The parable of the tenants, which Frank read a few minutes ago, is pretty harsh. In its normal interpretation, it’s taken as a warning to the religious authorities of the day. The tenants represent religious authorities of the state of Israel, who are pictured as stewards of God’s good creation, represented by a vineyard. When the time for harvest came, the landowner God sends slaves to collect the produce, minus the cut the tenant-farmers get for their labor Israel. The slaves represent the prophets, and the Israelite religious authorities—who are the ones listening to Jesus preach the parables—the religious authorities are depicted killing the prophets God has sent to collect the harvest. They beat one, kill another, and stone a third. The God-slash-landowner sends some more slaves-slash-prophets, and the religious-authorities-slash-tenants kill those as well. Then God-slash-landowner sends his son, saying “They’ll respect my son,” and you only get one guess as to who the son might represent, and when the landowner sends his son, the tenant-slash-religious-authorities kill him too, which upsets the landowner, and when Jesus asks the religious authorities what the landowner does, the religious-authorities to whom he is speaking say: “He 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.”

And you’d think it would be like “Oh! Snap!” Gotcha! But no: the chief priests and scribes don’t tumble immediately that he’s talking about them, not until he spells it out: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” They finally figure out that Jesus is talking to them, according to Matthew, and so plot to kill him.

But look at how we’ve been talking about this parable: we’ve been calling the overlord both God and landowner, the chief priests and scribes both religious-authorities and tenants and etc. And this indicates that there are at least a couple of ways to read this story . . . and to see what they might be, consider: what if this parable were to be preached to real, live tenant farmers? How would they interpret the parable? And tenant farming being as widespread even today, you can bet that it happens a lot. How might an Apartheid-era sharecropper in South Africa hear this? Or a campesino in Latin America, or a migrant worker on the Great Plains? Who would they identify with and, more importantly, who would they identify God as? Remember: these folks know about being sharecroppers, they know about having to come up with the required amount for the landowners whether the harvest is plentiful or not.

And in fact, that’s the way a lot of them become tenants on their own land … it happened in Apartheid-era South Africa, as foreign came in and began charging the native landowners for goods and services, and in a good year, they could pay for their seed and implements but in a bad year—and there are a lot in South Africa—in a bad year, they couldn’t pay their bills, and so they’d put up their land for collateral, but there’d come along another bad year, and pretty soon they couldn’t make the nut on their loan and the lender owned the land . . . that happened in the American mid-West, and it’s why theirs so few independent family farmers left, they are tenants or workers on the land they once owned, and corporate farming is the rule . . .

And so any tenant farmers listening to Jesus would know about the rich land owner—who left the tenants in charge and went to another country, the classic absentee land-owner—they were the ones who drove their grand-fathers and great-grandfathers off their land, they were the people who made their ancestors tenants on their own land . . .

And so there are at least two ways to read any scripture passage: from the above and from below, from the vantage point of the landowner and from that of the tenants, the point of view of the haves and the have nots. And—hold your cards and letters, I’m not advocating tenants murdering their landlords or anything but you can surely see that depending on where you sat you might have more sympathy with one side or another in this parable. And Matthew—writing for a upper-class Jewish crowd—most naturally slanted this story so that we’d think of God as the landowner, so it was quite a shock when the religious leaders realized that far from being identified with the landowner, far from being identified with God, they’re just tenants in the story . . . but any tenant farmers in Matthew’s readership wouldn’t think of it that way, they’d know exactly who they were in the parable, and exactly what the absentee landowner was . . .

Everybody hears the scripture from their own social location, according to their own context. Each of the people here in this sanctuary does, but so do all who hear it around the world. And each culture that hears it draws different lessons from the scripture than another would. That’s the nature of hearing, the nature of stories, the nature of context. And that’s the nature of World Communion Sunday . . . it was illustrated beautifully by the poly-lingual reading of the Ten Commandments . . . each of those languages represents a different way of hearing the scripture . . . a Mexican camposino will not hear it the same as a Parisian dressmaker who won’t hear it the same as a Korean postman. A Nigerian bricklayer will draw different lessons from a Greek bookseller who will look at it differently from a baby-boomer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

We all have different perspectives, different needs, different expectations, and yet . . . we are united in Christ. We are one in the spirit, as the song goes, and as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a few minutes we should remember this, and think about all our brothers and sisters around the globe who are doing the same. Amen.

The parable of the tenants, which Frank read a few minutes ago, is pretty harsh. In its normal interpretation, it’s taken as a warning to the religious authorities of the day. The tenants represent religious authorities of the state of Israel, who are pictured as stewards of God’s good creation, represented by a vineyard. When the time for harvest came, the landowner God sends slaves to collect the produce, minus the cut the tenant-farmers get for their labor Israel. The slaves represent the prophets, and the Israelite religious authorities—who are the ones listening to Jesus preach the parables—the religious authorities are depicted killing the prophets God has sent to collect the harvest. They beat one, kill another, and stone a third. The God-slash-landowner sends some more slaves-slash-prophets, and the religious-authorities-slash-tenants kill those as well. Then God-slash-landowner sends his son, saying “They’ll respect my son,” and you only get one guess as to who the son might represent, and when the landowner sends his son, the tenant-slash-religious-authorities kill him too, which upsets the landowner, and when Jesus asks the religious authorities what the landowner does, the religious-authorities to whom he is speaking say: “He 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.”

And you’d think it would be like “Oh! Snap!” Gotcha! But no: the chief priests and scribes don’t tumble immediately that he’s talking about them, not until he spells it out: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” They finally figure out that Jesus is talking to them, according to Matthew, and so plot to kill him.

But look at how we’ve been talking about this parable: we’ve been calling the overlord both God and landowner, the chief priests and scribes both religious-authorities and tenants and etc. And this indicates that there are at least a couple of ways to read this story . . . and to see what they might be, consider: what if this parable were to be preached to real, live tenant farmers? How would they interpret the parable? And tenant farming being as widespread even today, you can bet that it happens a lot. How might an Apartheid-era sharecropper in South Africa hear this? Or a campesino in Latin America, or a migrant worker on the Great Plains? Who would they identify with and, more importantly, who would they identify God as? Remember: these folks know about being sharecroppers, they know about having to come up with the required amount for the landowners whether the harvest is plentiful or not.

And in fact, that’s the way a lot of them become tenants on their own land … it happened in Apartheid-era South Africa, as foreign came in and began charging the native landowners for goods and services, and in a good year, they could pay for their seed and implements but in a bad year—and there are a lot in South Africa—in a bad year, they couldn’t pay their bills, and so they’d put up their land for collateral, but there’d come along another bad year, and pretty soon they couldn’t make the nut on their loan and the lender owned the land . . . that happened in the American mid-West, and it’s why theirs so few independent family farmers left, they are tenants or workers on the land they once owned, and corporate farming is the rule . . .

And so any tenant farmers listening to Jesus would know about the rich land owner—who left the tenants in charge and went to another country, the classic absentee land-owner—they were the ones who drove their grand-fathers and great-grandfathers off their land, they were the people who made their ancestors tenants on their own land . . .

And so there are at least two ways to read any scripture passage: from the above and from below, from the vantage point of the landowner and from that of the tenants, the point of view of the haves and the have nots. And—hold your cards and letters, I’m not advocating tenants murdering their landlords or anything but you can surely see that depending on where you sat you might have more sympathy with one side or another in this parable. And Matthew—writing for a upper-class Jewish crowd—most naturally slanted this story so that we’d think of God as the landowner, so it was quite a shock when the religious leaders realized that far from being identified with the landowner, far from being identified with God, they’re just tenants in the story . . . but any tenant farmers in Matthew’s readership wouldn’t think of it that way, they’d know exactly who they were in the parable, and exactly what the absentee landowner was . . .

