Just love?

A Sermon preached on 8^th October 2017, Pentecost XVIII at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Isaiah 5: 1-7, Philippians 3: 4b-14, Matthew 21: 33-46

Last weekend I and some other members of St. Augustine’s attended the Autumn meeting of the Council of Anglican Episcopal Churches in Germany. This is a unique organization, bringing together Church of England and Episcopal parishes to work together, learn from each other, and support each other´s shared ministry. While we share a common Anglican identity, there are however significant differences in how we worship and also in our theological outlooks, especially between the Episcopal parishes and a couple of the more Evangelical congregations of the CofE. These make our unity in mission a little difficult at times. 

The representatives of one parish questioned whether we were all preaching the same Gospel. All we preach, they claim, is love. But following Christ, they said, is more than that. It also requires self-denial, right behavior, and conformity of life. God’s love comes with requirements, they said. God will judge wrong behavior. They are both right and wrong. Of course, God has expectations. I just don’t think that these requirements and right behavior are all about human sexuality or that God rejects mutual, committed and sacrificial love between two people of the same gender, on the contrary this is as much as reflection of God’s love as is “traditional” marriage. That is where we differ. 

Our readings today, especially the Old Testament and Gospel, are about the balance between God’s love and God’s expectations, God’s grace, and God’s judgment. The parables in Isaiah and Matthew not only share the image of a vineyard, but also the concept of a God who judges. 

The prophet Isaiah says he will sing a love-song, and the beginning of the parable is a poetic description of all that God had given the people of Israel out of love. A fertile and fruitful land of their own, a watchtower to guard and guide them. All simply with the expectation that God’s love for them would be reflected in their love for one another, in a just and righteousness society. But God is disappointed: “he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry” or outcry. That could also be a comment on the most recent mass shooting in the USA. Speaking as an outsider – I cannot and will not understand why the “right” to own a deadly weapon is given a higher value than the right to life.

God has expectations, not just for individuals but for the societies they form. If the house of Israel and the people of Judah do not change, Isaiah warns, the vineyard that stands for Israel will be abandoned and left without protection and care, until it becomes an overgrown waste. Not long after this prophecy, Israel was overrun by the Babylonians. Jerusalem’s walls were torn down, and both the city, and the great temple at its center, the watchtower of the parable, became overgrown ruins. 

Jesus begins his version of the parable in Matthew’s Gospel with a direct quote from the original version in Isaiah, but he then goes on to focus more on the wicked tenants. Their crime is put themselves over the landowner, over God. They want to keep the fruits of the vineyard to themselves. In Jesus’ version of the parable there is also violence and bloodshed – but directed at the messengers, that is the prophets including John the Baptist and finally the owner’s son and heir, clearly standing for Jesus, who is killed. The tenants, the leaders of Israel, are ungrateful, selfish, and faithless. Not long after this prophecy, and after a failed revolt, Jerusalem was laid waste by Romans, the temple was destroyed, and the city was rebuilt as a Roman colony with new inhabitants. 

So, God judges and punishes, destroys and kills? No. That would be us judging God by human standards. The disasters that overcame Israel and Judah were not God’s punishments, but the consequences of societies built on injustice and which put nationalism and personal power and advancement above God and God’s values. In Matthew’s Gospel it is not Jesus who says that the landowner “will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time,” but the chief priests and the elders. Jesus just says that “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” That is a milder conclusion and more on the lines of the last will be first, and the first will be last …. that is the loss of a privileged position. I know he goes on to say, “the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”  But while this sounds violent and destructive, it is another OT reference, in this case to the Book of Daniel and in that story what is broken is a statue, not people, and the statue stands for kingdoms. 

Neither Isaiah nor Jesus are issuing threats, just warnings of the consequences of wrong choices and standards. The disasters are self-inflicted. By their actions and inactions, the tenants cast themselves out of the vineyard. Their exile results from selfishly acting as if the vineyard is all theirs and no one else’s, let alone God’s. This is not what God wants. God desires to reach and reconcile humanity. God is loving and gracious and all-giving. Isaiah’s story is a love song, but about unrequited love. Jesus’ parable is clearly also an allusion to his own death, a humiliating death on a cross, out of love and for forgiveness. 

That is of course the big difference between the parable of the wicked tenants and what is described just a few chapters later in Matthew’s Gospel. In the parable the son is seized, thrown out of the vineyard, and killed. He does not come back, only the owner with death and destruction. What we believe is that while the Son of God was seized, taken out of Jerusalem to a “green hill far away, without a city wall,” and killed, he returned. In dying he took on all sin and when he returned he brought not death and destruction, but new life and renewal. Then and now God can only offer this, it is up to us to accept the gift of forgiveness and the gift of love.

Our friends from the other Anglican churches who claim that all we preach is love are right. But the love we preach is not easy or about self-fulfillment. It cost Jesus his life and it still continues to cost lives. The love we preach implies demands. Properly understood, the love we preach will lead to self-denial, right behavior, and conformity of life. God’s way of grace and love is wooing us to respond to our good fortune of living in God’s vineyard by reflecting that love in our actions toward others. God’s love was poured out to us in such measure on the cross that if we allow it to, it can overflow from us, and through us onto all creation. The love we preach obliges us to love others and share with them the Good News of God in Christ. 

In the parables, the tenants ignored their calling and neglected God’s gift. At best they did nothing with it, except keep it for themselves, at worst they turned it on its head: love became hate. Through Jesus we have been given the vineyard, the kingdom of God – as a free gift. It is up to us in return, out of gratitude and faithfulness, to produce the fruits of the kingdom – justice, righteousness, love – in our lives and in the world.

