reject God’s invitation, so God destroys them.  On one level, it’s easy to see how this makes a kind of historical sense. You could interpret the slaves delivering the invitation as the prophets.  You could argue that the destruction of the city is an allusion to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.  But remember, the first people hearing or reading this account in Matthew were Jewish Christians, probably living in Syria.  There is even good evidence that the Gospel of Matthew may have been originally written in Hebrew.[2]  The people hearing this story in the Jewish Christian community of Matthew’s gospel still thought of themselves as Jews, as the people of Israel, but Jews who had received Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah.  Would they be likely to hear this as a story about God’s rejection of Jews and acceptance of Gentiles in their place?  More importantly, this interpretation leads all too readily to antisemitism—and has historically been used for that purpose.  Would Jesus, a Jew, be likely to tell a story with such a theme even if it wasn’t the main theme?

If we choose an interpretation that focuses primarily on God’s grace, then what do we make of the king’s violence?  If grace is our theme, what are we to make of the king ordering one of the guests to be bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth simply because he didn’t wear a wedding robe, especially since we are given no reason for why he’s not wearing one?  And what do we do with that last line—”many are called but few are chosen”—when it seems like the many are staying at the banquet and the few, the one, really, is being chosen for a brutal exit?

If we take any of these traditional approaches, I think we might miss something else that’s going on in this parable.  

There is a very similar parable in Luke 14.  It’s also a parable of a great banquet, but it is told as a much milder story.  In Luke’s telling, the host is a merely a man, not a king.  The invited guests make excuses, but no one is punished for not coming, except that they don’t get to share in the feast and celebration.  In Luke’s version there is no violence.  There are no wedding robes.  No outer darkness.  But in this banquet story in Matthew, those are the precisely things that Jesus is using to make a point.  So what, exactly, is the point he is trying to make?

If we listen more closely to this parable in Matthew, we can hear overtones that are clearly political.  The host is not just a man, he’s a king.  That means that the invitation to the banquet carries a lot of weight.  It is, in fact, a kind of command appearance.  The noted English Biblical scholar, Richard Baukham, put it this way:

“The attendance of the great men of the kingdom at the wedding feast of the king’s son would be expected not only as a necessary expression of the honor they owe the king but also as an expression of their loyalty to the legitimate succession to his throne. Political allegiance is at stake. Excuses would hardly be acceptable, and the invitees (unlike those in the Lukan parable) offer none. To refuse the invitation is tantamount to rebellion(italics mine). In refusing it, the invitees are deliberately treating the king’s authority with contempt. They know full well that their behavior will be understood as insurrection. This is what they intend, and those who kill the king’s messengers only make this intention known more emphatically. The king responds as kings do to insurrection (v. 7).”[3] 

So… we have a king whose kingdom is in open rebellion.  In response to his envoys being killed he launches an all-out attack and destroys the rebellious city.  Because that’s what kings do to rebellious cities.  Meanwhile, the feast is all prepared and must go ahead.  The king has to save face.  He has to show his political strength and force.  The aristocrats who were invited are out, so he turns populist.  He brings in people off the street.  This is right out of the Roman playbook—using bread and circuses, to pacify the masses.  But when the king sees one poor schmo who isn’t conforming to the dress code, he has him booted.

And now we’re back to Fredrich Wilhelm I.  Capricious.  Thin-skinned. Hot tempered.  Short fused. 

Is that how we see God?  

More importantly, since Jesus is the one telling this story, is that how Jesus saw God?

I don’t think so.

Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew we hear Jesus describing God as a patient, tolerant and nurturing parent.  He says, “Your Father in heaven makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (5:9).  “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (6:8)  “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Fatherfeeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (6:26)  “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” (10:29)  Even when Jesus is totally exasperated with the Pharisees and Scribes he says, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”  He tells them they won’t be first in line, but he doesn’t say they’ll be excluded or thrown out.

Does that sound like the king in this parable?  Or is Jesus trying to tell us something else here?   

Is there a way to hear this parable where we hear Good News?  Is there a way to hear this short story by Jesus where we Gentile Christians don’t get a version of Good News that’s just cheap grace at someone else’s expense?  As Debi Thomas put it, “— not the mingy Good News that secures my salvation and my comfort at the expense of other people’s bodies and souls — but rather, the Good News of the Gospel that is inclusive, disruptive, radical, and earth-shattering. The Good News that centers on the Jesus I trust and love.  What would it be like to look for Jesus and his Good News in this story?”[4]

A few years ago, the essay by Debi Thomas that I just quoted completely changed the way I see this parable.  In her essay in Journey with Jesus she wrestled with all the difficulties in this parable and then arrived at a solution unlike any I had ever seen or read before.  

What if the king represents all the powers that be in this world, the powers that insist we conform to their norms—religion, politics, the boundaries of society—the powers that rise up to crush anything or anyone that steps too far out of line, powers that reject and eject those who don’t wear the garment of conformity?

What if all the people in this parable are just that?  People.  In all their stratified layers—the aristocrats and wealthy, the privileged who get the embossed invitations to everything that’s good in life—and then everybody else—regular people who go about their lives making do but who every once in a while get a fabulous break because the original guests are no-shows.

What if Jesus is describing the system as it was, and as it is?  What if he’s describing the way the world works, with its hierarchies of wealth and levers of power, with its violence and struggles for control and its pressures to create and maintain business as usual?

And then, what if the “God” figure in this parable is the guest without a wedding robe?   What if Jesus is the one who refuses to wear the wedding robe, the garment of conformity?  What if Jesus is making a statement and saying, “I refuse to play along.”

