God Does Not Visit Violence Upon Violence; Sermon October 8, 2017

Isaiah 5:1-7

Psalm 80:7-15

Matthew 21:33-46

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…the kingdom of heaven is like yeast…the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who owns a vineyard… I am the vine, you are the branches…

Jesus was really good at Similes and Metaphors. 

When anyone talks about a vine or vineyard, they are talking about Israel.  The Psalmist says…

7 Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved. 8 You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. 9 You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land. 10 The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches; 11 it sent out its branches to the sea, and its shoots to the River. 12 Why then have you broken down its walls, so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit? 13 The boar from the forest ravages it, and all that move in the field feed on it. 14 Turn again, O God of hosts; look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine, 15 the stock that your right hand planted.

This is a Psalm that remembers the protection and prosperity of Israeli history, in a time when they are in much more crisis.  It was written during the time when the Assyrian Empire loomed large over the northern kingdom – a kingdom it would eventually come to destroy completely. It is a Psalm beseeching God to once again bestow God’ blessing on his people. And it’s an amazing example of a metaphor!

In our Old Testament scripture this morning, we hear the words of Isaiah early in his tenure, before the Assyrian Empire demolished the northern kingdom.  Isaiah recites a list of complaints against the people – all justifications for the coming storm of the Assyrian kingdom.  Through Isaiah, God says, I have protected you…but you betrayed my expectations, so I’m removing my protection, I’m removing the hedge that used to keep you safe from predators. 

We are clear, as we are with all prophets, that Israel has done something wrong.  That God’s people have disappointed God in some way.  But – truly – we rarely hear the ways we disappoint, am I right?

That’s because they are in the following verses, the ones not in our lectionary.

a.     In Isaiah 5: 8; you who adjoin house to house and field to field, until there is no room for anyone but you; greed and excessive – perhaps aggressive – perhaps predatory – hoarding practices, where the winner takes all and leaves no room for the loser to have a home.

b.    Verse 11 – you who pursue strong drink in the morning and wine at night, lying around listening to tambourine and flute but not paying attention to the work of God’s hands

c.     Verse 18 – you who draw iniquity along cords of falsehood; drag sin along with cart ropes – who decide who gets what based on errant cords of logic;

d.    Verse 20 – you who call evil good and good evil, /darkness for light/light for darkness, bitter for sweet / sweet for bitter

e.     Verse 21 – you who are wise in your own eyes and shrewd in your own sight;

f.      Verse 23 – you who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deny the innocent their rights

Nearly all of this has to do with how you treat others.  There are some of you out there who may drink too much wine and listen to too much music…  But most of these transgressions focus on right relationship with others.

When Jesus speaks in the temple – this, his third parable responding to the question of the Pharisees and Scribes, “From where do you get your authority?” - Everyone in the temple would know at the mention of the vineyard, that Jesus was referencing this passage from Isaiah.  Except, In Jesus’ rendition, the landowner has a much greater status, he has more properties and responsibility in his purview, and so he has hired tenants to tend the vineyard.  If the people of Israel, God’s people, are still the vineyard, Who do you think these tenants are supposed to be?  These caretakers of the vineyard are the temple leadership.

The tenants who were supposed to plant and water, tend and nurture, reap and harvest of God’s fruit from the people of Israel; that leadership was not teaching and caretaking the Jewish population well.  They were ignoring the landowners’ servants, the people who came as a reminder, the people who had a prophetic message, the people who represented truth, the people who came to demand accountability.

But More than simply ignoring the message, they got angry.  They beat the first messenger.

More than angry, they got violent.  They killed the second.

More than violent, they got self-righteous and stoned the third messenger.

And then, more than a beating, they got Greedy.  They decided to use violence to kill the heir.