Everybody hears the scripture from their own social location, according to their own context. Each of the people here in this sanctuary does, but so do all who hear it around the world. And each culture that hears it draws different lessons from the scripture than another would. That’s the nature of hearing, the nature of stories, the nature of context. And that’s the nature of World Communion Sunday . . . it was illustrated beautifully by the poly-lingual reading of the Ten Commandments . . . each of those languages represents a different way of hearing the scripture . . . a Mexican camposino will not hear it the same as a Parisian dressmaker who won’t hear it the same as a Korean postman. A Nigerian bricklayer will draw different lessons from a Greek bookseller who will look at it differently from a baby-boomer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

We all have different perspectives, different needs, different expectations, and yet . . . we are united in Christ. We are one in the spirit, as the song goes, and as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a few minutes we should remember this, and think about all our brothers and sisters around the globe who are doing the same. Amen.

I like the central core of this morning’s passage so much that we often use it as an affirmation of faith: “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited . . .” It’s called the “Christ hymn” – using the term “hymn” loosely – because scholars think that it originally it was some kind of poetic faith recitation, some kind of creedal statement that perhaps got repeated by fledgling, first-century congregations . . . maybe the house-church preacher would get all wild and off-the-wall with some sermon or another, and he’d look out on the congregation and some of them are asleep but some of them have this skeptical look about them, or – worse – a look like they’re gonna lynch him because of something he’s just said that got to them where they lived, and after the sermon the preacher would stand there in the lamp-light and say “Now let’s all stand and say what we believe by reading Theophilus’ Christ hymn from the bulletin . . . We believe that Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God . . .” And it would have the effect that affirmations of faith have today, of diverting attention from a lousy sermon, true, but more importantly, grounding the fellowship of believers in some foundational truths, of reminding them of why they’re huddled in a dimly-lit room in the first place, listening to the Word of God, struggling to discern it’s meaning for their lives, or – perhaps especially true in our century – whether it has any meaning whatsoever.

And the Philippians Christ hymn encapsulates the core of Christian belief in beautifully poetic language – though he was in the form of God – other translations, perhaps more precisely, say “though he had the nature of God . . .” – he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited . . . although he had – in some undefined sense – God’s nature, God’s form, Christ did not regard this equality – again in some undefined sense – something to be – as our translation has it, exploited, but others read grasped, with almost violent intent, think perhaps of a relative who grasps at an inheritance greedily for his own gain, or a robber who grabs at your purse, Christ did not consider this equality as something to be clutched at, taken advantage of, exploited . . . but emptied himself, poured out of himself the features of his God-hood, or perhaps emptied himself of himself, of his thoughts of himself, of his self-regard . . . a remarkable image, one so unique that the Greek word for it has entered the theological vocabulary – kenosis, self-emptying . . . Christ’s love was a kenotic love, a self-emptying love, a love that gives up it’s own self, its own claim to god-hood, its own claim to greatness . . .

And what was left after this self-emptying? The form of a slave, human likeness, human nature . . . three times there’s a synonym for form, and each time it’s a different word in Greek . . . this phrase is overloaded with likeness, over-burdened with form . . . form, likeness, appearance of a human being . . . we are pounded with it so that it’s point is unmistakable . . . it’s the incarnation we’re talking about here, the taking on of humanity by the divine . . . and being found in this form/likeness/nature, Christ humbled himself, and became obedient, obedient to the point of death, the ultimate humiliation for a being whose nature is that of a God.

And we can see that the first half of the Christ hymn is a downward spiral, an earth-ward slide . . . from the nature of God, to the nature of humanity, from the form of creator to the form of creature . . . from pre-existent equality with his Abba – who is immortal, invincible, God-only-wise – to . . . worm-food, coffin bait, death . . . even a death so ignominious, so lowly, so bone-crushingly horrible, as a death on the cross.

And along the way, it’s like his entire life and work are described . . . self-emptying . . . feeding the poor and homeless, accepting and embracing the outcast and marginal, refusing to use power and might to save even his own life, humbling himself in the ultimate manner, submitting to power inferior to his own, to die spiked onto a rough-hewn tree.

And now we come to a big transition-word . . . “there-fore” . . . therefore . . . meaning because of this, God also exalted him, raised him to the highest position, to the loftiest height and gave him the name that is above every name . . . remember that in the ancient word names have power, they are containers of reality, status . . . and the voice of God name-drops power and might and . . . exaltation, and the name is powerful enough that every knee should bend, in heaven and earth and under the earth . . . and that’s all over, that’s everywhere, all there is folks . . . so that every knee and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God. And our hymn spins from the nadir of death on a cross, from the maggot-filled earth of crucifixion, to the heights of exaltation, of power and glory and might.

Thus the Christ hymn can be viewed as a curve, in mathematical parlance a parabola where the higher you get the more exalted you are, and it begins with equality to God on one side then plunges down as and it bottoms out in humility and death, and then God takes over and it swoops back up as Christ is exalted above everything under heaven and upon earth . . . and on one side of the curve it’s Christ’s doing, the self-emptying, the humbling of himself, and on the other it’s God’s actions, the exalting and glorification . . . and to us, here on the other side of the doctrine of the Trinity, there’s a tension between our belief that Jesus and God are one and the same and the hymn’s assumption that Christ . . . though pre-existent . . . was not himself God, but Paul was writing 350 years before the Trinity, and probably did not believe Christ and God were unity, but merely equal . . .

And speaking of Paul, whatever he thought of the person of Christ versus that of God, he embedded this creed, this hymn into his letter to the church at Philippi for a reason, in order to tell them – the congregation, that is – something, and if we look at his words that surround the hymn, we can perhaps figure out what it is. First, he tells this congregation, this group of Christians to be of the same mind . . . and here I’m emphasizing that he’s telling it to a group, because it’s vital to understand that he’s not talking primarily to individuals, but to a group of them, to the church at Philippi . . . and he tells them to be of the same mind, and in the Greek it’s literally to think the same thing. He’s telling them to be unified in their thinking, have the same love, be in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing, he says, from selfish ambition but in humility – and here’s that concept again! – in humility regard others as better than yourselves. And now he specifies that he’s talking to individuals here, he says “let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” and it’s clear that one of the keys to the group being of one mind is individuals within it being humble, and looking to the interests of others, not themselves . . . and he makes the important link from the thinking or the mind of the group to that of Christ . . . “Let the same mind be in you” – again it’s you plural, you the congregation – let the same mind be in you the congregation as in Christ . . . so they are to be of one mind, and the mind they are to be is that of Christ, the thought they’re to have is the thought of Christ who though he was in the form of God . . .

And so, the Christ hymn is embedded in exhortation, in moral instruction about how to be Christ’s community, Christ’s body . . . the thought of this body, it’s behavior, it’s function is to be that of Christ. Makes sense, if you think about it . . . Paul’s dominant image of the church is as the body of Christ on earth, and this is consistent with it . . . the thinking of Christ’s body on earth certainly should be the same as it is in heaven . . . and just what that thinking should be is revealed in his life of self-emptying abnegation, his humbling – and in English humility comes from humus, Latin for soil – his earthiness in taking human form, obedient even to the point of death.

Humility is a quality promoted over and over again in the New Testament, but one that’s often not exhibited by the church . . . the child-abuse problem in the Roman Catholic Church is a prime example . . . the Catholic hierarchy itself is hardly humble, it hardly embodies the mind of Christ, willing to empty itself of power in the service of all . . . instead, it did just the opposite . . . the hierarchy protected its own power, its own status by not admitting there was a systemic problem, by shuffling off offending members – that is, abusive priests – to where their crimes were not known, to where they inevitably re-offend – as such individuals are known to do. The Catholic Church protected it’s own integrity rather than that of it’s vulnerable members . . . and what would have happened if it had truly been of the same mind of Christ, who was obedient even unto his own death? How many lives would it have saved from ruination, from being mired in swamps of addiction and shame?