When the king asked “Friend how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” the guest was speechless.  When Jesus stood before Pilate, he was speechless, too.[5]

What if the way to the real celebration was to opt out of the coerced party hosted by the powers that be?  What if the way in to the full celebration of life requires you to refuse to wear the clothes of conformity, to let yourself be bound hand and foot and thrown into the “outer darkness,” just as the way to Christ’s resurrection was through the cross and the tomb, just as the way to eternal life is through death?

What if Jesus is the guest being forcefully ejected from the party?  What would that mean for us as followers of Jesus?

Would you be willing to take off your robes of privilege, position, power and wealth to follow him into the outer darkness?   Would I?

Many are called.  Few are chosen.

[1] In the Meantime, Pentecost 19, A Limited Vision, David Lose.net

[2] Was the Gospel of Matthew Originally Written in Hebrew?,  George Howard, Bible Review 2:4, Winter 1986

[3] Parable of the Royal Wedding Feast, Richard Baukham; Journal of Biblical Literature, Fall, 1996, p.484

[4] The God Who Isn’t, Debi Thomas, Journey With Jesus, October 11, 2020

[5] Matthew 27:12-14

Does Your Eye See Evil Because I Am Good?

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Matthew 20:1-16

In this week’s gospel lesson, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who hired workers at different times of the day to go work in his vineyard.  At the end of the day, he pays the workers who have labored all day in the hot sun the same wage as those who have only been working for an hour.  This is one of the more challenging parables of Jesus and, as is so often the case, we may miss the point entirely if we over spiritualize it or try to turn it into an oversimplified allegory.

There’s a line at the end of this parable that I keep coming back to over and over.  The landowner is speaking to a disgruntled all-day worker who doesn’t think it’s fair that he was paid the same as the workers who only worked one hour.  Most English translations have the landowner saying to the unhappy worker, “Are you envious because I am generous?”  What it actually says in the Greek, though, is “Is your eye evil because I am good?”

Is your eye evil because I am good?

That’s an amazing question, and I think it’s more to the point than “are you envious?”.  It can be taken two ways:  One is, “Are you looking for something bad here?  Are you looking for something to be upset about because I did a good thing?” The other, if you want to get really old school, is “Did someone put the evil eye on you?  Are you cursed so that you only see bad where there is good happening?” 

So how are you seeing this parable?  

Who do you identify with in this story?

The all-day laborer?

The mid-day laborer?

The end-of-day laborer?

The owner of the vineyard?

The way we see this story depends a lot on our point of view—on where we stand when we’re looking at it.  The way you interpret this story depends a lot on your own socio-economic position and life circumstances.

I think most of us tend to identify with the all-day laborers—those first guys hired early in the morning.  We resonate with them, don’t we, when they say, “What’s the deal here?  We were out there working our tails off all day in the hot sun and you’re paying these guys who showed up an hour ago the same as us?!?  That’s not fair!”

That’s a natural response.  Let me tell you just how natural.

In 2003, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta did an experiment with Capuchin monkeys.  The monkeys were taught to complete a simple task, and when they did the task successfully, they were given a slice of cucumber as a reward.  They liked cucumber, and they were all perfectly happy being rewarded with a piece of cucumber.  Until one of them was given a grape.  Then cucumber wasn’t good enough anymore.  They all wanted a grape for completing the task and if they didn’t get it, they rebelled in all the loud and messy ways that monkeys can rebel.

Even monkeys want to make sure they’re getting the same deal as the other monkeys.  Even monkeys seem to have a built-in idea of what’s “fair.” So it’s natural, I think, for us to identify with the workers who feel slighted after laboring all day in the vineyard.   

Because of that, this parable makes a lot of us uncomfortable.  The kingdom of God is like a landowner who paid his workers on a grossly uneven scale.  So what is Jesus saying here?  Is God…unfair?

The traditional way to get around all that discomfort has been to say, “Well this parable is all about Grace.  Jesus is talking about getting into heaven and the point is that the Johnny-come-latelies will get in just like those who have been working in the church their whole lives.” 

Maybe.  But what if he’s really talking about economics?  What if the point he’s making is about the practical duties and responsibilities that come with having assets at your disposal?  What if he’s talking about the duty that the rich have to the less well off?  What if he’s talking about the kind of economic dynamics that keep a whole community healthy—not so much trickle-down as flow-through?  

What if this really is about wealth, every day dollars and cents and community economics?  What if Jesus is giving us God’s model for the administration and stewardship of wealth?

And before you dismiss that idea, note where this parable comes in the book of Matthew.  Just before this parable, a rich young man has come up to Jesus and asked what he has to do to inherit eternal life.  In addition to keeping the commandments, Jesus tells him to sell everything he has, give the money to the poor and then to come and follow him.  The young man “went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”  When he saw the young man’s response Jesus said, “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  That’s what leads into this parable.

Remember too, that Jesus is talking to a Jewish audience and this gospel is written to a community of Jewish Christians.  They have laws and traditions and customs that are all about making sure that the less fortunate are provided for.  

Leviticus 23:22 tells us, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.”

In Deuteronomy 15:11, we read ‘Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’

The audience who first head this parable were even familiar with other stories that are quite similar to this.   Rabbi Shimon ben Eliezar told a story about a king who hired two workers.  The first worked all day and received one denarius.  The second worked one hour and received one denarius.  Which one, asked the rabbi, was the more beloved?  Not the one who worked only one hour, he explained.  The king loved them both equally! 

In her amazing book Short Stories by Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine wrote:

 “The parable does not promote egalitarianism; instead, it encourages householders everywhere to support laborers, all of them.  More than just aiding those at the doorstep, those who have should seek out those who need.  If the householder can afford it, he should continue to put others on the payroll, pay them a living wage (even if they cannot put in a full day’s work), and so allow them to feed their families while keeping their dignity intact.  The point is practical, it is edgy, and it is a greater challenge to the church then and today than the entirely unsurprising idea that God’s concern is that we enter, not when.

