Vindication and Reconciliation

Vindication was what the widow in last week’s parable was looking for. When we heard her nagging the disrespecting judge last week, “give me justice against my opponent,” the Greek word translated “justice” actually means “vindication” or even “revenge.”

In today’s Gospel reading, which comes right after last week’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, we are in a different court, this time with a member of the Pharisee party and a tax collector. The one and only Temple in Jerusalem was a court, where the one God of Israel dwelt and who judged God’s chosen people on the basis of the covenant God had made with them after liberating the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

The Temple was the court in which the Jewish people confessed their transgressions and made bloody sacrifices that they hoped would persuade God to “justify” them again. The Pharisee belonged to a party in Judaism that stressed total obedience to the Law of Moses. A tax collector working with the pagan Romans in their imperial system of oppression wouldn’t be considered “just” by human standards.

Mixed Motives

One group of Jesus’s parables are almost poetic in their use of vivid agricultural imagery, like mustard seeds and weeds among the wheat. Others are stories of human beings, which are also symbolic, but are also vivid depictions of real people with mixed motives in real-life dilemmas. Luke excels in the latter, including today’s parable, which he said was about praying, though the two characters in today’s story don’t actually do any praying.

It doesn’t help that translators too often water down the original Greek. For instance, it’s not so much “justice” that the widow keeps demanding from the judge. It’s more like “vindication,” or even “revenge.” And while widows could often find themselves cut off from family support, there are many examples of Jewish marriage contracts making provision in the case of widowhood that have been found. And Jesus tells us that this widow “kept coming” to the judge, a luxury of time that a poor woman working on her own for her survival wouldn’t have. And as the lawyers among us might have noticed, the widow is getting a lot of ex parte time with the judge, in which the other unnamed party in this lawsuit doesn’t have the chance to respond.

And the judge isn’t afraid of being worn out, as the NRSV weakly puts it. The Greek is literally, “give me a black eye.” We use that as an idiom for harming someone’s reputation. But it might well have been understood literally, that the widow would slap the judge around, or perhaps pay someone else to do it for her. None of this is meant to put a white hat on the judge, who says he has no “respect” whatsoever for God or for his fellow human beings. And for all we know in this alternate universe that Jesus has placed us in, the widow’s opponent has it coming. And in his quest for what he sees as “justice,” the widow’s opponent, being only human, probably has mixed motives like the widow and the judge.

You’re not here for the sermon. You are here for Richard and Elizabeth, to do all in your power to uphold them in their marriage. Richard and Elizabeth are here, in this holy and sacred space dedicated to God, because they recognize that the source of their love, of all our loves, is the one and only God whose love “is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned.”

That love is God’s greatest gift to those whom God made in God’s image: “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.”

There are many other things that often seem to be valued more highly in this world, but they all seem to boil down to power. There is the power to use words to one’s advantage. That’s what Paul is referring to at the beginning of the 13th chapter of his Letter to Church in Corinth when he talks about prophecy and knowledge without love. The blessings that Jesus says his disciples already have are the opposite of power: the power to buy whatever or whoever you want, the power to make others mourn, the power to shut others up, the power that is unbound by any responsibility to others, the power to punish others, the power to impose your will on others.

Strange Profit

It feels like it’s been an entire liturgical season of Strange Stories by Jesus Christ, with Luke as the ghost writer, the more proper name of the strange stories being parables. So, one more time for those who’ve heard this already: According to the British biblical scholar C.H. Dodd, a parable is, “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” Jesus’ metaphors today might feel like we’re being set up to fail, and in the story of slaves and masters, downright offensive. Keep in mind, first, that Jesus is speaking to his apostles as one group. Second, slavery was not a metaphor in Jesus’s time, it was a fact of life that he and his disciples would have been all too aware of, and one they couldn’t ignore.

So, when Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you,” I need to clarify what is meant by “if” and “you.” Greek has root words whose prefixes and/or suffixes tell you, in this instance, whether it’s the singular “you,” or the plural “you.” English doesn’t, which is why it’s not always clear whether it’s you or y’all, or as they say in the Diocese of Alabama, y’all or all y’all. And the “if” here is not conditional, as in “if I were you,” but a statement of fact, as in, “if you have the right.” So, Jesus is telling us that all y’all, as one, already have such faith that when you speak and act as one, in one faith, you can do amazing things together.