And lest we get big-headed thinking “you know those corrupt Catholics . . .” look at churches in our own denomination, going down the tubes because they are too arrogant to change. Because they look to their own interests, their own comfort – they hate that contemporary worship, or liturgy, it doesn’t feed them – instead of looking to the interests of others, to those who need to hear the Gospel. Paul exhorts congregations to have the same mind – to be unified – and that it be the mind of Christ, who did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but humbled himself, becoming obedient . . . likewise churches are not to regard their special status – their status as Christ’s body – as something to be exploited, but they are to humble themselves, becoming obedient, even if it is to the death. Refusing to change to reach out to others is just the opposite, it’s disobedience to the command that church communities proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Note once again that Paul is not primarily talking to individuals here, although he certainly is sophisticated enough to know how individual behaviors – i.e., “each of you” looking to your own interests – effect group behavior as a whole. Power-groups coalesce around individuals or programs in the church, they keep others out and prevent them from participating in a meaningful way . . . the excluded often just leave . . . the blame-game is played very well in churches, so well that people who get tired of being scape-goated—and that can include pastors—simply up and leave. And though all of these behaviors can trickle up to effect overall church behavior, they are not what Paul is addressing in this passage. After all, the mission of God doesn’t reside in individuals, but in the individual bodies of Christ called congregations.

But how do address this level, how do you modify the way a group like a church works? By finding new ways of working out problems, of analyzing, of doing the business of the church. And, I’m happy to say, that we are beginning to do this. The Seeker process, as I’m sure you are all aware, has been occupying the leadership of this congregation for almost two years. And in that time, we have learned a different way to behave as a congregation, a different way to analyze and approach our work as Christ’s body. And now that the formal part is over, the real work will begin, as we begin to teach everybody what we have learned, as we apply these methods at every level of the church.

As Paul put it in the closing lines of our passage, we are will be working out our own salvation with fear and trembling, with humility and joy . . . he’s not talking about personal salvation here. He’s talking about the preservation, the deliverance, the persistence of the church. . . he’s talking about the salvation of the fellowship, of the congregation . . . work out your salvation, he says to the congregation at Philippi, with fear and trembling, with reverence and obedience and awe. In the past few years, your Session and the rest of the Seekers have been learning to do just that. And, as I just said but will say again, now the real work begins. Amen.

Parables are often best served cold, with not a lot of prior heating up by interpretation or explanation’s warm embrace, and so I invite you to listen to this parable again, with the knowledge that Jesus is speaking to his disciples here, the folks who’ve been with him since the beginning, who’ve sweated with him, watched him sparring the religious authorities and casting out demons . . . they may even have done a little of that work themselves, and so they consider themselves insiders, and rightly so! They’ve earned it, they’ve listened to all his teachings and helped him feed the multitudes, and now they’ve settled down to listen to some parables and he begins this one with “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.” And they’re thinking . . . uh, oh . . . a kingdom parable, this might not be too easy to understand . . . those others we’ve heard haven’t been . . . but this one starts easily enough, the landowner agrees that he’ll pay the laborers the usual daily wage, and they go to it . . . they enter the vineyard and begin work.

So far so good. The landowner has hired day laborers, he’s gonna get his vines dressed or his grapes picked and they’re gonna get a fair days wage . . . the disciples can understand that, they’re all hard workers, and the early bird gets the worm, those at that early hour get the reward of getting up so early in the morning . . . a full days pay. And then the owner goes out into the marketplace again, about nine in the morning, and the disciples begin to wonder . . . why didn’t he hire enough the first time, but the disciples like that he hires them, idleness is the devil’s plaything, and they undoubtedly had families to feed . . . and the owner says to them “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” And he goes out into the marketplace at noon and at three, and the same thing happens, he hires more men, and the disciples are beginning to think “is he nuts? Can’t he forecast his labor needs a little bit better?” But the kicker is when he goes out into the marketplace at five in the afternoon, only an hour before closing time, and does the same thing . . . and it seems to the disciples that it’s hardly worth the trouble, either the landowner’s or that of the laborers themselves.

And then evening comes, and the owner of the vineyard says to his manager – and just why, the disciples wonder, didn’t he send his manager to hire the workers in the first place? – the owner says to the manager “Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” And the disciples say, oh . . . maybe that’s what he means by the last shall be first and the first last, they remember Jesus saying stuff like that, in fact he said it just before this parable, the last get their pay first, and so the ones hired at about five come along, and they’re paid the usual daily wage, the pay the landowner had agreed upon with the first workers hired, and the anticipation of the disciples listening rises, just as that of the first-hired laborers . . . they’re amazed at the landowner’s generosity and what’s more, they’re thinking “If he paid those one-hour-lay-abouts so much, what must he have in store for those who worked all day?” What is he going to give those hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, get-up-early-in-the-A-M folks, who really deserve it?

But when the first-hired come, each one of them receives the usual daily wage, and they grumble, they’re very angry, and they complain to him, saying “These last worked only one hour, and you’ve made ‘em equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” And the disciples can certainly identify with what they’re saying, because they’ve stood around in the scorching heat, listening to this incomprehensible story – see the sweat dripped from their noses! – and what’s more, they’ve tramped all around Galilee with Jesus, and they are certainly long-suffering. they’d been busy little beavers, working with Jesus . . . and they’d hate to see some Johnny-come-lately disciples get the same as them . . . but the landowner in the story answers the workers saying “Fiends, I am doing you no wrong . . . did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go.”

Now. How does this story make you feel? Does it make you uncomfortable, does it make you mad? Do you think that the laborers who worked a full day for the same amount as those who worked an hour got the short end of the stick? Me too. This story goes against every grain that a lifetime of upbringing in this old world can get . . . like a lot of you, I have a keen sense of what’s fair and what’s not. And we live in a debt-keeping world, one where balances must be kept even. If a pipe-fitter or an electrical engineer or a horse-trainer works 3 hours, we expect her to be paid for three hours, not one, and certainly not for a full day.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s downright fortunate our labor system operates the way it does . . . getting paid proportionate to how long a person works ensures that the system does work . . . if everybody knew they were going to get paid the same amount no matter how long they worked, everybody’d just sleep in until the last minute, then go work for an hour or so and collect a check. Not a lot of work would get done. You might say that the whole social order relies on this principle of “equal pay for equal work,” and so the actions of the landowner are deeply subversive, they have the power to overturn the social order . . . maybe that’s why this story creates as great a sense of distress in me as it must have in the disciples, who were after all, insiders in the kingdom. Jesus called to them, of course, they were chosen first.

Back in the ‘70s, equal pay for equal work became a rallying cry of the feminist movement. This was, of course, the idea that women who were hired to do a job ought to be paid the same thing as men who do the same job. It sounds simple, right? Simple and fair . . . but you remember all the griping and moaning and complaining coming from the employers and other pundits who were – just coincidentally, I’m sure – men. They couldn’t attack it directly, because it’s really such a no-brainer – what man wouldn’t gripe to high heaven if – all other things being equal – he didn’t get paid the same as the guy next to him? They couldn’t attack it directly, so they had to get creative. My favorite was “well, men are the family breadwinners, they need the living wage, women are just dilettantes, working for a little extra income.” Such touching concern for families . . . too bad it didn’t carry over to today, when 40 million people are in families below the poverty line . . . And anyway, what skin off of male noses would it have been if women were paid the same as they were? They’d have still get their fair day’s pay . . . and it’s the same with those who were grumbling in our story . . . “Friend,” the landowner says, “I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?” What skin is it off of your nose if I choose to pay them the same as you? You’re getting what we agreed upon . . . and then he puts his finger on it: Or are you envious because I am generous? The problem isn’t the landowner, it’s not what the landowner has done that’s caused them to grumble and complain . . . it comes from within the laborers themselves. They’re envious.