Here we are with Jesus and – for once – a pretty clear metaphor.  We can see this metaphor of Jesus the heir, and the prophets who came before him but were refused, rejected, ridiculed, and returned with deadly force.  We are able to see how God continues to hope the tenants will come around to their responsibilities.  We can see, in real time in the story, how the temple leadership that has gone astray and failed to lead their people well are now trying to figure out how to repudiate this heir, this Son of God, so they won’t be forced to relinquish their power.

The leaders of the temple are the caretakers of the vineyard.  Our leaders are the caretakers of a nation.  Have they been doing a good job?

For the past 6 days, ever since waking up to horrible, tragic news on Monday morning of the Vegas shooting where over 50 people were killed, our country has been plunged, once again, into one of our favorite unending debates.  I am not going to stand up here and rehash the gun debate.  I am not going to do it because I think that both sides are right.  I think the proliferation of these obscene episodes of apparently random, large-scale killing is a direct result of the proliferation of the amount of killing machines we have in our population, the ease of getting them, the fact that they become more and more technologically advanced in the skill of how fast they can kill … things.  People, animals, robots, stone statues brought to life (according to the movie I was watching the other day.)  But I also think, paradoxically, that policies enacted would come to rest on a great number of gun owners who are trained in safety, and responsible, and have great respect for the damage their firearm can do.  I don’t think simple gun policy would prevent tragedies like the one last weekend in Vegas.

But there are two things that do sicken me about the gun debate in light of our assumed religiousness and our unconscious religiousness.   

First is the reverence we seem to have as a culture –and consumers - for the all-more-powerful gun model.  A pistol will kill someone as dead as a rifle as dead as an Assault Rifle. It seems to me a person who lives outside of a war zone does not own an Assault Rifle because they need to protect themselves.  They own an assault rifle because they appreciate – admire – revere the technological advances and the deadly power of the thing.  I made a friend here in Hastings several months ago, and he is a gun owner.  He owns 10, 4 of which are the type of rifle that looks like what you see in the movies.  Black. Sleek. Long. Contoured to fit your stance.  And loaded with a magazine of bullets.  I think he collects them and admires them as someone might who drives and loves classic cars, or a pilot appreciates construction of a plane.  It’s about the artistry, the design, the power and the majesty of the thing.  But between our TV and film culture of kill-the-bad-guy plotlines, our political fear-mongering that enemies could be at our door at any second, the NRA’s paranoid narrative, and the gun lobby’s hold on our politicians, that admiration of guns turns into a reverence that is hardly paralleled with anything else in our culture.

In bible study this week, a fellow pastor here in town said something profound; that whenever the beginning of a conversation gets an immediate and vehement backlash, you can be assured you’ve uncovered a sacred cow – an idol of the culture.  Our love of guns has, for some, I believe, crossed over into gun worship.  Idolatry, as Jesus or the prophets might have said.

But to me, something even more terrifying is the narrative that is used to justify this love of firearms.  Did you know that the value of gun manufacturers stock goes up every time there is a mass shooting, in anticipation of a rise in gun sales? We are told that we need to arm ourselves because at any time, a crazed or depraved or drugged out person could appear on our doorstep ready to take everything we hold dear.  We are told we have the right to stand our ground whenever we feel threatened – an idea and a law that tacitly endorses responding in violence instead of trying have a discussion and find out whatever the dispute may be.  In each of these mass shootings, we are told, again and again, that the only way to stop a ‘bad guy’ with a gun is a ‘good guy’ with a gun.  Nevermind the fact that for all intents and purposes, Stephen Craig Paddock seemed to be just another good guy who liked guns.  Nevermind the fact that in a Permit-to-Carry state of Minnesota – (well, all 50 states now allow gun owners to carry with a permit; Illinois was the last hold out) – but Nevermind that in Minnesota Philando Castile proactively and calmly informed the officer who pulled him over that he had a firearm and therefore should have been in the ‘good guy’ category but was shot and killed while reaching for his permit.  Nevermind that when John Crawford III picked up a BB gun in a Walmart in Ohio in 2014, it scared fellow shoppers so that they called the police and he was fatally shot for considering a purchase of a toy gun in a place where people purchase real guns – legally. 

Which all begs the question - Who decides who is a good guy with a gun and who is bad?  How do we make those decisions in the split second we feel we have to protect ourselves?  If we accept the mantra that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun, how often will we get that split-second decision wrong?  And on whose authority do we have the right to take a life?

Because it’s certainly not a Christian authority.  If we were following Christ, if we were following our professed Christian beliefs, we would see that neither Jesus our Christ nor his disciples nor the Apostle Paul ever suggest that the way to solve violence is with violence.  In fact, in every instance, it’s the opposite.  Let’s look at this parable again;

You would expect, after the first servant came back beaten, the second killed, that would be enough for the landowner to respond with wrath and violence.  Right?  Human intuition is, if you don’t learn the first time, you certainly learn the true nature of someone with a second instance.  Cross me once, shame on you… cross me twice, shame on me… as the saying goes?

But God, in the form of the landowner, sends a third peaceful messenger to the tenants to remind them of their responsibilities.  And when, again, he is greeted with violence, the landowner sends his own Son. 

Does he respond with an eye for an eye?  Does he show up with assault rifles or whatever weapons were appropriate to the time?  No.  Again and again, God brings grace and vulnerability and love in lieu of retribution or violence.  

Indeed, we follow a teacher who sacrificed himself that we might know a different pathway to human life rather than war and violent retribution.  Our parable ends with another metaphor about the stone that the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone.  The Pharisees, aware that Jesus is speaking of himself, turn away disgusted.  Because Jesus says, those who fall on this stone, those who try to break Christ, will become broken themselves.  The way of love and generosity and vulnerability inherently breaks down evil.  Jesus is the cornerstone, building for us the foundation of a new way of life.  Because Jesus never answered violence with violence. Jesus lays out a life that rejects violence and vengeance for radical vulnerability, radical generosity, radical love – even for enemies and those who appear evil.

And so I ask a question that has been debated for centuries; Is there any room in the Christian Worldview for a Christian to say, “I am going to kill to protect life?” 

Sadly, I don’t think simple gun policy would prevent tragedies like the one last weekend in Las Vegas – but neither is more guns an answer to our culture’s problems.  There was no way a ‘good guy with a gun’ could have stopped the shooter faster than the security and police did.  Rather, an end to these horrible incidences of mass murder will require a whole-scale change in our lives; in our TV and film plots that exaggerate violence, simplify evil and exalt righteous vengeance without any presence of doubt; in our tending and nurturing of relationships in the face of an ever-more disconnected and bullying culture; in our own diminished human capacity for compassion and empathy; in our regard and respect for the lives of others; in our sense of safety, protection and ideas of who to fear, and finally, in our approach to how much of a firearm is necessary to fulfill those things.  We would have to build these things on the cornerstone, on the teachings and example of Jesus, his disciples and in the words of the Apostle Paul.  We will have to build them by holding fast to God’s love, grace, and vulnerability – not more guns.  

We Are The Global Moneychangers; Sermon, October 1, 2017

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32

Matthew 21:23-32    

One should always pay one’s debts.  We often hear – and teach – this core principal of our society.  An unpaid debt is a quick way to lose a friend, or make tension with a family member.  It will prevent you from buying a home and can even impact whether you get hired in today’s job world. 

We also like to project these principals onto our country at large, fretting about the national debt and what services need to be trimmed, or programs cut, or populations penalized in order to get our debt under control or preserve earning potential for future generations. But sometimes our mottos such as these become flawed, or do harm…

In today’s Old Testament reading, the prophet Ezekiel finds himself face to face with one of these flawed sayings.  "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge."  As foreign as this sounds to us, this was a common saying in Ezekiel’s time.  It referred to the sins of the past generations determining the poor fate of the current generation.  It’s biblically based in Exodus, when God says he will visit the sins of the father on the sons for four generations.  However, in Exiled Babylon, the saying had gotten to the point of “Eh. We’re cursed by our fathers. What does it matter what I do?” God is irked, and through Ezekiel, admonishes his audience that the Lord never wants to hear it said again in Israel, and then goes on to argue against the saying for the next 12 verses (the ones we don’t read). This saying is so common that Ezekiel has to name it and correct it before he can talk to people, because the flawed logic behind this saying – that God visits the sins of the parents onto generations - caused people to turn away from their present responsibilities by blaming the past.

Two years ago I visited Puerto Rico for the first time with friends.  The gorgeous beaches and perfect 80’s temperature, the quaint and country cities, the solid roads and kind people made it a heavenly place to visit.  It’s not heaven anymore.  Puerto Rico is in the midst of an epic humanitarian crisis.  There are 3.5 million people, American Citizens and residents of the Island who are desperate and terrified.  According to the US Army, In four days, the percentage of people in Puerto Rico without drinking water has risen from 44% to 55%. They have no running water, no cell phone grid, limited gas, and will be without power for months.  A former boss of mine in Chicago named Marilyn has family there.  She wasn’t sure until yesterday – yesterday, 10 days after the storm – that they had survived Maria. That was the first her family was able to make contact. Relief supplies have arrived now in Puerto Rico, but there are 3000 shipping containers sitting in the dock containing medicine and drinking water because the roads are impassable and the truck drivers who would be driving them inland can’t get to work.

The US Virgin Islands are in a worse situation.  Both Irma and Maria hit the Virgin Islands. 

The Daily Beast: The Damage Hurricane Irma Left Behind So Far

According to the Boston Globe “the second storm drowned what the first could not destroy.” The hospitals are completely destroyed, and they had to lift their curfew because there weren’t enough hours in the day to bury all the bodies of those who have died of natural causes since the storm.  Waterfront resorts, which comprised a third of the economy through tourism, have been reduced to rubble, and on the smallest island, St. John, a landslide blocks the one road that connects the east and west sides of the Island.

The Globe article adds, “So many public school buildings have been compromised on the three islands that students cannot go back to class. And the wind has stripped the trees of all their leaves, leaving the once lush tropical forests looking as if they were set afire with napalm.  The 103,000 people who live in these islands are at the end of a long supply chain of relief that depends heavily on the ports in neighboring Puerto Rico — now crippled by Maria and unable to meet the needs of its own people.”

Today is World Communion Sunday, and it struck me that the descriptions of these places are closer to what we expect from undeveloped countries in far away nations, not US territories and US citizens.  But Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands have something else in common besides their tropic location, total devastation, and being part of the US Nation; their governments are largely in debt to Wall Street, and that debt has barred these countries from making the kind of infrastructure improvements they needed to withstand this kind of storm. 

Whether or not you believe that human activity has impacted climate change, or that we have the power to reverse it, there is no denying that the agony of our new extreme weather patterns, and - as has become obvious in the last month, the frequency of these storms which will compound the suffering – will fall disproportionately on those least ready to withstand it’s impacts.  The wrath of a climate hot under the collar at our extravagant overconsumption of fossil fuels will be felt by the poorest, the weakest, and the least protected people on this earth.

From the Wall Street Journal: Puerto Rico Tallies Up Devastation From Hurricane Maria

And that brings me back to where I started. Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt is blamed on mismanagement of public utilities; the Virgin Islands’ $2 billion debt is said to be a direct result of corruption. The President referenced that this debt must be ‘dealt with’ in his tweets on disaster response this week.  I’ve been reading a few books that began to scratch the surface of how national debt held by developing nations is like driving a stick-shift with your right hand handcuffed behind you; you have the liberty to steer but it makes it impossible to shift out of first gear and really get moving.  The global lenders and financial policies like forced austerity encourage developing countries to continue to sell their raw material assets to outside nations and keep their labor force ‘cheap’, keeping their population poor and powerless.  This was an ethical challenge to begin with.  But when the impacts of a warming climate – what some people call ‘global weirding’ but I like to call ‘climate chaos’ – fall primarily on these same developing nations, or US territories with excessive debt – that changes the scenario from something that seems unfair to something downright sacrificial.  As in, sacrificial of the inhabitants of those countries. 