Of course, that means we can’t do these things on our own, without God. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”* If we can revive that sense of total dependence on our Creator, that might give us a way to see ourselves in Jesus’s parable of the slave and master. It is extremely unlikely that any of Jesus’s apostles or disciples would have had the means to purchase a slave. They were more likely to have potentially been in the position of being taken into slavery for being unable to pay Roman taxes, having to sell themselves into slavery for failure to pay debts, or being so desperately poor that they had no other way to live. They may well have seen it happen to their neighbors.

Handing Each Other Along

Today’s parable – not allegory – is not about “Hell.” Notice that Jesus actually calls it “Hades,” as in the underworld kingdom of the Greek god of death. And while in his telling the rich man goes straight from his underground burial to the underworld of the dead, we can safely assume that the Son of God knows that there isn’t some underground place where the shades (not so much souls) of the dead go. So, while Jesus used the images that the people of his time imagined, he is not giving us a photographic description of at least one part of the afterlife.

Neither does Jesus specify how much we should give to the poor. The Law of Moses, and the prophets – Amos among them – was clear about the obligations of the wealthy to help the poor. As Abraham said of the rich man’s brothers, “They have Moses and the prophets. They must listen to them,” as the rich man himself could have done.

But all of us are at risk of building walls of indifference to the poor that we might be tempted not to see. The rich man’s “gate” was just part of a wall that allowed him to pretend that he didn’t know about Lazarus who would have been laid outside his gate, because in a subsistence economy, he would have been the obligatory safety net. But it turns out that the rich man does know Lazarus because he recognizes him in Hades.

BFFs

— And I your Lord and Savior tell you, children of the light: Use your money, tainted as it is, to help your eternal friends, so that when your tainted money is gone, they will welcome you into homes where the light never goes out. (Luke 16:9)

How’s that for a Stewardship statement? Do we really know where all our money has come from, or where it all goes? And can we decide not to take any tainted money? No, no, and no. The “dishonest wealth” you heard in the Gospel reading could also be translated “unjust wealth,” or “tainted money,” perhaps something we “children of light” can relate to more easily than dishonest wealth. But, even if we are all implicated in “tainted money,” we can decide what kind of friends to make with our tainted money? That is the Gospel, the Good News that Jesus gives us today. The very strange story he tells today is one with which his disciples could easily identify. And with a little imagination, so can we.

“There was a rich man who had a manager,” or “steward.” A steward was charged with managing the property, in this case, for an absent landowner. He would rent parcels of the land to sharecroppers, then take a percentage of their crops as income for his master, and a commission for himself. With the rich man absent, the steward had a great deal of power. But he didn't have security, because the land wasn't his. Managers in this position were caught between rich landlords who wanted more profits for themselves, and laborers who wanted more wages for themselves.

Celebrating the Cross

It was the Roman Emperor Constantine, first to legalize Christianity, who ordered the erection of a complex of buildings in Jerusalem “on a scale of imperial magnificence,” to set forth as “an object of attraction and veneration to all, the blessed place of our Savior’s resurrection.” He entrusted this project to his mother, Empress Helena. When she arrived at Jerusalem, she discovered that Calvary Hill, which had stood outside the city walls in Jesus’s time, was now inside the walls of a city which the Romans had built on top of the old city which they had destroyed.

Calvary Hill itself was buried under tons of fill. It took years of excavation to find it, the nearby tomb, or sepulchere, where Jesus had been buried — and from which he rose — then finally a relic believed to be the true cross.

Constantine’s shrine included two principal buildings: a large basilica, used for the Liturgy of the Word, and a circular church, known as “The Resurrection”—its altar placed on the site of the tomb — which was used for the Liturgy of the Table, and for the singing of the Daily Office. In the courtyard between the two buildings, the exposed top of Calvary Hill was visible. So, as the faithful passed from Word to Sacrament, they would see where Christ was crucified. And it was there that the solemn veneration of the Cross took place on Good Friday.