But . . . just who and what are they envying? It can’t be the folks who came late . . . they all got the same amount, which was – significantly – just enough. The only person to envy is the landowner, who they know has enough to pay them more . . . they know that he could give them more if he’d so desired . . . what they envy is the wealth of the landowner, who is giving from his abundance . . . and perhaps their envy is understandable. After all, in the economics of the First Century, “generous landowners” were products of a system that allowed them to accrue great tracts of land at the expense of the original owners, who – through a process of increasing indebtedness – making less than a living wage in bad years and just enough in good years – lost their land and became tenant farmers to these “generous landowners” who thereby accrued larger and larger tracts of land. But when we read this parables “from above,” that is, when we go immediately to the assumption that the landowner is obviously God, then we tend to blame those who were first hired, to act as if it’s all their fault. Refraining from seeing the landowner as God – and neither Jesus nor Matthew tells us that the landowner is supposed to be God – allows us to see some of this parable’s richness.

OK . . . but what does this say about the kingdom of heaven? After all, the first line of the parable is “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner . . .” If we aren’t supposed to jump the conclusion immediately that the landowner is God, what can we infer about the kingdom from this story of a – typical – landowner and laborers who are – again, typically – envious? Well, let’s see . . . we have a landowner who’s giving from his abundance, who could give more, but doesn’t choose to . . . but what if he can’t give more? What if the riches he controls are not sub-dividable, what if he’s giving all he has? What is there that’s like that? Well, let’s see . . . what’s something you either give or don’t . . . what about . . . forgiveness? Forgiveness – God’s ridiculously bountiful grace – is nonetheless un-dividable . . . forgiving somebody is unitary, you either forgive them or not . . . and in this light, the parable becomes about the ridiculous nature of forgiveness in the Kingdom of heaven . . . it is not dependent upon how much work you do. Those who were there first – like the first-hired, or the disciples who’d been with Jesus since the beginning – don’t get any more grace than those Johnny-come-latelies who’d only worked an hour.

That’s the problem with grace, folks, the problem with the kingdom of heaven . . . unlike the world, where what you get is proportional to what you do – and as in the many cases – way too often, I’m afraid – who you are, what the color of your skin is, or where you live – in God’s kingdom, none of that matters, everything will be reversed, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And of course, that often feels scandalous to those of us raised up in the world . . . and it is. Like the landowner who paid the same no matter how long they worked, un-earned forgiveness overturns the social fabric of our world, it undermines the very basis of how our society works. We live in a debt-keeping world, a world that expects tit-for-tat, that expects all the books to add up . . . and grace just isn’t like that. Forgiveness isn’t like that . . . and like those who were hired first, like the disciples who heard Jesus’ tale, we insiders are prone to grumble about it. It’s natural, it’s the way we were brought up . . .

But . . . that’s the way grace is, and I thank God for it . . . God’s grace – and it’s kinda sneaky how we got back around to equating the landowner with God, isn’t it? – God’s grace is undividable, it’s the same for you and me and everyone, no matter what we’ve done, no matter who we are, it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been with the program, how many times we’ve gone to church, or anything else, God’s grace is ours, it’s free, period, that’s the end of it, amen.

I’m going to back up just a teensy little bit to set the stage for this week’s passage . . . last week we talked about a passage right before this one, though we stopped short of the verses just before. Let’s go back and pick them up by way of segueing into today’s lection: “You know what time it is,” Paul says, “how now is the moment for you to wake from sleep . . . the night is far gone, the day is near” and of course what he’s talking about is the return of Christ, which he believed was right around the corner . . . he believed that it would come before his generation was finished on earth. After all, Jesus had said as much, and this was such an ingrained belief in that first generation of Christians that Paul felt compelled in his first letter to the church at Thessalonica to reassure them that all was well, despite some of their number dying, patently before the second coming. What was going on in the Christian community was a gradual awakening to the fact that the second coming of Christ wouldn’t be quite as soon as some of them had thought. It was sort of like the folks who take all their worldly possessions up onto a mountain, sure that Jesus is coming again at 5:36 am on September 4th, 1908, and when he doesn’t, they gradually begin to look around at one another, then file slowly, a few at a time, down the mountain . . .

What was going on with at least some of the first-generation Christians when Paul wrote Romans somewhere around 60 AD . . . Christianity was in a flux, it had not settled down into an orthodoxy – that wouldn’t happen for a century or so – and there were a lot of opinions about the way Christianity should be. Among those were Paul’s own opinions, and he was writing to kind of give them an overview of his theology, which was very dualistic: as a good apocalyptic Jew he thought in terms of good and evil, light and dark. In the paragraphs right before our passage he says “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”[i]

And so it’s clear that to Paul, that first line of our passage—“Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions”—should be taken in this context of his admonition to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” To put on the Lord Jesus Christ is to welcome those who are weak in the faith, but not for the purpose of feudin’ and fussin’ and fightin’. And what does he mean by “weak in faith?” “Some believe,” he says, “in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.” So: here’s one characteristic of the weak: they restrict their eating. The not weak believe in eating anything. And he says, those who eat everything must not despise those who abstain . . . and those who abstain, must not judge those who eat. Note the difference: he’s warning those who eat not to despise those who don’t, but those who don’t, he warns not to judge. We’ll get back to that a little bit later.

Now. Remember I said that Christianity was in flux? That there had not been an orthodoxy established? That’s what’s going on here. And although we’re not certain about the specifics of what Paul is saying, we know the general outline. There was a debate among first-generation Christians about which and how many rituals must be followed to be Christians in good standing. Most prominent, were the Jewish dietary restrictions of the day, like eating pork or certain kinds of seafood . . . over in Galatians, Paul describes his disagreements with the pillars of the Jerusalem church—James and Peter, among others—about whether or not Christians should observe Jewish dietary rules. And there were apparently other traveling, Christian teachers—perhaps not unlike Paul—who taught that Jewish observances like circumcision and the following of the dietary laws were prerequisite to being Christian. Paul was adamantly opposed to that way of thinking: “we know,” he wrote in Galatians “that a person is justified not by the works of the law” and by law, Paul means Mosaic law “a person is justified not by law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.”[ii]

And so, observing the law in general—and not just dietary laws, but all of the Mosaic law—is not necessary for what Paul calls justification, and we more commonly refer to as salvation. But there were still a large number of brothers and sisters out there who believed that way, who were still what we might call traditional or old-school, that still believed Christians should refrain from doing certain things, like eating certain foods, and in our particular case, meat that had been offered to idols. This stemmed from the general prescription against eating meat offered to God—only members of the priestly caste were allowed to do it—and it had been extended by common practice to meat offered to any god, or as Jews would have it idols. The problem is, you couldn’t always tell if meat had been offered to idols or not, it was common practice to sell such meat in the marketplace, after it had been slaughtered for sacrificial purposes, so it had become common practice in some quarters to avoid eating meat altogether.

But Christians—stemming from the fact that their salvation, their being deemed children of God, comes not through observance of the law but by adoption through Christ—have great freedom which included, apparently, not worrying about whether or not meat had been offered to idols. And for Paul, this freedom in Christ was very important: As he wrote also in Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”[iii] The yoke of slavery he refers to is the Torah and its rules about what you can and cannot eat.

And there were other rules causing problems: religions like Judaism and the pagan faiths of Paul’s converts had festival days. Judaism had Passover and Purim, worshippers of the goddess Astarte had lunar observances, followers of the ba’als had harvest festivals. And for Paul, freedom in Christ extended also to freedom from strict observance of these holy days. As he puts it in our passage, “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike.” But those who observe the days, just like those who follow dietary laws, observe them in honor of the Lord, and those who don’t do the same. They are all servants of Christ, worshippers of a common Lord. And who is anybody to pass judgment on the servants of another? Who is one servant to pass judgment on another? All serve the same risen Lord.

