The Menu in the Kingdom of God

Leonardo DaVinci's "Last Supper"

What do you think the menu will be like in the Kingdom of God? Filet mignon, creamy garlic mashed potatoes, and a side salad full of fresh heirloom tomatoes? Homemade apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert? Perhaps in the Kingdom the meals are catered by Albany Bistro or Ruth Chris’ Steak House or preferably my favorite taco place in Austin, TX, Torchy’s Tacos!

We love talking about food in our culture. I, in particular, love talking about and learning about food. Where does it come from? How does it grow? Is it local? What nutrients are in it? How do I complement the flavor of squash? And so on and so on… My colleagues and friends know this about me and often will tease me when I start a new diet or swear off some product or another.

Our culture urges us to go too far with obsessing over how and what we eat. In the face of our obesity epidemic we swing on the pendulum in the other way. Think about all the different types of diets that have come into fashion recently: low-carb, low-fat, gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, Atkins’, Paleo, weight-watchers, juice, local, organic, just to name a few. So hearing Paul’s words to the Romans today can poke a hole in the dieting balloon that I so often blow up in my own life.

Paul tells us, “Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God.” Now we can take these words and run right into our complex societal issues around dieting shouting “See, I told you we don’t need to diet.” We can believe that Paul is telling us that we ought not to put food in the way of God’s work, and we would be right in doing this. And yet, there is more to what Paul is telling us about the good news of Christ Jesus and the building up of His Kingdom.

In Paul’s day issues around food were not about how food made one look, but it was instead about what food was clean and what food was unclean. Food that was unclean probably had historically caused some sort of problem within the Jewish community. Certain foods, most notably pig, might have been seen as a dirty food that would cause someone to get sick and potentially die. So that food was not seen as Kosher. Today Jewish perspectives on food are a bit different. Heck, there is even a Jewish-Scottish fusion restaurant in Los Angeles that offers bacon wrapped matzo balls.

In Paul’s day however, there was more than just unclean food. There was the communal perspective that certain food was not only dirty, but would also cause others to stumble. The Romans who heard Paul’s words were struggling in a multi-cultural city. They were Jewish-Christians who were living amongst pagans. Many of whom would have practiced strange rituals dedicated to local gods eating particular foods that were associated with those acts.

Paul knew this, and was warning those in this community to be careful about what you eat. Sure all things that God makes are clean, but you don’t have to rub it in around your neighbor who is struggling to avoid certain “gateway foods.” We might laugh at this, but think about a contemporary example. If you have a friend who struggles with alcoholism or to whom alcohol is gateway drug, then you probably, if you are building up the Kingdom of God, are not going to serve alcohol around your friend.

We can struggle with what we eat and drink, we can wonder if this certain food will make us look or feel better, and our society will always push onto us new fads, new superfoods, and new diets, but Paul urges us to think about how the meals we eat build up our communities. How our table time might enhance, continue, or destroy the good work that God is doing with and among us. It is not about what food is clean, it is not about what food is gluten-free or Paleo, it is about building the Kingdom of God.

“For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” What is on the menu in the Kingdom of God? Righteousness, peace, joy, and the love that we share when feasting with one another. Amen.

Wrestling with Parables

(This week's sermon is based on Genesis 28:10-19 and Matthew 13:24-30,36-43.)

In 11th grade math class, Algebra II, we received a new text book a few weeks into the school year. Mrs. Stevens, a young, energetic, and engaged Algebra teacher quickly learned that these text books made a big impact on her students’ homework grades. Overnight almost everyone was making near perfect scores. There was however a slight problem.

All of these paragon problem sets had no work out beside the answers. The sheets were clean except for the correct responses. Pretty quickly Mrs. Stevens asked us in class to give her one of our text books. She thumbed to the back of the hardcover, as the class sat breathlessly and anxiously watching.