The Value of Loyalty

One of the most important phrases in the Old Testament is, as our New Revised Standard Version translates it, “steadfast love,” in Hebrew, hesed. That is how God’s love for God’s people is constantly described. This love is not just a feeling, but an act of loyalty to the people of Israel with whom God made an everlasting covenant.

The LORD God’s hesed is not explicitly referred to in today’s reading from Deuteronomy. But when Moses says to the Israelites in today’s reading that they are to “obey the commandments of the LORD your God…by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways and observing his commandments,” he is asking the people of Israel to respond to the LORD’s loyal love with their own active loyalty.

And in today’s Gospel reading Jesus also asks for loyalty. Luke is usually clear when Jesus is giving “insider information” to his followers, or as in today’s reading, “great crowds” along for the ride or looking for a great show. So Jesus’s call for loyalty is out in the open, and at first hearing, harsh. His language about “hating” one’s relatives may have been hyperbole. The books of the New Testament were written in the common Greek that served as an international language in the Roman empire. But Jesus and his fellow Jews spoke Aramaic, similar to but still separate from Hebrew. And biblical scholars today believe that what Jesus actually said in Aramaic was that his followers must “love less,” not “hate” their family.

Whose Banquet?

To set the scene for today’s Gospel, imagine a large U-shaped table with attendees reclining forward, with the host and guest of honor at opposite corners so they don’t have to turn their necks sideways to speak to each other. Perhaps they’re already reclining, but the rest of the guests are jockeying with each other, in increasingly louder tones, for seating within earshot or eyesight of the host and guest of honor. Jesus apparently is still standing around observing the seating competition, but then raises his voice —

— When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

A Saint for the Rest of Us

All of us – lay persons, bishops, priests and deacons – “represent Christ and his Church,” according to our Outline of the Faith. To break it down by syllables, all of us are called to re-present the risen Christ, so that our words and actions point to him. When we celebrate the feasts of individual saints, we celebrate them because they were particularly memorable in re-presenting and pointing to Christ Jesus.

Except that Bartholomew isn’t all that memorable, compared to Peter, Paul, John, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Mary Magdalene among others In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Bartholomew is listed as one of the Twelve Apostles, exclusive company to be sure. But “Bartholomew” just means, “Son of Tolmai,” “Son of…” being a common designation in 1st century Judaism. So by the time those Gospels were written, enough years had apparently passed for this apostle’s name to be unknown.

Peaceful Waters

We can’t say we weren’t warned: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division,” or occupation. Some baptized Christians have failed to see the irony in Jesus’s words and have taken them literally, as license for division by forceful means. But Jesus wasn’t calling for division. Fourteen times in this Gospel, Luke speaks of Jesus as a peace-giver. But as Jesus – by his words and actions – challenges peoples’ presumptions of a God they assume is on their side and in their pocket, then they will cause division by rejecting his peace for all, not just for some.

Those who seek the living God have always been tempted to think they have found God, and having found God, pocket God. So God has had to remind us that they are in nobody’s pocket: “Am I a God near by, says the LORD, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? Says the LORD.” Of course there is no part of God’s creation off limits to its creator. Yet, through the prophet Jeremiah, God begins with a question, “Am I a God near by?” Or have the king and the priests and the approved prophets taken God’s presence for granted, as near by as their dreams? “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, "I have dreamed, I have dreamed!" In this case, those so-called prophecies were exactly what Sigmund Freud said that most dreams are, wish-fulfillments. Wish-casting isn’t new under the Sun either,

Truth Spoken and Hidden

A common misconception about the biblical prophets is to see them only as fortune tellers. First and foremost, they are called by God to be truth tellers to those who presume themselves to be all powerful. “Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” In the story that had been handed down to Isaiah, those two Canaanite cities were judged by God and destroyed. But now, the prophet speaks to the successors of King David in Jerusalem, and basically says your capital and the kingdom of Judah are no different from Sodom and Gomorrah in their oppression of the powerless, such as orphans and widows.