   “Jesus is neither a Marxist nor a capitalist.  Rather, he is both an idealist and a pragmatist.  His focus is often less directly on ‘good news to the poor’ than on ‘responsibility of the rich.’  Jesus follows Deuteronomy 15:11, ‘Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’” —Short Stories by Jesus, p. 218

Because we are who we are in our culture, I think we tend to hear this story through the filter of our Lutheran theology of Grace and we read it through the lens of a Calvinist work ethic.  We want to make it about Grace and Heaven and the rewards of hard work, so we make some assumptions about the characters in the story that probably aren’t what Jesus had in mind at all.  

But maybe we can see it differently if we slow down and ask the text some questions.

Why are those other workers in the marketplace looking for work in the middle of the day?  

Verse 3 in the NRSV says that when the landowner went out about 9 o’clock “he saw others standing idle in the marketplace.”  ‘Standing idle’ is a legitimate translation, but it’s not the only translation.  I don’t know about you, but when I hear ‘standing idle’ it has a connotation of laziness.  But the Greek word, agrou, the word that gets translated as ‘standing idle’ can also mean simply ‘without work’ or ‘not working.’

There could be any number of reasons why they weren’t working.  There could be all kinds of reasons why they showed up late to the day labor pool.

They might be caring for an elderly relative in the morning, which would be fulfilling both a family duty and a scriptural obligation. They might be caring for a sick spouse.  And maybe they simply weren’t hired by other landowners.

Jesus’ story makes no judgment on them for being late to the marketplace or simply being there “without work.”  So why do we?

We tend to focus on the workers, but the landowner needs some scrutiny, too.  Is the landowner a bad manager?  Is he clueless about how many workers he needs for his harvest?  Is that why he keeps returning to the marketplace?  Or is there something else going on here?

Timothy Thompson wrote a play based on this parable in which he depicts two brothers waiting in the marketplace, hoping for work. John is strong and capable; Philip is just as strong and willing but has lost a hand in an accident. When the landowner comes, John is taken in the first wave of workers, but Philip is left behind.  Later, other workers are brought to the field, but Philip is not among them.  John is glad to have the work, but he’s worried about his brother.  He knows Philip needs the work just as much as he does. Finally, the last group of workers arrives, and John is relieved to see that Philip is with them.  He’s glad to know that Philip will get paid for at least one hour. So imagine John’s surprise when the owner of the vineyard pays Philip a full days’ wage!  John is overjoyed, knowing that Philip – his brother – will have the money necessary to feed his family.  And when it’s his turn to stand before the landowner and receive his pay, instead of complaining as the others have, John throws out his hand and says with tears in his eyes, “Thank you, my lord, for what you’ve done for us today!”

The kingdom of heaven is like that.

God’s justice arises out of a sense of community in which we see the “eleventh hour” workers as our brothers and sisters whose needs and dignity are every bit as important as our own. 

When the landowner hired the workers he said, “I will give you whatever is right.”  What is right.  It might not be what looks “fair” to everybody else, but it will be what is right and just.  It will be what is needed.

Maybe in this parable beyond giving us a story about grace or qualifying for eternity, Jesus is giving us a model to follow.  Maybe he’s telling us how to do what is right even if it doesn’t look particularly fair.

I suppose it depends on how you see it.  

Time to Wake Up

Steve Beckham 5 Comments

Time to Wake Up

Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

At the end of August in 2018 in the small town of Actlán, Mexico, a “community alert” message began pinging from phone to phone on WhatsApp.  According to the message, a gang of criminals were kidnapping children and eviscerating them in order to sell their organs on the black market.  

No one knew exactly where this grisly story was coming from or even if it was true.

On the 29th of August, as this horrid rumor about child abduction was sweeping through the area, Ricardo Flores and his uncle, Alberto, came into town to buy supplies for the cinderblock water well they were building on Alberto’s ranch in the countryside.  Since Ricardo and Alberto did not live in town, the local rumor monger did not recognize them and began spreading the word that they were the feared child abductors.  Francisco Martinez began livestreaming into his phone saying, “People of Actlán de Osorio, Puebla, please come give your support, give your support. Believe me, the kidnappers are now here.”

Ricardo and Alberto quickly found themselves surrounded by a mob. The police arrested the two men for disturbing the peace, but since they had no real reason to hold the them, they let them go.  Sadly, the moment Alberto and Roberto walked out of the police station they were seized by an angry mob who beat them, doused them with gasoline and burned them to death.

It turned out, when it was all over, that the rumor about child abduction was fake news.[1]

“A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on,” wrote Terry Pratchett, and in 2018 three researchers from MIT proved the truth of that observation by carefully tracking the spread of both rumors and facts on Twitter.  “We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” said Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of the study.[2]

Rumors can be fiercely destructive.  Even deadly.  Rumors can even be weaponized.

Because rumors and misinformation can be so destructive, in 1942, as World War II was rapidly and utterly transforming life in the US, psychologists Gordon Allport and Robert Knapp set up the first Rumor Clinic at Harvard University.  Their goal was to stop pernicious rumors that could undermine the war effort or upset public morale.  They also wanted to understand why rumors are so attractive to us.

Knapp noted that rumors arise to express the public’s feelings in a time of crisis or instability.  Rumors supply the illusion of information when real information is unavailable or unsatisfying.  They can give a sense of having some measure of control when things seem out of control.  

Knapp identified three kinds of rumors and the psychological functions they serve.  

The wedge driver rumor expresses hostility in a time of frustration and allows us to find a scapegoat.  The rumor that the Corona virus originated in a Chinese lab is a good example of a wedge driver rumor.  