“Of course,” she said almost under her breath, “the answers are in the back of your book.” Then turning to us, “Why didn’t any of you point that out?” Before anyone could respond to her question, she knew the answer. Her class wanted to get the right answer in whatever way we could. We did not care about doing the work, we were not interested in learning to solve algebraic equations, we just wanted to skip ahead and get the right answer.

This is the challenge that we face when we begin to read parables like the one from today’s gospel reading. We have the difficult word problem right in front of us, but all we want to do is skip ahead to the end. We want the correct answer without having to do the work. We want to know who is the sower, who are the servants, who are the weeds, and who is the wheat.

We can quickly thumb ahead in Matthew’s gospel account to read the answer key: the sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed/the wheat are the children of the kingdom, the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy is in fact the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels. Yet, in jumping ahead to hear what Jesus says to his disciples about this parable we miss the all-important middle step…doing the work.

Parables, like challenging math problems, require us to do work. I am not suggesting that we have to do work to get into heaven, this is after all the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, and we certainly believe that Christ Jesus’ redeeming work on the cross and his all-encompassing grace is the only thing that brings us into right relationship with God and into the Kingdom. No, the work I am referring to is interior work, work that opens us up to God’s calling, work that reveals our true selves in light of Christ. If we skip the middle step in these parables we miss this work.

Put another way, the moment we believe we know the meaning of a parable is the moment when it slips between our fingers, like squeezing Jell-O. Jesus’ answers at the end of today’s gospel give us a false confidence that we know what Jesus means in this parable. Now, it’s one thing to think I know what a parable is challenging me to do, but the trouble comes when I think that I know exactly what the parable is telling you to do also. It’s one thing to think we know what the parable means to us, but when we begin telling others what to do in light of this one text we wade into dangerous waters. We no longer listen to how God challenges us individually, and instead we have hijacked the gospel for our own ends.

So what do we do? Ignore the parables? Avoid them at all costs? Not engage these stories from Jesus? We might do better to be like the main character from today’s reading from Genesis.

Not too long after Jacob had his vision of the ladder, he spent an entire night wrestling with God or a messenger from God. At the end of this fight Jacob is left with a limp, a mark that reminds him of his struggle. He’s even given a new name, Israel, which means “He struggles with God.” This is how we can approach the parables, as wrestlers ready to engage, not as math students seeking easy solutions. So what happens when we wrestle with this parable?

What we hear when we listen is not practical farming advice. Like Evan said last week, Jesus would have been a terrible farmer. The weed in this parable, probably the bearded darnel weed, may look like wheat to the untrained eye, but to an experienced farmer the differences are easily seen. So if the weed could be detected by the servants, why not pluck it up? Jesus tells us about life in the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God, not about how to keep a good garden.

In the Kingdom there are both weeds and wheat. They grow together. They aren’t separated. Good exists. Evil exists. We can look around and see someone who has all the right answers to the questions of life. Somehow this person got the right solutions in the back of the book of life. We can be so certain that they are wheat. We can see another who seems set on doing ill. We can, like the servants, be so sure that we know which the weed is, and which the wheat is. Yet, the Master urges us to wait.

The parable of the evil sower pushes us to think beyond practical farming practices into wondering not only how we define evil and good, but also how we live together as wheat and weed. We want so often to pluck out the evil ones, separate them from us, lock them away, so that they do not effect the good wheat. Yet, God lets the evil grow among the good. Why?
To test us? To make us angry? Because the devil put them there? I do not know why. What I do know is that our work is not to judge, not to fully comprehend the complexity of this parable, but to wrestle all the same with the Master.

We may want a simple answer to this parable. We might even think that we can skip ahead and find the key to unlocking this story, but that’s the thing about parables, right when we think we understand them they slip through our grasp. So do not skip ahead. Don’t rush to the back of the book. Don’t seek the easy answer. Instead wrestle with God and you like Jacob will be changed forever.