Today in the Church we have ordained bishops, priests and deacons. We don’t have ordained prophets, though the bishops, priests and deacons are sometimes implored to be “prophetic” in their preaching. Speaking truth to power is sometimes what we all might be called by God to do. But it can come with a price. According to Jewish tradition, Manasseh succeeded his father Hezekiah, the last king mentioned by Isaiah. He was such a terrible king that when Isaiah hid from him in a tree, Manasseh had the tree sawed in half.

Re-presenting Christ

All of us – lay persons, bishops, priests and deacons – “represent Christ and his Church,” according to our Outline of the Faith. To break it down by syllables, all of us are called to re-present the risen Christ, so that our words and actions point to him. When we celebrate the feasts of individual saints, we celebrate them because they were particularly memorable in re-presenting and pointing to Christ Jesus.

James the son of Zebedee didn’t always do a good job of representing Jesus. The nickname that Jesus gave him and his brother of John, “Sons of Thunder,” or in Greek Bonaerges, may not have been entirely complimentary. When Jesus wanted to travel through Samaria on his way to Jerusalem, the Samaritans who hated the Jews as much as the Jews hated them, refused to receive him. Whereupon James and John volunteered to call down fire on them, and Jesus had to rebuke them. And using their mother to gain influence with Jesus is hardly pointing to the same Jesus who replies that he has come to serve, not to demand service or dole out patronage.

Both

Martha and Mary of Bethany are not proxies for the perennial debate about whether the active or contemplative life, hospitality or spirituality, are more important in the Church. These were two sisters who loved each other, who loved Jesus, and whom Jesus loved. Both were faithful disciples of Jesus in their own ways, and both are equally valuable models for how we should faithfully follow Jesus today. At the risk of oversimplification, Mary exemplified listening to the word of God, while Martha exemplified doing the word of God. But you can’t do the word of God if you haven’t listened to it, and if you don’t do the word of God after listening to it then you haven’t heard it.

Both sisters assume roles in this story that would normally have been reserved for males. That it is Martha who “welcomed” Jesus into “her home,” indicates that Martha was the legal owner of the property, presumably a large enough household to entertain Jesus and at least twelve of his apostles, which would also indicate that she owned other land from which income could be generated. A woman could inherit property if there was no father or husband to inherit it. Of course in John’s Gospel, there is a brother, Lazarus, whom Luke doesn’t mention. Perhaps if Lazarus was the youngest, perhaps too young to administer the property, then it might have fallen to Martha to supervise a large household.

My Enemy My Neighbor

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish Biblical Scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School, calls Jesus’s interrogator the Malevolent Lawyer.* His malevolence is clear from his first question of Jesus: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Do? Inherit? Those two verbs don’t go together. An inheritance is a gift, especially from the giver of eternal life, which the lawyer would have jumped all over Jesus if he’d answered the question. But Jesus responds to this question with another question — You tell me Lawyer. And the lawyer answers correctly, linking together passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Jesus wasn’t unique among Jews in understanding that love of God and love of neighbor are part and parcel of the same Love.

But this Lawyer won’t give up trying to stump the Teacher: “And who is my neighbor?” In her excellent book on Jesus’s parables, Levine writes that the Lawyer’s real question is — Who is not my neighbor? Who can I get away with not showing compassion for? Jesus’s answer, given though the parable is: No one.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Jesus says nothing about what sort of man this is. As Jesus tells his story, we can assume that the man is returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But aside from that, he’s a human being onto whom any identity can be projected. Too often we want to think of ourselves as the Good Samaritan initiating the charity. Jesus wants us to see ourselves in the man who, “fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” So the question in this story is as much who is going to help me as who am I going to help.

Our Armor is Each Other

The peace which Jesus says all the seventy (meaning all of Jesus’s disciples, not just the ordained “elites”) can give is not the civil pleasantry that is said – literally – in passing. It is the peace in which new relationships, thicker than blood or soil – spiritual – are created by a loyalty to Jesus that transcends the more demanding loyalties of this world. And when we share that peace with our new relations, the “accusing” forces of this world fall, perhaps as they scream or flail. But whatever collateral damage they cause on their way down, we still have the peace that Jesus gives, of knowing that we are never alone.