Those who eat, and those who don’t observe the festival days, who Paul here implies are stronger, must not despise those who do, who hew to the old ways. Those who abstain, who hew to the old ways—who Paul calls weak—are not to pass judgment on those he might call stronger because, as he says, “God has welcomed everyone.” Once again, note the differential: those who are advanced in their faith, those who have claimed their freedom from dietary laws and observance of holy days through Christ, must not despise, must not look down on those whose faiths are weaker, who cling to the old ways. But by the same token, those who are more traditional, more old-fashioned, clinging to the old ways, must not judge those who are more traditional must not pass judgment on those who are more “advanced” in their faiths.

And I don’t know about you, but this is beginning to sound awful familiar. Traditionalists, keepers of the old ways, judging the newer ways to be inadequate or downright unchristian? The less traditional, more “advanced” Christians, looking down their noses at the more traditional in scorn? There’s nothing more smug than a person who’s convinced of the new ways, baby, and who looks upon his more traditional—often older, but often not—brothers and sisters as provincial. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard progressive, mainline Christians—whose churches are by and large failing—make fun of those video-watching, hands-to-Jesus-raising, evangelicals, whose churches, by and large, are growing.

Conversely, there’s nothing more judgmental than Christians who hold to the old ways, who refuse to see that there may be more than one way to worship God, who think that a faith that keeps up with the times is a lesser faith than theirs. Some of those same evangelicals, that advocate that “old-time religion,” where women are in their place and there are no gays anywhere near, are so judgmental, thinking that these peripheral differences, such as about who you ordain or sleep with, are fundamental to the faith, and that more open, tolerant expressions of Christianity are literally the work of Satan.

In a denomination like ours, the motto of which is “reformed and always being reformed,” these divisions become all the more acute. They get labeled conservative and liberal, which is understandable: conservatives tend to resist change, they want to “conserve” the past. Liberals tend to be more comfortable with a more progressive theology and, yes, sometimes contemptuous of those who aren’t; conservatives tend not to be as comfortable with modern theology, and just a weensy bit judgmental of those who are. And it’s splitting our denomination apart.

But it happens within churches too . . . and often—but not always—it’s along generational lines, between people brought up in times. George and Beverly Thompson call these cultural streams, and they point out that at least three are present in a lot of churches: Boomers, Gen-X’ers and so-called “Silents”, those who grew up during World War II. Each of these generational groupings grew up when the conditions surrounding them, with the nation and the local communities, were very different. Because of this, they tend to view the world very differently: Boomers protested the Vietnam War, marched in civil rights demonstrations, dropped in and out of middle-class society, raised kids, married, divorced, and now expect everything life has to offer. Generation X-ers, on the other hand, are less certain, the economic situation is not as clear, they’ve been raised to be more suspicious of middle-class trappings. The Silents are called that way because they don’t believe in protest, they commit to institutions such as church, they helped defeat Hitler and built the post-World War economy. And the point is that each of these groups, because they grew up and matured under very different circumstances, view the world in very different ways, and—this is very important—they view church differently too. Many times, without even knowing it: everybody tends to think that what is apparent, real and important to them is that way to everybody else. And it just isn’t true.

And it’s along these lines that deep divisions within churches tend to develop, that underlying splits emerge—that often never surface directly, but only through trivial carping and fighting. These generational divides, between people with different world views, different ideas about how society and church should be run—can cause deep fissures within our churches.

But Paul is having none of it. We are not to judge or despise one another, but we’re to welcome everyone. And once we get them here, we shouldn’t expect them to be just like us, to like the same music we do, to commit to do the same things as us . . . As Paul says, why do we pass judgment on one another? Or why do we despise one another? As Paul says, we all stand before the judgment seat of God, not that of one another. We all serve the same Lord, who is Jesus Christ. Who are we to pass judgment on another servant of Christ? We are—and will be—accountable to God alone. Amen.
[i] Romans 13:13-14
[ii] Galatians 2:16
[iii] Galatians 5:1

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately . . . so naturally I went to the World Wide Web to consult the “Love Doctor,” and he has a Love Calculator, and so I entered Pam’s maiden name and mine, and wouldn’t you know it? We only had a 22% chance to make it together before we were married, and I sure wish the Love Doctor was around back then . . . we wouldn’t have wasted those 29 years. I was just about to call a lawyer when I decided to take one more shot at it, and I entered our married names this time, and what do you know . . . we now have a 96% chance of making it. Boy, am I relieved.

Of course, I’m just kidding . . . I wouldn’t really take the advice of some silly computer . . . love’s too important a thing to take lightly . . . I mean, all you need is love, right? Love is a many splendored thing, as anybody on the love boat could tell you . . . love lifts you up where you belong, I love New York . . . heck, I love American style. Have trouble with your love story? Then take love potion number nine, and you’ll be a victim of that crazy little thing called love, but don’t worry – there must be fifty ways to leave your lover. We’ve got lovin’ in the morning, lovin’ in the evening, lovin’ ‘bout supper time . . . we’re so much in love with love that we even have our own love holiday, with it’s own Saint, and it’s a wonder his name isn’t St. Love . . .

We use love to sell things, everything from toothpaste to deodorant, from Ford Broncos to Dell Computers . . . or maybe that’s sex we use to sell things . . . I do tend to get them confused. After all, we call the act of sex “making love,” like if we just have sex enough times, love will be somehow generated out of thin air. Love’s become an item, a commodity – if we just have enough of it, our lives will be perfect. And the Beatles sing about love as if it’s something you get – love, love, love . . . love is all you need.

But at the same time, we also think of love as an emotion, something you feel . . . I love you, I love my car, I love my cat. We talk about the act of starting to love as “falling in love,” like “falling off a cliff,” as if we can’t help ourselves, it’s an accidental kind of thing – I saw her standing there, and I just flat-out fell in love. This emotional love comes with a pleasurable feeling, a warm-and-fuzzy state of euphoria – flushed cheeks, tingly, prickly hairs-on-end . . . clichéd – but accurate – descriptions of what many of us call “being in love.”

But have you ever noticed that these things wear off after awhile? That cool, sleek car that gave you goose bumps when you first drove it can become nothing more than a hunk of painted metal, especially after a few repairs. That delightful guy you thought was the be-all and end-all of the known universe turns into something ordinary, well-worn, Ozzie to your Harriet – and that little rush when you see him is just no longer there. Scientists – wouldn’t you just know – have studied it, and they’ve found out that pleasurable feeling is caused by a kind of brain-chemical called an endorphin that’s released into the bloodstream when you see your honey, and that eventually, after repeated sightings, it’s no longer released. This takes about seven years, thus accounting for – you guessed it – the seven-year itch.

Marilyn Monroe aside, it’s at this point – if not before – that maintaining a relationship starts to be real work, and loving someone becomes more and more active, more and more trouble. And that’s where Paul comes in, because that’s what love is to him – real, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact, work. In fact, he starts with the image of love as an obligation, as something you owe somebody else. How romantic is that?

“Owe no one anything,” he says, “except to love one another.” And that’s a real downer, because it sounds pretty cold – if we love someone because we have to, it’s can’t be worth much, can it? And what does he mean, owe no one anything, except to love one another? Why would I owe you love, and you me? What could I have done for you that incurred such an obligation? But here’s a thought – maybe it’s not to one another that we owe it to love one another . . . maybe Joe doesn’t owe it to Clara to love her, and Clara doesn’t owe it to Bill to love him, but Fred and Cleo owe it to God to do their loving. And this makes sense, because Paul goes on and says “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law,” and here, as almost everywhere else, Paul is talking about the Torah, the Mosaic law. And Jews are bound to observe it out of covenant obligation. So maybe the obligation is to God for Christians to love one another.