In our gospel today, Jesus is asked, “By what authority do you do these things?”  In the 24 hours before this exchange, Jesus has ridden into Jerusalem to shouts of Hosanna; he has entered the Temple, cured the sick, turned over the tables of the moneychangers, and withered a fig tree with a curse. His power is clear, but the people in charge seem dazed by his willingness to upend the status quo.  But Jesus can’t stand the inherent unfairness in the money practices in the temple.  The Jewish kingdom was spread across many nations, and each year at Passover, any Jew in the world who was an adult male and wished to worship at the Temple would make the trip and make an animal offering. These animals were for sale in the Temple. Since foreign money with any foreign image was not permitted in the Jewish ritual, the money changers would sell "Temple coinage" at a very high rate of exchange and assess a fee for their services.  This practice of buying sacrifices, and changing money with high fees, was expensive for the wealthy; for the poor it was an incredible burden.  Jesus realized it was a predatory practice that trapped people in debt.

The temple elite demand to know where Jesus gets his audacity.  Quite simply, Jesus gets it from knowing that God is inherently fair.  Knowing that this system of usury, and debt, and predatory fees was inherently unfair.  Knowing that it was unfair to force people into debt and prevent them from unable taking control of their own lives.  

If we, the global moneychangers, demand our payment before we allow salvation – the saving grace of modern infrastructure, improved technology, and responsive resources when disaster hits - How are we different from the moneychangers in the temple? 

I’m not saying I have all the answers – I’m certainly not an economics expert – but I’m certain there are creative economic answers out there.  After all, we have allowed many entities to be bailed out in the last 10 years; when General Motors was failing, or when AIG was ‘too big to fail’; I mean, even our President has reconciled his debt several times.  But as there are many more of these disasters on the horizon, destined to hit the areas most vulnerable throughout the world, we can’t ‘fair-market’ our way out of this mess unless we completely extinguish every ounce of compassion we contain for the people living in these debt-ridden countries.  If we don’t get creative with their debt, they will continue to be pummeled by extreme weather that we had a hand in creating. Perhaps, just perhaps, the damage in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands could lead people to seek a more dramatic solution to Puerto Rico’s debt issues - maybe by restructuring the debt to allow critical investment in the country’s infrastructure – before the next hurricane season.  There’s got to be a way that we can help developing nations pay it forward to avert more disasters like the ones we face from last week.

The good news is that we can do a little something now, even here at home.  Next week, our church will be joining with CROP walk teams from all over Hastings to raise money for anti hunger initiatives across the globe.  CROP Hunger Walks are “viewed by many as the granddaddy of charity walks,” since it was started in 1969. When CROP began in 1947, CROP was an acronym for the Christian Rural Overseas Program. Its primary mission was to help Midwest farm families to share their grain with hungry neighbors in post-World War II Europe and Asia. 

These days, it continues to address hunger and it’s broader causes.  Over 2,000 communities across the U.S. join in more than 1,300 CROP Hunger Walks each year, and already this year over half a million dollars have been raised in online donations so far! Of the money we raise for our FCUCC team, 25% will go to support Hastings’ mobile food pantry, and 75% will be dedicated to Church World Service, both towards hygiene kits and clean-up buckets for disaster relief, and towards their work around the world – in places like Guatemala and Haiti, Panama and Indonesia.  In these places that are crippled by international debt, your funds raised through the Crop Walk will help people grow sustainable and nutritious food, build infrastructure to secure access to clean drinking water, and create safe housing.

CROP walk is a small step towards the world being a little more fair.  We need to look for more ways to reject the sour grapes of the past – individual changes and big system changes – to be sure that the sins of the previous generation do not condemn the future generations to a much more miserable existence.

For this, in God’s name, we pray.  Amen