Pulling Weeds

As a teenager, I never liked pulling weeds in my mother's vegetable garden. I would mow the lawn, edge the spots that the mower missed, and haul limbs or branches to the trash collection area, but kneeling down to pluck up pesky plants... NO, THANKS! Certainly now I feel a bit differently, I enjoy the task of watering, WEEDING, and picking the community garden at St. John's. However, even as I have grown to enjoy this menial work; this coming Sunday's gospel lesson would have been so helpful as an adolescent.

Jesus' parable of the evil sower and its explanation (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43) describes the Kingdom of Heaven as a place where the evil one plants nutrient sucking weeds right next to the good wheat, and instead of getting rid of the weeds immediately the master tells his servants to let the weeds grow. Why did I not use this great story to get out of weeding as a teenager? It is right here in the text, "Let both of them grow until the harvest." That was my ticket out of all the hard work.

Yet, this parable truthfully does not primarily function as a way to shirk responsibility in our backyards, rather like most (if not all of his) parables Jesus challenges us to see a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven within a simple story. I often find myself looking for my place in the Kingdom. Maybe you do this as well. How can we not put ourselves in there? Yet, as we insert ourselves as is into this story or last week's Parable of the Sower we believe that we understand the parable, or worse we make the parable about ourselves (and not having to pick weeds).

As Steve Pankey recently stated in his blog "As soon as one thinks they’ve grasped the meaning of a parable, they’ve lost it." We can believe that the meaning of a parable is all about us and how great we are, what good soil we are, or what great wheat we have become. Jesus though uses these many images (shepherds, farmers, a woman searching for her coin, two brothers and a father, a mustard seed, and on and on) to describe as many different vantage points within the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God, for us, so that we might just catch a glimpse of how life can be with God.

So often, I want to find my place in the parable so that I do not have to change my life. Just about every time I read a story about Jesus I try to make it about me and my life. While this is human nature to a certain extent, Jesus tells these simple stories not to build up our egos, not to make us feel good about who we are, not to hand us a worthless participation trophy, but to plant a good seed within us. Only Christ's goodness places this within us, but we are not incapable of messing with the seed's growth. We can ignore the hard work of looking inside and seeing how Christ would grow us through these stories, we can place ourselves in the story as is and cheapen the power of the parables, or God's Word can convict us to be transformed by the healing love of Christ. I say, let it grow.

Escaping From Hell With A Chicken Wing!

“How can you escape being sentenced to hell?” Jesus asks in Matthew 23.

Trigonometry and advanced math in high school or college always eluded me. I could feel the breeze as this kind of higher mathematical thinking zoomed over my head. Now I can safely say that it has been 10 years since I last took this type of math course. Geometry, I am afraid, also created an irrational fear in me that I believe stems from being made fun of by all the 9th graders when I tried to take advanced Geometry as a 10th grader. Math was not my favorite subject in school, or at least these genres of math.

Now algebra that is fun! Give me a variable within an equation and I will happily solve for it. Balancing an equation on both sides and figuring out what the variable equals is so satisfying that even though it was not required when I took my GRE to get into seminary I still did these math problems for the fun of it. I might be alone in this type of mathematical bliss, but I certainly enjoy balancing things out. It just feels fulfilling. I like the feeling of getting things the same on both sides of the equal sign. Algebra is not the only area of life where I do this either.

When I make a mistake, I often will search out ways to rectify what I did wrong. If I lose my temper, I will go out of my way being nice for a while. If I eat too much, I will fast for a time. If I feel I am being lazy, I will work extra hard for a spell. In this way, I attempt to counteract all my sinful ways by doing good deeds. I try to balance out the “good” and the “bad” on the opposing sides of the scale of life. I work as hard as I can to avoid my sentencing to hell.

Yet, there is no way for me to completely balance things out. Sure, I am made good. I am made in God’s image, but try as I might I will never be able to fully avoid falling into sin. What is worse, I being a religious man, much like the Pharisees, can appear to be just as hypocritical as this brood of vipers. “Here walk this Christian path,” I might say, but all the while I am slipping off of the way. How can I escape being sentenced to hell? I can’t!