In fact, our passage begins and ends with two very similar statements, both about love fulfilling the law. So it’s a good bet that that’s what’s on Paul’s mind – the fulfilling of the law. In fact, the first statement is a premise, and the final one is a conclusion, restating the premise. And between the two is the proof – all you logical Presbyterian types understand that, and -he lists four of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet,” and any other commandment – and says they’re summed up by only one: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And note that he doesn’t say replaced by the love commandment, but summed up, gathered together, united, and it makes sense – if you love your neighbor, you certainly won’t kill her, or covet her cat or her husband; you certainly won’t steal from her or commit adultery against her. In fact, he says, love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, it is the fulfilling of the law. Q.E.D.

He uses this notion of love as the summing-up of the law to prove his point, and the reason he could do this is that it was a common belief among Christians and Jews of the day – Christians, of course, because Jesus had said something a lot like it like it, but contrary to popular belief among Christians, who think that we invented love, it wasn’t original with Jesus, either – it was a common teaching among Jewish rabbis of the day. But if it was a common belief, why did he make a big deal out of it? Why did he have to write this paragraph at all?

The key is in the word “fulfill,” and his declaration that love fulfills the law – he’s saying that it doesn’t just sum it up, it doesn’t just recapitulate it, but it satisfies the purpose that God intended for it. And that’s about as radical as it comes . . . Paul is saying that love does what the law was intended to do, it fulfills its role.

But this creates a problem for us Christians: isn’t the whole point of the Gospel grace? Isn’t the point that our being made right with God, being justified, being saved, is free, and that we don’t have to do anything, in fact we can’t do anything, to merit it? This love your neighbor stuff sounds like just another thing you have to do to get saved. Hasn’t he just substituted loving your neighbor for abstaining from pork, for remembering to wash up before a meal? Isn’t this just works righteousness in disguise?

But Paul’s not talking righteousness here – he doesn’t even mention the word once, or salvation, either. For Paul, that was never the purpose of the law, to make the Jews – or anybody else, for that matter – righteous before God. For Paul, the law’s purpose was never to provide salvation. The purpose of the law to Paul is to reveal the glory of God to the nations, so that “Israel might be God’s light to the world.”1 And so fulfilling the purpose of the law has nothing to do – in Paul’s mind – with whether someone is saved or not – it’s to show the glory of God to the world, to reveal the meaning of life in the Lord. In a Christian context, we might say it’s the heart of evangelism. Through our communities united by love, we’re to be beacons to the world. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

That’s why Paul puts it in terms of something we owe God: obligation comes after the fact, after receiving something. God has done something for us, sent Christ to Earth to set us free, made a new covenant with us in his blood, and now our obligation, our side of the covenant, is to love one another. Just as Israel’s side of the bargain was to obey God’s commandments, we’re to love our neighbors as ourselves.

I wonder how big our churches would be if we truly practiced loving one another, just within these walls, if we truly behaved in our churches as if we loved one another? How big could we grow if people could truly see that we’re different from the world at large, that we treat each other with love? I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from people who used to go to church, but something happened, somebody snubbed them, somebody said something hurtful, or they just got tired of the backbiting and the jealousy. In a lot of churches, far from acting like they love one another, members jockey for power, for control, over whose version of the Gospel will be taught, and in what way it will be taught. That is human nature, I know, but we’re supposed to transcend that, we’re supposed to be better than that . . .

And in our passage, Paul’s speaking about loving our neighbors, not just other members of our church family. How in the name of you-know-who are we supposed to do that? I mean, I don’t even like my neighbor – he’s crabby, he plays his music too loud, and he yells at my dog. And to top it all off, he’s not a Christian, he makes no bones about it . . . he thinks it’s pretty stupid to worship some two-thousand-year-old carpenter, and how am I supposed to love a guy like that? And furthermore, the gospels make it pretty clear that the definition of “neighbor” is wider than just the guy next door – remember the Good Samaritan? Am I supposed to love people around the world, with whom I have nothing in common, many of whom – lest we forget September 11 – seem to not particularly love me?

Well . . . yes, but maybe not quite in the way we assume . . . Paul’s not talking about some emotion or feeling, he’s not talking about being in love, about something we can’t help . . . he’s talking about action, something we do. For Paul – and, I think, for most of Scripture – love is action, it’s doing, it’s hard work. . . . and as we’ve seen, we’re obligated to do it. Even if we can’t stand our neighbor, even if we get tired of his face, even if we think his ideas are dangerously crazy, we are to engage with them, to treat them as if we genuinely like them.

And you know what? When we grit our teeth and treat someone we dislike as if we deeply care for them, a funny thing can happen on the way to the forum – we can develop a genuine affection for them, it happens all the time. For a start, treat everybody as you yourself would want to be treated, and then go further . . . be kind to them, do things for them . . . and most of all, try to put yourself in their shoes, try to imagine what their life must be like. Instead of just shaking your head at something you don’t like, try to understand why they are that way . . . is it their religion? Is it the way they were raised, what happened to them as children? Are they insecure, like we all are sometimes? To love someone, in Scripture, is to do for them, it’s not necessary to feel for them . . . although that certainly is expected to come.

New Testament scholar Tom Wright says that Paul’s love is “tough love,” in the sense that it’s tough to do, that because it doesn’t spring from the emotions, it comes from the will, it comes from just doing it, as the Nike ad might say.2 It’s hard work, but it’s our obligation, there’s just no getting around it . . .

But the good news, as always, is that the Christian life is a journey, and as Paul himself knew all too well, we’re not yet at its end, we’re not yet perfected, we’re just on the way. But he also knew that we’re not alone on the road, that we have the Holy Spirit to power us, and intercede for us with sighs too deep for words. He knew that Christ is with us all along the journey, and he will be with us every step of the way. Amen.

1 Wright, N.T., “The Letter to the Romans,” vol. X in: The New Interpreter’s Bible,12 vols., (Nashville: Abingdon), 2002, p 725.
2 Ibid., p 726.

When I was just a preacher-ling, before I went to seminary, I preached at my old church in Starkville, Mississippi, where the buffalo play and the bulldogs roam, and nary a cross word is said to anyone. And in the sermon, which probably wasn’t much of one, actually—and don’t ask me if anything’s changed, please—and in the sermon I was saying something about how some weird things had been happening to me lately, how folks had come up to me I barely know, and ask when I was going to seminary, and stuff like that, and I saw my friend Roberta grinning like a mad-woman in the back-center where she always sat with her husband Ed, and I didn’t quite know why she was doing that, and when I asked her she said. “When God is after you, every bush is burning” Every bush is burning . . . and what she meant by that is if you’re under the gun, if God is trying to call you into the ministry, then everything in your life will point to it.

Even if it doesn’t. Because we all know we can, well, read things into things, that’s why Paul said to test the spirits . . . what he meant was that we should carefully practice discernment to see what things come from God and what things come from us, or some other non-God source like a Chevy commercial or a politician’s sound bite. I used to laugh at some of my acquaintance back in the day who’d say—dramatically, of course—I prayed to the Lord that he give me a sign, I said Lord? If you want me to buy that Cadillac Seville, just give me a sign, and then . . . and then . . . the light changed! And I knew it was a sign, praise Jesus . . . well, that’s over-the-top, of course, but you can see the point: When every bush is burning, you gotta find the one where you won’t get burnt.

Not that it was a problem for ol’ Moses . . . there was only one burning bush out there in the wilderness, where he’d fled after that little, ah, dust-up in Egypt that left a man dead. He was a wanted man back in the land of the Pharaoh, or at least he used to be, he was a long time in the desert, and he’d married the daughter of a Midianite sheep-farmer, and maybe they’d forgotten about him back home . . . and here he is, herding sheep, walking up and down the mountainous wilderness without even benefit of an SUV, or even a measly little trail bike, and he comes up on this bush that’s literally burning, but it isn’t being consumed.

And I’ll bet he looked around for the film crew, for Steven Spielberg maybe or George Lucas, or something, because it had to not be too common even in those days for bushes to burn but not be consumed . . . but there it was, burning away, and Moses says “I must turn aside and see this great sight” literally seeing “and see why the bush is not burned up!” And in just three verses, the Hebrew verb for seeing—or one of it’s derivatives—is used seven times, and now it’s God’s turn, God sees that Moses sees, and calls out to Moses from the bush—and I thought it was an angel: “Moses, Moses!” God says, and Moses says: “Here I am.”

And it’s true: there’s a whole lot of seeing going on, around that mountain called Horeb: God sees that Moses sees, that he is looking, and he speaks to him. Seeing is important to the enterprise of call . . . and make no mistake, this is a call story. Look at the wording. Does it remind you of something? When God called to Samuel in the night, he said “Samuel!” and it took Samuel three times before he said “Here I am.” God came to Samuel in the night, he was asleep; but it’s broad daylight for Moses, there on the mountainside, and with a visual aid as well . . . and Moses looked and saw that it was burning . . . and he turns aside—another important verb in this verse—he turns aside and looks at the bush, and only when the Lord sees that Moses had turned aside does he call out to him.

And look at what’s going on here . . . it’s clear that this call thing is a transaction, an interaction between God and Moses. It’s clear that it involves God revealing God’s self to Moses—the angel of the Lord appears to Moses in a bush that is burning, but it is not consumed. But it’s equally clear that Moses has to see it, to observe it—that verb is used seven times, after all—he has to be open to it. And that’s not easy to do, when you’re busy herding your sheep, when you’re busy living life, it’s not easy to see God wherever you are, but that’s a key to knowing God, to discerning God’s will: first you have to see it.

The Benedictines are past-masters at this sort of thing. They practice it in their daily lives, it’s built into the structure of their days. And the first thing understand is that if you’re not quiet, you can’t hear anything. And so not only do they have the daily office—periods of corporate, chanted prayer four to seven times a day—not only do they pray to God, but they schedule time when all they do is listen. They have several hours a day where they practice some form of contemplative prayer, usually lectio divina, divine reading, in which they open their hearts to the whisperings of God, listening to what God would have them do in and with their lives . . . it is a deeply-held Benedictine belief that God is in all things, that God speaks to us through all things, that there doesn’t have to be a burning bush, and they are quite intentional in looking for God everywhere. This is culminated on a daily basis in their nightly office, said in private, in which they chant the Song of Simeon, in Latin the nunc dimitis: Now, Lord, dismiss your servant in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all the peoples . . . and as they chant it, as they sing about their eyes having seen salvation, they reflect back over the day just ended, consciously looking for just where they have seen it . . .

And as for us, who run like the proverbial chickens all day long, who are over-programmed and near-to-being overwhelmed, I think it’s even more important for us to be intentional about discerning our calls, about listening and looking for God . . . it’s even more important for us today—who aren’t likely to be warmed by the fire that does not consume—it’s even more important tha,t like Moses, we turn aside from our sheep herding to be open to God’s will.

And when Moses did so, when he stopped and looked at that burning bush, that’s when he heard the voice of God issuing forth from it, and it no less than changed his life . . . that’s what encounters with God do, you know, change lives . . . and that’s a frightening thing in and of itself, isn’t it? It sure was in Moses’ case: God speaks to him out of that burning bush, and he says I have seen—there’s that verb again, translated as “observed” here—I have seen the misery of my people, I have heard their cry, and I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians. The Lord has done what the Lord does, God has seen and known, and now he’s gonna do what God is gonna do, and that is to deliver them. The Lord sees and knows and delivers, that’s what the Lord does. “I have come down to bring them up our of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—and I’ve always wondered how the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites felt about it, but that’s the subject for another sermon—God sees and knows and comes to deliver.

And ol’ Moses must have been grooving along, saying “Hey, this is pretty cool, my people have needed delivering for quite awhile now, but then God says “So come! I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” And you can almost hear the screeeeech of the breaks, almost see the look of panic come over Moses’ face . . . after all the seeing and turning aside and knowing and coming and delivering, Moses has gotta do something! He’s gotta respond, and it panics him . . . This is more than he bargained for, more than “Go ye therefore to church and sing Amazing Grace and pray real hard” or “teach ye therefore Sunday school for an hour a week.” Moses is a good little boy, he turns aside and sees, and what does it get him? A whole new life.

And he doesn’t really like it. He starts sputtering like Woody Allen on a first date “Who am I,” he says, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” You can almost see him loosening his collar, it’s getting a little hot around here, and besides: he’d fled Egypt all those years ago, something about a dead Egyptian, remember? And now you have me going back? Why couldn’t you just leave me with the wife and kids, and the executive position I’ve achieved in my father-in-law’s organization? Why all the change?

But that’s what happens when we listen to God, when we turn aside and see . . . God is likely to change our lives. Discerning the will of God isn’t a safe little exercise, God doesn’t say, or doesn’t always say, at least: “That’s nice, now run along to church like a good little boys and girls.” Instead God says: “Come, I will send you. I will upend your lives, change the way you do business, pull you out of your comfort zone.”

And do you see? We’re not just whistling Dixie about our doctrine of cooperation with God . . . we really are God’s hands and feet on earth, but I hope you see something else as well: this discerning of God’s will for our lives, this turning-aside and seeing, is risky business, because it has a way of changing lives.

And our church has been in such a season, a season of turning-aside and looking, and can you feel it? We are changing . . . there is something stirring around, we’re beginning to ask questions, to take stock of where we are and where we should be. We’ve learned new ways of being the church, we’ve seen new vision for ourselves, and we are going to be changed by it . . . your session has learned new ways of thinking about our business, of analyzing it and we are beginning to apply them, and as we do, our lives together as a local expression of Christ’s body will be changed, and it won’t always be pleasant.

But you know what? God tells us the same thing as Moses: when there’s a burning bush before you, indeed when every bush is burning, I will be with you. I will be with you. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Paul of Tarsus . . . of Augustine and Calvin and Martin Luther King . . . of your grandfather and mother and aunts and uncles . . . your God, the great I am, will be with you. Amen.

Today’s passage is one of those “Watershed Passages” that everybody knows about, and everybody thinks they know what it means. What that is, of course, is the naming of Simon Peter . . . Peter, or in Greek petros, which in turn means rock. “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” And for 1500-some-odd years, the church took this to mean that Peter was the first head of the church . . . and the vast majority of Christians today—Roman Catholics and some of the various flavors of the Eastern Orthodoxy—refer to Peter as their first Pope—pope is a diminutive “papa” from Greek, and they trace the heads of their churches—their Popes—back to Peter and this statement.

We Protestants, understandably, don’t buy into this, and this passage has kind of a diminished stature in our eyes: it takes into account the naming of Peter, true, and it does give some kind of theological hat to hang our foundations on. If Peter is representative of all the disciples, as many scholars understand him to be, if he’s a stand-in for us all, then the church is built upon us all, we are the rock upon which our church is founded. Of course, as the hymn goes, “The Church’s one Foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord,” so we have to be careful to nuance that a bit, but still. It does indeed work, theologically, anyway . . .

But if we look a little bit deeper, maybe we can tease out a little more meat, a little more of interest for us modern day Peters. And the first thing to notice is that for Jesus, it’s a teachable moment. And like any good teacher, he begins with a question, addressed to his followers: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” and notice that he’s using a theological title for himself, one that places him into a theological context, and its one that—surprisingly, for how often it’s used in the New Testament—doesn’t seem to have a fixed meaning. In some contexts—as perhaps here—he’s associating himself with the final judge, who’s coming is described in Daniel as “one like the Son of Man.” And he asks his disciples—in that perfect teachable moment—who do people say I am?