Pipe dream rumors express our hopes and wishes.  The debunked rumor that hydroxychloroquine is a cure for Covid was an obvious pipe dream rumor.  

Bogie rumors express our fears.  For instance the rumor that hospitals were not going to treat Covid patients over 60 which spread through social media in April of 2020 was a bogie rumor.

When we’re living in highly uncertain circumstances where even day-to-day decisions can have unforeseen outcomes, rumors will be rampant.  They provide an outlet for our precarious collective emotional life.  But they can have dire consequences.

One of the most common negative consequences of rumors is that they can damage relationships.  Let’s say Gomer tells Wanda that he heard that eating bleu cheese can keep you from getting the flu.  Two weeks later Wanda is in bed with the flu, feeling miserable, despite eating bleu cheese every day since she first heard about it from Gomer.  Now she’s going to be skeptical about anything Gomer tells her.

Or let’s say Wanda doesn’t buy the idea of the bleu cheese cure for a minute.  Now she’s going to take anything Gomer says with a grain of salt because she’s pretty sure his elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor.

The easy way to avoid the mistrust and skepticism that inevitably arises from this kind of thing is simple: don’t pass along anything unless you are absolutely certain that it’s true.

There’s a very wise rule that has been attributed to Socrates or sometimes to the Buddha: “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates.  Is it true?  Is it kind?  Is it necessary?”  For those of us who are followers of Jesus, who are trying to live in and sustain the beloved community, I would add one more gate:  Is it loving?

We’re living in a very conflicted time.  Information and misinformation is flying around us at lightspeed—information and misinformation about science, about political figures, about political parties, about nations, about issues, about factions.  A lot of that information and misinformation is sent out with an agenda.  And some of those agendas are destructive.  

If ever there was a time when we needed to double and triple check the truth, the agenda, and the sources of the information that comes to us, this is it.

I think we all know that not everything we hear is true.  But we’re not always diligent about taking time to verify sources and facts before we pass things along.

As St. Paul says in today’s epistle reading from Romans, “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.”  There’s a lot at stake—in our country, in our communities, in our church, in our personal lives, in our relationships.  We need to be wide awake and thoughtful about what we hear and what we share.

But as St. Paul also says in that same passage, the one thing we owe each other above everything else is to love each other.  All the commandments “are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Loving each other with agape love means that we tell each other the truth.  No rumors.  No fake news.  No gossip.  It means we check our sources.  If necessary, it means we check our sources’ sources.  

As it says in Ephesians:

“We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.  But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,  from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”[3]

But what do you do if something does happen to damage your relationship with someone else in the community, if some rumor or misinformation or half-truth or something worse insinuates itself between you?

Fortunately, in Matthew 18 we have a formula in the words of Jesus, himself, for dealing with exactly that situation.

The first step is to go to the person who you feel has wronged you and talk to them one-on-one, alone.  Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  So when you go to talk to that person, just the two of you, it’s not just the two of you.  Jesus is there, too.  So, what are you going to say if Jesus is right there listening to the conversation?  How are you going to say it?  How are you going to navigate this in the presence of Jesus?  How are you going to show faith and love?

Speak your truth in love.  If that person listens to you, all well and good.  Your relationship can begin healing.  I should note here that the Greek word translated as “listens,” (akouō) implies not just listening but understanding.  So the hope that you will come to an understanding is built into the text.

Unfortunately, too often our typical way of dealing with our grievances is to triangulate; we go looking for someone else to hear our tale of how we’ve been wronged.  As Brian Stoffregen describes it, 

“When we have been wronged, we often don’t confront the person. Instead, we create triangles. We go and tell two or three or more of our friends, ‘Do you know what so-and-so did to me?’ Jesus did not say: ‘Go tell everybody what that stupid jerk did to you.’ Jesus told us: ‘Go and talk to that stupid jerk about the hurtful actions s/he has done,’ although Jesus didn’t quite use those words. We are to go and talk to the person, not to go around telling everybody else. We are to be so concerned about the breach in the relationship, that we are willing to do whatever is possible to restore it.”[4]

So that’s the first step.  Go talk to the person.  If that doesn’t work, try step two.  Bring two or three others into the conversation.  Listen to what they have to say about it.  And here’s a caveat:  Be prepared to be told that you are in the wrong.  And if that happens, be prepared to be gracious about it.

Remember, this is the ideal way of dealing with disagreement or injury within the beloved community, and this part with two or three witnesses is also completely consistent with dispute resolution as it is described in Torah.[5]

If you’ve tried steps one and two, the additional witnesses think you’re in the right, and the other person still won’t listen or try to understand, then Jesus says to take it to the whole congregation.

This may seem a little radical to us, but it really is wise in two very important ways.  First, it brings everything out in the open and puts a dead stop to any scuttlebutt that might be circulating.  It stops the rumor mill dead in its tracks.  Most importantly, though, it acknowledges that relationships are important in the beloved community, that, in fact, the community is built on relationships.  One fractured relationship can collapse the community as surely as one fractured beam can bring down the roof. 

So you’ve tried to resolve your differences by talking one on one.  You’ve tried with one or two others sitting in.  You’ve tried with the whole church.  But you still can’t seem to reach that other person.  Now what?  

“If the offender refuses to listen even to the church,” says Jesus, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  

That sounds so harsh.  But is it?  On the one hand, it seems clear that at this point the offender has made themselves an outsider, separated from the rest of the church.  On the other hand, it’s important to note that, especially in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus made a special point of reaching out to Gentiles and tax collectors.  

So yes, that person is now on the outs for a while.  But you —you have a new special focus for outreach.  You have a mission to find a way to bring that person back into the community.  You don’t get to wash your hands of them and say good riddance.

In a world and a time where so much is falling apart, now more than ever the beloved community needs to do everything we can to keep it together.

We need to remember that we owe each other love.  Love that is patient and kind.  Love that is not arrogant or boastful or rude.  Love that is not irritable or resentful or self-seeking.  Love that rejoices in truth.  And speaks truth.

We need to remember that, as much as we might like to have everything spelled out, as far as God is concerned, the entire law is spelled out in “love your neighbor as yourself.”  

We need to remember to speak the truth in love.  To pass our words through the three gates—is it true, is it kind, is it necessary—before we let them run out of our mouths our through our typing fingers.  

Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;  the night is far gone, the day is near.  In Jesus’ name.

[1] BBC News, 12 Nov 2018, Marco Martinez

[2] MIT News, March 8, 2018

[3] Ephesians 4:14-16

[4] Brian Stoffregen, Exegetical Notes, Matthew 18:15-20

[5] Deuteronomy 19:15

Thought Pollution

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Matthew 15:21-28

Are there stories or sayings in the Bible that make you uncomfortable?  This story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman has really bothered me for a long time, mostly because at first reading Jesus come off as a bit of a jerk.   

But here’s the thing:  I think this story is supposed to be disturbing.  It’s supposed to bother us.  This story is begging us to do our homework, because we won’t even begin to understand what Jesus is up to here unless we dig into some history and social context.  I’m pretty sure that Jesus was aiming for a particular reaction from his disciples and I think he wants that same reaction from us.  But for us to get to the “aha moment” here, we really need to go back.  Way back.  All the way back to Noah.

But before we set the Wayback Machine for Noah, let’s go back to what happened just before Jesus encountered this bothersome and determined Canaanite woman. 

At the end of the previous chapter, after a stormy night on the lake where Jesus walked on water and Peter tried to, they landed at the little town of Gennesaret.  As always, a crowd gathered and Jesus started teaching.  But before he got very far some Pharisees and scribes started to give him a bad time because his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating.  So Jesus tells the crowd to gather round then says, “Listen and understand:  it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person.  It’s what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”  This offended the Pharisees.  And it probably offended them even more when Jesus called them blind guides of the blind.  

But Peter wanted to hear more about what goes into the mouth versus what comes out.  I really like how Eugene Peterson rendered this bit of dialogue in The Message:

“Peter said, ‘I don’t get it. Put it in plain language.’

“Jesus replied, “You too? Are you being willfully stupid?  Don’t you know that anything that is swallowed works its way through the intestines and is finally defecated?  But what comes out of the mouth gets its start in the heart. It’s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, and cussing.  That’s what pollutes. Eating or not eating certain foods, washing or not washing your hands—that’s neither here nor there.’”

So keep all that in mind—those things that come out of the heart by way of the mouth to pollute life—keep all that in the back of your mind because suddenly the story shifts and in one brief sentence Jesus walks about fifty miles to the region of Tyre and Sidon.

Why?  Why Tyre and Sidon?  Did he just want to put some distance between himself and the Pharisees and scribes?  Why does he suddenly head off for Gentile territory?  Why, of all places, Sidon?

Well to answer that, we go all the way back to Noah.  

After Noah left the ark he planted a vineyard.  He grew some grapes and made some wine.  And then he got drunk and fell asleep naked in his tent.  Like you do.  Noah’s son, Ham, wandered by, noticed that his father was naked, and covered him up which actually seems like a pretty decent thing to do.  But when Noah woke up things got weird. He was furious that Ham saw him in such a state, so he cursed Ham with a curse that would apply to all of his descendants.  

They took cursing very seriously in those days, especially being cursed by your father.  Being cursed was devastating.  It was the opposite pole of blessing.  A blessing could give you a bright vision of your future and a big dose of optimism to help make it come true.  A curse would make your life a living nightmare. It would haunt you and hang over you like a shadow.  

So Ham was cursed.  And so was his son, Canaan.  And so was Canaan’s son, Sidon.  And on down the line.

Sidon, Noah’s grandson, inheritor of the curse, ended up having a lot of sons and grandsons and great-grandsons and so on until Sidon became a great nation.  And because Sidon’s territory butted right up against Israel, and because  the two nations were somewhat less than friendly, the nation of Sidon shows up fairly often in the history and scriptures of Israel.  

In the Book of Judges, the Sidonians conquer and oppress the Israelites.  King Solomon married several Sidonian women who then induced him to worship their goddess, Ashtoreth.  King Ahab married a Sidonian Princess.  You’ve probably heard of her.  Her name was Jezebel and she caused all kinds of trouble, especially when she kept trying to kill the prophet Elijah.  Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah all predicted judgment and doom for Sidon because of their idolatry.  When the Assyrians and later the Babylonians conquered Israel, they launched their ships from Tyre and their armies from Sidon.  

For devout and even slightly patriotic Jews, the region of Tyre and Sidon was not a friendly place.  In their eyes, the people there were cursed.

So why did Jesus go there?  

Jesus went there to put some distance between himself and the Pharisees and scribes.  Physical distance, cultural distance, and historical distance.  And also to make a point about God’s love and grace.  But we’ll get to that.

They had no sooner arrived than a woman ran up and started screaming at them. The NRSV and other translation say she shouted, which sounds slightly nicer, but the Greek word Matthew uses is ekrazen which has a sense of both screaming and crying.  It’s a very emotional word.  

So this Canaanite woman—Mark specifies that she was Syrophoenician—comes rushing up to them and with tears and wailing pleads with Jesus to free her daughter from a demon that is  tormenting her.  “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon!”  Kyrie eleison. 

And Jesus . . . ignores her.  

So she starts to plead with the disciples and pesters them to do something.  And no matter how they try to put her off, she won’t give up.  Because she’s a Mom.  A good Mom.  So finally they come to Jesus and beg him to intervene. “Send her away!” they said.  “She’s driving us crazy!”  