The contrast in today’s Good News from Luke is between peace and accusation. Whatever peace we can give to others as the Seventy could give comes from Jesus. And when we give that peace and it is accepted, then the forces of accusation that prey on our fears and griefs and anguish fall from the sky, like “The Satan” that Jesus saw, whose name means “Accuser.”

Keeping Restoration

As the mission of the Church is to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ,” by implication that mission includes keeping the Church in unity with God and each other in Christ. And you can’t restore what you can’t keep.

I believe that my call to ordained ministry was to help spread the unity that I encountered in anglo-catholic churches where I saw people of diverse opinions holding those opinions more lightly when they worshiped God in the beauty of holiness. That was challenged from the moment I entered Virginia Theological Seminary in August 2004. Over my three years, my sponsoring diocese of Virginia was beset by disagreement over the ordination of the openly gay and partnered Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson. In my senior year, about ten parishes voted in mass to leave The Episcopal Church, one of them being my field education site, which made my continued internship there untenable, because I did not consider the question of LGBT people’s rightful place in the Church to be one that should break our communion as “living members” of Christ’s eucharistic body.

Sadly, both parishes that I pastored after my ordination in 2007 contained people of good conscience who couldn’t see that if two committed people are prepared to love each other as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, then their respective genders are not a moral issue. Some left, but others stayed and kept communion with me even though they respectfully disagreed with me. So, my continuing friendship with them continues to persuade me that our church must make a space for their good conscience so that they and I can hold our opinions with open hands, not fists, for the sake of Christian unity.

Living with the Trinity

Theologians speak of the Trinitarian God in two ways: in relation to each other, and in relation to us. Perhaps the best example of the first is St. Monica’s son Augustine describing the Trinitarian God as Lover, Beloved, and the Love that flows between them. But too many metaphors about the relation of the three persons to each other in this one being we call God has usually led to accusations of heresy; either of dissolving the persons into parts or functions of one being, or of creating three beings, all gods.

Some believe that we can only speak of the Trinity in relation to us because it is presumptuous for humans to speculate about a mystery of which we know nothing except what has been revealed to us in Holy Scripture, and what has been revealed to us is what the Trinitarian God has done for us. But still others object that solely focusing on the Trinitarian God in relation to us encourages us to project our own images on to the Trinity, so that we end up worshiping ourselves rather than God.

Repentance and Restoration Start Today

Today is the birthday of the Church, and the 2nd day of birth for Liam Willoughby. Whatever Sunday in the calendar the moveable Feast of Pentecost falls on, that Sunday will always be his 2nd birthday. In the water of Baptism, he will be buried with Christ in his death. By it he will share in his resurrection. Through it he will be reborn by the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit which filled up the hearts and minds of Jesus’s first disciples so much that they had to start telling everyone around them about God’s deeds of power. And in that very public telling, along with some 3,000 baptisms, the Church was born with a mission from God to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism, BCP, p. 855)

“Pentecost,” Greek for “fiftieth,” in this case the fiftieth day after Passover. So, Jerusalem was more crowded than usual with pilgrims from throughout the Roman world there to celebrate the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In addition to those who lived in Jerusalem, many of those pilgrims had probably been there for the Passover and stayed for the fifty days. I suspect that many of them had welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. But then, some were highly perplexed, to say the least, at his ‘dissing the Temple by disrupting the sacrificial system of exchanging Jewish coins for Roman coins to pay for their sacrificial animals. And then, as they saw no apparent change in the political system of Roman occupation, their disappointment boiled into rage, even to the point of joining the chants of, “Away with him, crucify him.”

“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father.”

Between this sermon and the reports to come, you’ll have certainly heard enough from the leadership of this parish church by the end of our Annual Meeting. And hopefully we leave space for your questions. So from the circular Gospel reading today, perhaps what we need to hear from Jesus today are the words I just quoted. If I may be so bold, here’s my amplified version: