Tuesday, September 26, 2017

God Needles Us; Sermon, September 24, 2017


Sermon; God Needles Us

How many of you know the story of Jonah and the whale?  I was in a Cantata about this story when I was little, but all I remember is about a guy surviving after being swallowed by a whale, and the word ‘Ninevah’.

Our gospel passage today is, again, just a small sliver of the book of Jonah.  Whereas usually would-be prophets protest – Jeremiah thinks himself too young, Moses thinks himself too weak – Jonah doesn’t even stick around long enough to hear what he’s supposed to say to the Ninevites before he takes off running! And it isn’t until this chapter, at the end of the story, that we get to find out why Jonah ran. 

Finally, he confesses; I knew this is what you would do, Lord.  I knew that you are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, a god who relents in sending punishment.  I didn’t want to go because I knew you would forgive the Ninevites. 

Huh.  What an ironic twist. Jonah is having a 100% success rate. Unheard of for a prophet!  He is supposed to spend three days in the village, but people begin to repent before the end of day one! He doesn’t even have to confront the king directly because the word spreads so quickly, and the king hears he immediately sets out a decree of fasting and repentance for the entire city.  ALL of Ninevah wears sackcloth and fasts to repent. 

So what’s the problem? 

Jonah knows the history of this place. He knows that Ninevah is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the empire responsible for completely erasing the Northern kingdom of Israel. He has heard countless stories of cruelty and brutality that happened in Ninevah.  To be here, to ask them to repent – and have them do it much quicker than Israel ever does – is an insult to what is fair to the Jewish people.  Jonah wants justice for his people, not forgiveness.  He wants justice so much, he pouts!

I have to tell you, when I read this story I couldn’t help but think of my niece Julia.  Julia is the clever, precocious, beautiful youngest daughter of my sister in Boston.  And, apparently being the youngest in the household, she is on the lookout for opportunities to file claims of unequal treatment between her siblings.  According to my sister and brother in law, her favorite refrain lately is “That is not fair!”  She has been given the nickname: Captain Injustice.

Today’s bible verses offend our sense of justice.  In Jesus’ parable, the parable of the landowner, offends our sense of fairness. And why shouldn’t it?  Fairness is a concept we learn early – definitely by the age of 5 - and employed often to help us learn to share, and to in discipline, and in building a work ethic.  Capitalism teaches us that we should be fairly rewarded for what we earned and it’s nearly impossible to detangle those ideas in our modern world.

When we read this, we almost always read it with the landowner as the place of God.  It’s a way of talking about God’s unending grace and forgiveness.  It’s a beautiful way to talk about the journey, the spiritual journey we are all on – that wherever you are in your life when you recognize that you want Jesus to be a part of it, you will still get an equal portion of grace.  And, since Matthew’s community was very mixed - some of the Christians in the Mathean community had known Jesus, some were Jews, some were slaves and newly-converted Gentiles, it is likely there were feelings of envy and “I was here first.”

But why do we always leap to that interpretation?  Why do we have such a tendency to equate God with wealth and power?  Especially when we know that Jesus was almost certainly speaking from experience as a laborer. 

A few years ago, the author Reza Aslan spoke at my Seminary about his book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.  Aslan wrote this book from a historical perspective – verifying what could be verified about Jesus without using scripture (that he lived, when he lived, and that he was crucified next to bandits by the Roman Empire), and then filling in the historical context like the background on a painting.  From him I learned about the enormous wealth inequality that existed in Jesus’ time.  Rome was a massive and hugely successful empire with everything from Roman Senators to a subsistent peasant class to slaves.  Jesus is often referred to as a ‘carpenter’ – and in our modern world, we envision a competent, middle class tradesman who does woodworking and building.  But the Greek word in the bible was ‘Tecton’, which was merely one step away from a slave.  A Tecton was someone who traveled village to village looking for day labor.  A tecton more closely resembles the men in this parable, or the immigrant men who I used to see standing on the street corner near Home Depot, waiting for a truck to pull up and hire them for the day.

Because of this massive wealth inequality and the suffering it produced, apocalyptic religion, and political insurrection were commonplace during this time, and as we’ve discussed, revolts were commonly overpowered by Rome’s military force.  Historical records show that the city Suferus, not far from Nazareth where Jesus lived, was a site of rebellion and put down, quite brutally, by the Romans when Jesus was about 5 years old.  The city was burnt to the ground, and Jesus likely watched the flames from the high elevation of Nazareth only a few miles away.  Ten years later, when Jesus was probably around 15 and finishing his apprenticeship, Herod Antipas, the appointed ruler over the Galilee region who eventually beheaded John the Baptist, set about building a gleaming city upon the ruins of Suferus.  It was the greatest building project in the history of the region, and it was extremely likely that Jesus was one of the mass of day laborers that flocked to that city looking for work.  Nazareth was a village made up of mud huts and no roads we can assume that every day Jesus walked the hour journey to Suferus, a gleaming city of mansion after mansion, to get a days’ wage. 

A days’ wage – the denarius – was barely enough to feed a family for that day.  It was a subsistence wage.  It was the kind of cycle that ensured you only ate each day if you worked each day.  That’s why we can see, in our Matthew scripture today, why these day laborers were still waiting around at 3 pm and 5 pm – still hoping to make a days’ wage to feed their family. 