And this is where Jesus says the first thing that makes him sound like a jerk.  Jesus turns to this desperate woman who is frantic with fear for her demon-assaulted daughter and says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

What!!???  Jesus! What the…???

But she comes and kneels down in front of him and begs him.  “Lord, help me.”  

And this is where Jesus doubles down and says something truly ugly, something that makes him sound like a complete bigot.  “It’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

He calls her a dog.  

And there is no way to translate that that takes away any of the sting and insult.


How does this make any sense at all?  Did Jesus, the same Jesus who was criticized for hanging out with tax collectors and “sinners,” the same Jesus who crossed all kinds of boundaries to embrace all kinds of outcasts, the same Jesus who touched lepers! did this Jesus trek all the way to the heart of Sidon just to insult this poor woman with a racial slur?

Yes.  Yes he did. Jesus schlepped all the way to Sidon to create a teaching moment that his disciple and all his followers forever after would not forget.

In this moment with this desperate woman, Jesus is saying aloud what his disciples are thinking.  He wants them to hear the ugliness of their attitudes out loud.  He has led them to the neighborhood of “those people,” the ones who they think are inferior, the one who they think are cursed.  The ones who, in their understanding, God doesn’t much care for. 

I am not for one moment suggesting that the disciples in particular or Jews in general were xenophobic.  I’m suggesting that almost all of us are to one degree or another.   We humans have a bad tendency to “other” each other.

Jesus wants us to hear what our othering attitudes sound like to someone on the receiving end.  He wants us to hear the ugliness of even our most benign bigotries expressed out loud in the presence of someone who is “not one of us,” not our clan, not our race, not of our culture or religion or denomination or neighborhood. Someone who doesn’t speak our language.  He wants us to hear what overt othering sounds like to someone we are prepared to dislike or disregard or even hate for no reason at all except for a long-nurtured history of othering and mistrust handed down through the generations.  He wants us to hear just how brutal inherited ill will can really be.  He wants us to understand that it has consequences.

It’s not what goes into the mouth that pollutes, it’s what comes out of the mouth. What comes out of the mouth comes from the heart. It’s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, blasphemies, bigotries, othering and racism.  That’s what pollutes us.  That’s what poisons us generation after generation.  

“It’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” said Jesus.  “Yes Lord, she said, but even the dogs get to eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.” “Woman, great is your faith!” said Jesus. “Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

Such faith.  Such amazing faith to let herself be ignored then insulted and degraded all in the hope of some kind of help for her daughter, all for a scrap from the table of God’s healing love and grace.  All for a lesson that far too many of us still seem all to reluctant to learn.  

The Greatest Miracle

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Matthew 14:13-21

There are six accounts in the gospels of Jesus feeding thousands of people from almost nothing: two in Matthew, two in Mark, one in Luke and one in John.  The accounts are similar in most details.  In each one Jesus is moved by compassion for the crowd and uses the very meager resources at hand, five loaves and two fish in some accounts or seven loaves and a few fish in others, to provide so much food that baskets of leftovers are collected afterward.  In John’s version, the loaves and fish are provided by a young boy who has been watching Jesus from the edge of the crowd.  

In a world where 783 million people will go hungry today—34 million of them in our own country—in a world where 45% of all child deaths are caused by hunger or hunger-related illness, these stories of Jesus feeding multitudes serve to remind us that we have a responsibility to feed a hungry world and we’re not doing a very good job of following his example.  

Hunger in our world and in our country is a solvable problem.  The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 130 billion pounds of food is wasted every year in this country alone—that’s more than 200 pounds per person being dumped into landfills while 34 million people go hungry. 

Each of the gospel accounts of Jesus miraculously feeding thousands begins by telling us that he was moved by compassion for the hungry crowd, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s the thing we’re missing when it comes to feeding our hungry world.  When grain shipments bound for food-insecure nations are blown up at the dock by the misguided missiles of a needless war, it’s hard to believe that food production is the problem.  When voices in Congress are trying to reduce or eliminate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, it’s hard to believe that inflation of food prices is the main reason people are going hungry.  When 67 counties in our country are food deserts that don’t have a single grocery store because the big grocery corporations decided that a supermarket in those counties would not be profitable, it’s hard to believe that the high rate of food insufficiency in those same 67 counties is because people are uninformed about the importance of healthy nutrition. 

The six gospel accounts of Jesus feeding thousands of hungry people are a clear invitation for us to consider how we are or are not following his example in feeding hungry people today, but there are other dynamics in these miracle stories, and if we only focus on the food we may miss something else that’s equally important.  

It’s also easy to miss something important by wandering down the rabbit hole of trying to rationally explain the miracle.  Some think that the people in the crowd were so inspired by seeing Jesus and the disciples passing out their measly 5 loaves and two fish that they all decided to share the snacks they had stowed away in the sleeves of their robes.  Sure.  That works.  Maybe.  I suppose it would be a small miracle in its own way and certainly a good example of sharing what we have to make sure everyone has something.  But the Gospel writers don’t even hint that that’s what’s happening in these accounts.  They seem to think that something much more impressive happened. 

I, for one, have no problem believing that Jesus made food appear where none had been before.  After all, God has been creating something out of nothing since the beginning of . . . everything.  

Nothing seems to be God’s favorite material to work with.  Nature abhors a vacuum.  Emptiness is meant to be filled.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, Horatio.  And just for fun, do a Google search on Miracles and Quantum Physics sometime.  That’ll glaze your donut.

There are a lot of similarities in the 6 miracle feeding stories, but the context for each one is different, and the context is particularly important in Matthew 14.

When the disciples of John the Baptist came to tell Jesus that John had been murdered by Herod Antipas, Jesus “withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”  It’s easy to imagine that Jesus wanted some privacy for his grief, some time to pray, some time to think about what this meant for the message of the kingdom of heaven that both he and John had been proclaiming.  But when he got to that lonely spot at the end of the lake, instead of a private retreat there was a multitude waiting for him.

When the crowds heard that John had been killed, they went looking for Jesus.  John had been important to them, and if anyone could speak to their fear, their loss, their broken hearts and their shattered hopes, it would be Jesus. 

“They followed him on foot from the towns.  When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.”

When Jesus saw the crowd he went to work.  He prayed.  He laid hands on the sick.  He hollowed himself out so all the power of the Holy Spirit could flow through him.  

And he let himself feel their hunger.  Spiritual hunger.  Intellectual hunger.  Hunger for a better life.  Hunger for justice.  Hunger for independence. Hunger for healing.  And just plain, old physical hunger.  He felt all of it.  From all of them.  A great chasm of hunger from the thousands on the hillside in front of him.

He loved them in all their hunger and his compassion moved him to do the impossible.  He took what he had, five loaves and two fish, which by every worldly measure was obviously insufficient, then he looked up to heaven, and he blessed it.  Eulogesen is the Greek word in Matthew’s text.  It quite literally means that he said good things about it.  “Thank you.  This is good.”  Then he broke the bread and told his disciples, his students, to hand it out to the crowd, trusting that in this God-made, God-blessed world, on that God-blessed hillside with all its God-blessed hunger what they had to share was good, and that by God’s power and presence and grace there would be enough.  More than enough.

“And all ate and were filled,” Matthew tells us, “and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

Jesus fed five thousand men, besides women and children—such a weird way for Matthew to say that women and children were also there but not included in the count.  Jesus fed all those people from five loaves and two fish, but the food that fed them wasn’t the only thing that Jesus created out of almost nothing that day.  He also created a community.  A community of companionship.

Meals were not merely utilitarian in first century Palestine.  Sharing a meal was a way to affirm kinship, friendship and good will. Sharing a meal was also a way to affirm or elevate one’s status in a world where status was important.  To put it plainly, it was a way to show that those gathered together for the meal recognized each other as “acceptable” in a world where some were regarded as clearly “unacceptable” or “unclean.” 

Jesus, had been criticized by some Pharisees for eating with “sinners” and tax collectors, people considered unacceptable in good company.  But in this feast on the hillside at the end of the lake, he included everyone, regardless of their social standing or ritual acceptability.  In that great crowd of all kinds of people, no one was turned away.  No one was excluded.  Everyone was equal in their hunger.  Everyone was equal in being fed.

In the book After Jesus Before Christianity, the authors tell us that meals were the primary social engagement for the early followers of Jesus.  During the first two centuries, the people who were loyal to Jesus commonly organized themselves into something that, to us, would look like supper clubs.  They would gather once, twice or even several times a week in someone’s home to share a meal, to sing, to pray together and to remember the stories of Jesus. 

In an era when the Church is in rapid decline, I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we followed the example of those early Jesus people today.  What would happen if we transformed our pews into long tables and benches and converted our sanctuaries into dining halls then gathered each week to throw open our doors and invite our neighbors in for a hearty meal, some prayer and some singing?   Who knows what kinds of hunger we might feed?  Who knows what kind of emptiness Christ might fill?

Those of us who come to church come with hungers of our own.  We also come to share a meal— a meal that reminds us that we are in Christ and Christ is in us—a meal that fills us with Christ’s compassion as we taste and see the goodness of the Lord.  We come to share a meal that calls us to trust that in this God-made, God-blessed world, that in this God-blessed place with all its God-blessed hungers what we have is good.  We come to learn again that we can share what we have even if when it doesn’t seem to be enough, and that by God’s power and presence there will always be enough.  More than enough.  

About Those Weeds…

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

[Jesus] put before [the crowd] another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field;  25 but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.  26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well.  27 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?’  28 He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’  29 But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.  30 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.’” 

36  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.”  37 He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man;  38 the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one,  39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.  40 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.  41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers,  42 and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!

In 1965, William Youngdahl, the pastor of Augustana Lutheran Church in Omaha, Nebraska became convinced that racism was a pernicious evil, a spiritual cancer destroying the soul of America.  As he thought about how he might address this in his parish, it dawned on him that most of the people in his all-White congregation simply didn’t know any Black people—that many had never had an actual conversation with a Black person.  Youngdahl thought that a logical first step in confronting racism and White Supremacy would be for White people and Black people to simply meet and talk to each other.  To introduce the idea to his community, he invited youth from nearby Calvin Memorial Presbyterian Church, a nearly all Black congregation, to join in worship with his congregation.  That went reasonably well so he prepared to move to the next step in his plan which was to ask couples from his congregation to have dinner at the homes of couples from the Presbyterian congregation.  That’s when polite smiles faded and attitudes surfaced.  He quickly discovered that while the Presbyterians were willing, the members of his own congregation were resistant—passively at first, but then more actively.  At first they simply said they didn’t think people would be comfortable dining at the homes of their Black hosts.  Then they said they didn’t think “our people” were quite ready for such a big step.  The more Youngdahl encouraged them to try the idea, the more his Council and other members of the congregation found reasons to object.  They began to accuse him of being divisive and revolutionary.  In the end, they forced him out of his position as pastor.  They saw him as a weed in their field.[1]

If you spend much time discussing religion, you’re almost certain to find someone who thinks you are a weed.  And, of course, you will also find people whom you think are weeds. It seems that there are always people ready and eager to pull the weeds… or at least what they think are the weeds.  