I can’t escape being sentenced to hell. There is absolutely nothing I can do to redeem myself from the ways of sin and death that mark the way I live and we live our lives. So what do we do? How can we escape being sentenced to hell? Where do we turn if all our works get us nowhere but a dead end?

Jesus says, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” He might as well be saying, “Decatur, Decatur, the city that ignores the Good News given to you, following your own will, ignoring my prophets, forgetting the poor among you! How often have I desired to gather you together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you aren’t willing!”

This is one of the few times that Scripture refers to God in a feminine form. Jesus is our loving mother hen. That might seem a bit strange, but what is stranger is that we often completely overlook Jesus' invitation to come under the wing, instead trying to correct our wrongs through our own effort. This invitation does not mean that we go out and do all sorts of sins because we know that God will forgive us (even though God will). This invitation is to come underneath the shield that is Jesus’ wing where we are free from the sin that clings to us, where we are free from the balancing act of life, where we escape hell, and where we are transformed.

Chicks cannot make it on their own. I can still remember in elementary school seeing a chick in an incubator struggling to survive. We cannot make it on our own. Christ invites us under his wing, so that we can grow up in his stature. Jesus bids us not to try to balance out our lives through our own salvation algebra, but to come underneath the shadow of his wing. For it is truly under Christ's wing that we receive redemption from hell, safety from this life's storms, and transformation into Jesus' likeness. Who knew that God would get us out of hell with a chicken wing?!!

Changing the Rules

Sermon on Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 delivered on July 6, 2014 for audio click here.

Defensiveness and the Cornerstone

“When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.”  Matthew 21:45 (read Matthew 21:33-46)

I do not have a problem when I hear someone speaking some critical message. Just so long as it is kept as an academic exercise or something I am meant to conceptualize, I am fine to hear some good ol’ fashioned tongue-lashing. Yet, as soon as I recognize that someone is speaking directly about me, that is when I bristle up like a porcupine.

The Pharisees in today’s lesson from Matthew are just like me (and most religious folks today). We love to hear a good story, but when it begins to point the finger at us we get defensive. We may very well know that we have a problem. You may know that we have a problem. Jesus certainly knows when we have a problem. Still as long as we can pretend that we are the only ones that recognize it we are fine. It is like an ostrich putting its head in the ground. To personalize this practice: "If I keep my head down here maybe my problems will disappear."

Jesus though urges the religious people of his day, and us now, to recognize that we play a part in blocking the work that God wants to do with us in the world. Sure we in the church can point to those who do not believe in God, those who only come around every once in a while, the spiritual/not religious crowd, or even to those in other traditions. We can say that it is their fault that the God's servants are mistreated and the Son is beaten and killed, but Jesus is talking to us, even if it is hard for us to hear. We all can struggle with denying that we have a problem.

When I was on a three week geology trip out West I had to spend virtually every minute with other people. My fellow students got to see all sides of me: good, bad, and ugly. Towards the end of the trip, I heard one woman whom I had been around the entire time say to another man (even as she was looking at and speaking towards me), “I am so happy that you are such a mature gentleman, unlike some others on our van.” I knew the implication. She didn’t want to speak directly to me, but she wanted me to know that I was not acting in the right way.

I had a hard time hearing those words, just like we have a hard time hearing Jesus’ words. We might not kill or harm God's people in physical ways, but how are we respecting the dignity of others? How are we caring for the least among us? How are we treating the lowly messengers of God? We cannot and do not get it all right! Yet, there is good news in this. There is good news in us being wrong. There is good news in us being broken. It is okay to be broken. For when we are broken on the cornerstone that is Christ we can be rebuilt.

Jesus urges us to be smashed, so that we can with God rebuild our lives. Christ wants to construct our lives with the brick, mortar, and elbow grease that are love, peace, and joy. Jesus wants to be our firm foundation, not just a part of our lives. With his presence we can restructure our brokenness. When we hear criticism we can choose to be defensive like the Pharisees, we can pretend it does not exist, or we can allow others to speak Truth into where we must be broken and rebuilt on the sure foundation that is Christ.