Amen.

Is God fair?

A Sermon preached on 24^th September 2017, Pentecost XVI at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Jonah 3:10 - 4:11, Philippians 1:21 – 30, Matthew 20:1-16

The book of Jonah is a story we tend to see as a Biblical fairy tale for children, something for Sunday School. It has comic elements, first God sends Jonah one way, but Jonah runs in the other direction. It contains scenes of great drama and excitement like the storm, magical creatures like the giant fish, and even a happy ending, well except for Jonah, he is never happy it seems. But we would be making a mistake if we restricted Jonah’s tale to children. 

Jesus certainly didn’t. Both in Matthew’s (12:38–41 and 16:4) and in Luke’s Gospel (11:29–32) Jesus makes a reference to Jonah when he is asked for a sign by some of the scribes and the Pharisees. “No sign will be given (…) except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:39-40). Jesus uses Jonah's restoration after three days inside the great fish to anticipate his own resurrection. But that is not the only reference that Jesus makes to Jonah, he also recalls how the people of Nineveh repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and compares them unfavorably to his own people who neither acknowledge their need for repentance nor recognize that in Jesus “something greater than Jonah is here.”  

Whether Jonah is a true story or not, does not matter. It contains some important truths about God and can be seen as a parable, at least as a living parable about God’s grace and forgiveness. Grace and forgiveness are not at the front of Jonah’s mind. On the contrary, when God changes God’s mind about destroying the city of Nineveh, because they had repented, “this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.” (Jonah 4:1) It would seem that the main reason Jonah ran away from his commission from God, was not because the thought he would fail, but because he was worried he would succeed: “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” (4:2) 

Nineveh was not just any old city. It was once the capital of the Assyrian empire, that is the empire that invaded Israel and completely wiped out the Northern Kingdom. The book of the prophet Nahum is almost exclusively taken up with prophetic denunciations against this city. So, it is no surprise that Jonah cannot stand the idea of this city being forgiven, he cannot imagine that his God’s grace includes them too. The whole book of Jonah is written to teach the opposite, to show the people of Israel that God’s grace is infinite, that God is also the God of “Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals.” (4:11) The reference to many animals is a reminder that God’s saving purposes apply to all of creation. The book of Jonah ends with God’s question, “should I not be concerned about Nineveh?” There is no reply recorded from Jonah, and I think that is deliberate. It is an open question to everyone who reads the book.

Martin Luther, who we have been mentioning a lot this year, definitely read the book of Jonah. He saw parallels between its message and the message of the parable we heard this morning, of the laborers in the vineyard.  On the surface, they are very different. We have no whale, no enemy city, just a bunch of people, day laborers we would call them now, who wait at a corner to be picked up for work. The parallel is in the behavior of the landowner and the reaction of some of the laborers. Against all expectations, the owner of the vineyard gives everyone the same wage, regardless of whether they worked all day, or just an hour. He is extraordinarily generous and ignores all conventions about fairness.

Those who have “borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat” (Matthew 20:12) are not happy. They are envious and angry. Surely reward and effort must be equal? 

Well no, not in the kingdom of heaven. There is no privileged position there for the Jews. Gentiles who follow God and God’s Son will receive the same access as the people God chose through Abraham.  There is no privileged position there for the disciples who were the first to follow Jesus. Anyone who turns to and follows Jesus, whenever that may be in their lives, will be treated exactly the same. And that means there is also no privileged position for us either, except that is for the privilege that Paul mentions in his letter to the Philippians, the “privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering (or striving) for him as well.” (Philippians 1:29) 

Both passages tell us something about God in the questions that are posed at the end of each of them. “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh,” (Jonah 4:11) God asks …. And also about Pyongyang, Tehran, and Caracas. God is the God of everyone and everything – whether they know or believe that or not. “Are you envious because I am generous,” the landowner asks. (Mathew 20:16) Our God is a generous God. God’s grace and love are not something we earn, not something that one of us can have a lot of, and another only a little or none. God’s grace is not a reward or, despite the parable, a wage: it is a gift. God’s grace is based on our needs and God’s love. 

Both passages challenge our understanding of fairness. Why should Israel's sworn enemies be saved from destruction? Why should the laborers who only worked an hour, be paid as much as those who worked the whole day? Surely that isn't fair ... is it? It is in God’s terms - justice is served, but mercy is added. Both passages are illustrations of God’s commands to love not only our neighbor, but even our enemy, and look after those who cannot look after themselves, the widow, orphan, stranger, the unemployed, and the homeless. These are patterns of behavior not reserved for some distant, future, other worldly, kingdom of heaven, but for the one that we as its citizens are called to live out in the here and now when we follow Paul’s call to “live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” (Philippians 1:27) 

Both passages are about attitude. In the end, the question we should be asking is not why have they been forgiven, but why have I? Not why did they receive so much, but why have I? How do I react to this gift? Today in the Episcopal Church, we remember and giving thanks for the Julia Chester Emery, founder of the United Thank Offering. In the early 1900s, Julia helped organize the women of the church to participate in a daily spiritual discipline of gratitude. She asked that everyone remember that when something good happens in his or her day, that this is a gift from God, and to make a thank offering in remembrance that all good things come from God. The simple thank offering she started in her local church grew into the United Thank Offering we also support. 

Unlike Jonah, and the early laborers who sulk, mutter, murmur and mumble, our reaction to God’s gift of love, whether we see it given to others or to ourselves is joy and gratitude. We are not envious because God is generous, we are thankful and jubilant, and we should make his generosity and our gratefulness the pattern of our lives.

Amen.