And, while the unbidden generosity of the landowner becomes clear as he returns again and again to fold workers into his fields, and then pays each equal – what also becomes clear is the wide gulf between the landowner and the workers.  Truly, he is so wealthy that he has the freedom to do what he will with what is his – he doesn’t even have to make smart business decisions with his money.  His generosity is a merciful act of life-saving grace, but his actions leave questions and feelings of resentment.  If you are going to up the hourly wage, then shouldn’t it be increased for everyone?  Didn’t the early workers earn a greater share?  If you’ve put in the time and have seniority, shouldn’t you be paid more? Don’t people deserve to be valued for the effort they put in? If you moved heaven and earth to get out of your house and be on that corner at 6 am sharp, why should the guy showing up at 2 pm get an equal portion?  Shouldn’t the landowner show some loyalty to those workers who were there first, especially those who were rightful citizens of their country?  And not insignificantly – Why did the landowner specify that the people get paid with the last going first, if not to arouse the irritation and division among the workers?  (These all sound like good questions for our new Fair Wage Discussion Group.)

And in the meantime, Captain Injustice shouts her battle cry again: It’s Not Fair! 

With each of these stories, we are reminded that God’s love, grace and forgiveness go above and beyond our own human tendencies.  We long for a sense of order, and fairness that we can rely on and plan around.  But in each of our bible stories this morning, we are again confronted with the truth that God doesn’t operate by our rules.  God does not sign on to our human ideas and systems of fairness.  God’s grace doesn’t exist in a scarcity system, or in Capitalism – as much as we would like to believe it so. God is trying to tell us something about how to create the kingdom of Heaven.  But he needles us a little bit, too.

So back to Jonah.  Jonah, after proclaiming to Ninevah, then acts like a true toddler and goes off to pout.  Captain Injustice himself, he walks through the gates, leaves the city, goes to sit on a hill and be angry.  Rather than stay and watch his words work, rather than stay and invest in the people of Ninevah, rather than be concerned for their continued redemption, he walks off and pouts and asks God to take his life.

And God needles him. 

“Is it right for you to be angry about this?”  “Yes, right enough to die.” Is his reply.

God places a bush to shade Jonah while he pouts; but then sends worms to kill the bush and leaves Jonah to bake in the hot sun.  And he needles him;  “Is it right for you to be angry about this?” 

Yes, Jonah insists.  Right enough to die.

God asks, “what have you done to make any of this possible?  Did you plant the bush?  Did you till the field?  Did you create Ninevah? What ownership do you have for your anger at your injustice?

With ownership, the landowner can be as generous as he likes.  With ownership, Jonah would be invested in his result in Ninevah.

Friends, on this New Member Sunday, which is also a Sunday where we may vote to embark on a new, streamlined board structure, I challenge you to think about ownership.  Our church body may be on the small side, but we are mighty, and each new addition to our church family adds new talents and connections and potential leadership.  We have power beyond measure, and grace beyond human expectation.  Our coming changes may no doubt require patience, and good communication, and repeated generosity of spirit.  But with insight and invitation, we may leverage those talents, connections and leadership to create grace beyond our expectations.  There may be slip-ups or fumbles, but like the landowner returning for more workers, we can and I believe we will choose to show favor to willing hands no matter if they’ve been here since the beginning, or are new to the field.

And, like the landowner; we will need your efforts.  The volunteer structure means we may be calling, and calling, and calling again on you to help execute tasks of the church.  But this is a risk worth taking.

A good preacher should be a good storyteller, always ready with a story in their back pocket to help illustrate a sermon.  Since I, myself, am not, I am thankful to have a good memory to tell other people’s good stories. At Synod this year, the Reverend Traci Blackmon shared a phenomenal sermon that begun with a story of a wheelbarrow. 

The story was of Charles Blondin, a famous French tightrope walker. Blondin achieved his greatest fame on September 14, 1860, when he became the first person to cross a tightrope stretched 11,000 feet (over a quarter of a mile) across the mighty Niagara Falls. People from both Canada and America came from miles away to see this great feat. 
He walked across, 160 feet above the falls, several times... each time with a different daring feat - once in a sack, on stilts, on a bicycle, in the dark, and blindfolded. One time he even carried a stove and cooked an omelet in the middle of the rope.  A large crowd gathered and the buzz of excitement ran along both sides of the river bank. The crowd “Oohed and Aahed!” as Blondin carefully walked across - one dangerous step after another - pushing a wheelbarrow holding a sack of potatoes.
The crowd was so dazzled by him that, upon reaching the other side, the crowd's applause was louder than the roar of the falls!  After the last run of pushing a wheelbarrow filled with potatoes across the gorge, Blondin suddenly stopped and addressed his audience.  “Do you believe I can cross this tightrope many, many times without falling?”
“Yes!” roared back the crowd.
“Do you believe I can carry just about anything across these raging falls?”  Yes! Came the reply.
Then, as if the thought just occurred to him: "Do you believe I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow?"  Again, the crowd enthusiastically yelled back, "Yes! You are the greatest tightrope walker in the world!"
"Okay," then said Blondin, energized, "Who will volunteer?  Who will get into the wheelbarrow and walk across the falls with me?"  <crickets>
Friends, we need to get in the wheelbarrow because we are in a world filled with injustice.  We are going to have to get in the wheelbarrow and take the risks that go along with speaking out.  We need to get in the wheelbarrow because – on New Member Sunday – this congregation will not keep track of who was here first and who got here in the 11th hour – but we will accept your laboring.  We need to get in the wheelbarrow because, on this day of voting on reorganization, in whatever form our church takes we are going to need not to run away, but bring our vision and our energy to fill it up.   


Our wheelbarrow is waiting.  And – let’s face it – the belly of a wheelbarrow is better any day than the belly of a whale.

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