“In Matthew’s day and in every generation,” wrote Robert Smith, “it takes little talent to finger members of the community who look like bad seed.  Where do they come from?  It is easy to lose confidence in the way God runs the universe.”[2]  

The weed that Jesus refers to in this parable is almost certainly darnel, Lolium temulentum, a poisonous grain that looks so much like wheat that it’s also called “false wheat.”  It’s easy to mistake it for wheat and vice versa if you’re not trained to spot the differences, especially when the plants are just beginning to grow.

Jesus says to let the weeds grow.  The reapers will take care of them when the time comes.  But almost from the beginning, the church seems to have not been listening to that particular instruction.

The word “heresy” has cropped up pretty frequently in the history of the church.  It comes from the Latin haresis which means “a school of thought or philosophical sect.”  The Latin comes from the Greek heiresis which means “to take or choose for oneself.” In Greek debate it was used to describe “a differing opinion.”  In church use, the conventional meaning of heresy is “a belief or opinion that is contrary to orthodox doctrine.”  Historically in the church, however, heresy” seems to have meant, “Look!  Here’s a weed!  Quick, let’s pull it!”

In 431, at the Council of Ephesus, the teachings of the British Monk and theologian, Pelagius, were condemned as heresy.  Fortunately for Pelagius, he had died in 418 or he might have been in for a rough time, not that he hadn’t been roughed up a bit while he was still alive.  After all, you don’t go toe-to-toe with powerful bishops like Augustine and Jerome without getting a few bruises to your reputation.  Or your body.  Theologians played rough in those days.

And what was the great sin of Pelagianism?  Pelagius had dared to question St. Augustine’s idea of Original Sin, the idea that all of humanity was perpetually polluted by Adam’s sin.  

Augustine said that from birth we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. No, said Pelagius, we are born innocent.  True, we are born into a world where sin is nearly inescapable, but we have the gift of free will which is one of the gifts of grace!  We can choose to move toward the love of Christ and Christ’s grace brings us the rest of the way in.  No, said Augustine, our human will is entirely corrupted.  The human will is not free.  If Christ had not freely given us God’s grace, no effort of ours would make us even want it.  Pelagius is a heretic, a weed that must be uprooted.

On the 6th of July in 1415, Jan Hus, a Czech academic theologian,  philosopher and priest was burned at the stake as a heretic for condemning indulgences and crusades.  He had also advocated, like Wycliffe before him, that the scriptures should be translated into the languages of the common people so that everyone could read them for themselves.  The Church said that was heresy.

On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy and cross dressing. The case against her for heresy was weak, and Joan answered the inquisition’s questions with such pious intelligence that the English bishops hearing her case were ready to dismiss the theological heresy charges. But they had her dead to rights on the charge of dressing like a man.  Plus, they felt she needed to be punished for being such an inspiring military leader and a brilliant military strategist, talents that were not appreciated in a woman.

In 1521, Martin Luther was condemned as a heretic and sentenced to death for his widely circulated writings insisting on church reform.  Some of the reforms he advocated had been proposed by Jan Hus a hundred years earlier.  Luther had developed a large popular following and his denunciation of indulgences hit the church right in the wallet.  Fortunately, because he was under the protection of Frederick the Wise, the powerful duke of Saxony, Luther’s opponents were never able to capture him and execute him.

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was declared a heretic and forced to recant his assertion that the earth moves around the sun and not the other way around.  He died under house arrest 9 years later, but 359 years later in 1992 he was vindicated when Pope John Paul II admitted that Galileo was right, the earth does move around the sun.  And in the year 2000, a mere 8 years after admitting that Galileo was right, the Church held a ceremony in which they issued him a formal apology.  Galileo, who had been dead for 358 years at that point, was unable to attend.

In his book Parables of the Kingdom, Robert Farrrar Capon reminds us that the enemy who sows the weeds doesn’t have any real power over goodness. The wheat in the parable is already sown.  The reign of God is already in the world and there’s nothing the enemy can do about it.  But, “he can sucker the forces of goodness into taking up arms against the confusion he has introduced, to do his work for him. That is why he goes away after sowing the weeds. He has no need to hang around. Unable to take positive action anyway—having no real power to muck up the operation—he simply sprinkles around a generous helping of darkness and waits for the children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for him.”

All these heretics, all these persons with differing views, were seen in their time as weeds in the field.  Some were pulled and burned, ignoring the advice of Jesus: Let both of them grow together until the harvest.  He tells those who are eager to yank up the weeds that they’re likely to pull up the wheat, too.  Jesus also leaves a cautionary question hanging in the air, a question that echoes through this parable and our history: What makes you so sure you know the difference between darnel and wheat? 

Today, Pelagius is being reevaluated. A fair number of theologians are thinking that maybe he wasn’t entirely wrong and maybe Augustine wasn’t entirely right.  Jan Hus is commemorated as a martyr whose ideas planted seeds that flourished in the Reformation.  Joan of Arc has been canonized as a saint and nobody much cares that she wore pants.  Martin Luther is acknowledge as a titanic figure who not only ignited the Reformation but set the stage for the Enlightenment.  And Galileo opened our minds to the notion that religious dogma should not stand in opposition to the empirical observations of science.  

Time and time again throughout our history, persons and ideas that were thought to be weeds in the field turned out to be wheat.

So if you think that some person or some group are weeds in the field and need to be uprooted because their theological ideas or practice or opinions differ from yours, maybe it would be best to leave them alone, to live and let live, and leave the judgment to the more far-sighted understanding of God.

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.

Do not judge and you will not be judged.  Don’t be in such a hurry to yank those ideas or persons you think are weeds out of God’s field.  Grow and let grow.  Because that’s what Jesus said to do.

[1] For a thought-provoking look at this story see the documentary A Time For Burning by William Jersey.  Available on YouTube

[2] Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament: Matthew; Robert H. Smith, 1998, p.178