And they answer with the popular ideas of the day, the popular conceptions of who this wandering wonderworker is, this pointer to the kingdom of God, and apparently they think that he’s John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. And it’s important to nuance this a little bit: it’s more than a case of mistaken identity . . . the people think that he’s of the old order, that he’s another in a long line of prophetic Hebrew voices . . . they do not recognize in him something new, that God is doing a new thing . . . and people continue to do that, don’t they? They continue to interpret Jesus in the categories of the old . . . he’s like this or like that, he’s like a military commander, storming the gates of Hell, he’s like an innocent lamb, helpless, led to the slaughter . . . some people view him as the ultimate therapist, here to help us through the bad times. Others see him as the head of a victorious army, the church, fighting the pagans wherever they may be . . .

We continually interpret Jesus in light of what already is, in terms of what we already know, and perhaps that’s inevitable, really . . . after all, we can’t conceive of . . . what we can’t conceive of, can we? How can we describe it—on paper or in our mind’s eye?—if it’s completely beyond our imagination, our knowledge-base, our ken? It’s why “the streets of heaven are paved with solid gold,” why “there will be no sickness, toil or danger” and “the lion shall lie down no more” . . . these are all attempts to imagine the unimaginable . . .

And it’s understandable, of course, it’s a human thing, a human weakness, our finite minds are incapable of describing something totally new, but it can be a dangerous thing as well, when we confuse the reality of the Christ with that of the world . . . and that’s what’s going on with “the people” that the disciples describe, they think Jesus is just another prophet, another Jeremiah or John . . .

And following his lesson plan, Jesus now turns it onto the disciples: “But who do you say that I am?” And immediately, Simon Peter jumps in: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!” And Jesus calls Peter blessed because of his confession, and we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking he’s commending Peter for it . . . the word translated here as “blessed” means fortunate, happy and it has the sense of a being a recipient of God’s favor, and Jesus is stating a fact here: Peter is blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to Peter, it wasn’t something he learned from someone else, from the Sadducees or Pharisees that Jesus dissed in the passage right before ours, nor did he come to it on his own: flesh and blood did not reveal this to Peter, but God, whom Jesus called his Father in heaven.

Peter comes to this confession, this belief, not by his own will, on his own recognition, but via a revelation of God. God chooses to reveal Gods-self to Peter, not the other way around . . . Simon Peter is blessed in that God made him a believer . . . happy, fortunate, blessed is Simon Peter in that he didn’t learn this by human means. And next Jesus does a little revealing himself—like parent, like son, I guess—he reveals to Simon the meaning of his name: you’re Peter, in Greek Petros, rock, and you are gonna be the foundation of the ecclesia, the church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against the church.

Let me repeat that: the gates of Hades, the evil that stalks this world, that we can feel will not prevail against the church. And isn’t this is a fabulous claim, isn’t it a powerful declaration: despite all evidence to the contrary, the gates of the evil one will not win out in the end. But it certainly doesn’t seem that way at the moment . . . it seems like evil’s got us on the ropes, the church is shrinking, we’re losing numbers and even whole denominations, and ours seems poised to split in two . . .

Just this past week, Juanita and I were at the quarterly meeting of our regional governing body, the Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley, and in a sad bit of business, the church at Opelika left the PCUSA for another denomination, and all over our denomination, churches are leaving for one reason or another, and I firmly believe that this is evidence of evil working in this world, that Jesus pictured as the gates of Hades . . . and notice that I didn’t say our brothers and sisters at Opelika are evil, but that nevertheless it is the work of this ancient evil—that our ancestors personalized “Satan” or “the devil”—it’s the work of this evil that our churches are fighting in and among themselves . . . and this dis-harmony does great harm to the work of God, which is the working toward the coming of God’s just reign. Our presbytery spent over a year and resources it doesn’t have trying to fulfill the biblical mandate for reconciliation. But to no avail . . . First Presbyterian Church of Opelika is no longer part of our fellowship.

But Jesus tells Peter that the gates of Hades, this ancient evil—which C.S. Lewis calls “that hideous strength”—will not prevail in the end . . . and why? Because Peter will be given the keys to the kingdom—thus, we picture him at the pearly gates—he’ll be given the keys to the kingdom and the power to use them: whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever he looses on earth will be loosed in heaven. And over in John, Jesus does this after his resurrection, as he breathes the Holy Spirit into them, and there it’s limited to forgiveness of sins: “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” He gives the church—in the person of his gathered disciples—the power to forgive sins, to bind on earth what will be bound in heaven, to loose on earth what will be loosed in heaven . . . he gives the church the power to do God’s work on earth, to work toward the coming kingdom of God . . .

And whether that extends literally to the forgiveness of sins, as the Roman Catholics would have it—and after all, that is the literal sense of it—or a more generalized mandate to do the work of God, it’s clear that it is a formidable ability that Christ has bestowed upon us . . . that’s why John pictures it as coming at the same time as the Holy Spirit, because that’s what it must be, it must be spirit-led, spirit-powered, spirit-fed. The church—and note that I said the church, not we as individuals—the church has been given the ability, and the mandate, of cooperating with God’s creative, ongoing work here on earth. And, as they say, that ain’t chopped liver.

We are partners with God, partakers and purveyors of his grace . . . every time we feed someone, it is God who feeds them . . . every time we baptize someone, it is God who baptizes them through us. Whatever we bind on earth is bound in heaven, whatever we loose on earth is loosed in heaven, that is the church, that is us. Amen.

There’s an old saying—probably by some scurvy prophet or something—that says “I’ve come to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” and that surely applies to scripture as well. There’s nothing more afflicting to our comfortable notions about life and our place in it than scripture. If you read it and pay attention, that is . . . a lot of folks—and I know none of us here are like that—but a lot of folks just read the parts they like and kind of skip over the rest. Or if something bothers them they gloss over it or try to explain it away, assuming “Jesus wouldn’t do that,” or “He really means this.” But one of the keys to a deeper understanding of scriptures is to first acknowledge what it says, period. Not what it means, or what you think it means to us, but what it says, the plain sense of the words on the paper. Once you do that, you can apply what us text critics call “interpretive lenses” or “critical methods” to trying to figure out what it means. But first, you have to acknowledge what it says.

And what this passage says, no getting around it, is that Jesus basically calls the woman and her child dogs. When she begs for him to cast the demon out of her daughter, he says “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” No getting around it, he’s called her kid a dog. And the moment I first read it, I thought “Oy vey! That’s not the Jesus I know, that’s just mean, calling her sick, demon-possessed child a dog.”

Ok. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s try to see what it all means. We could take it at face value, you know, but that’s almost as bad . . . it seems as if Jesus—who we Christians confess is God’s own self—it seems as if Jesus changes his mind. At first he’s not going to heal her child—it would be throwing food to the dogs, after all—but then when she says something he likes, he decides to do it after all. Note that here in our passage, Matthew makes it about faith, and do you all remember last week? When Peter didn’t have enough faith to walk on the water? In Matthew it’s about faith a lot, but over in Mark’s version, it’s not about faith at all, it’s about what she says. Over there, he says “for saying that, for saying ‘yes but even dogs get the crumbs off the master’s table’, “your daughter has been healed,” but over here, Matthew makes it about faith, and somehow her response reveals, or maybe confirms her faith, but that brings up another problem: if Jesus is God, if he’s omniscient, why didn’t he know it from the outset? Why put a distraught woman through the ringer if you knew what you were gonna do in the first place? Kind of cruel, don’t you think?

Of course, another possibility is that he actually learns something here, that the Canaanite woman—it’s a Syrophoenician woman over in Mark—that she actually teaches Jesus something. When she says even the dogs eat the crumbs, maybe Jesus is saying “Huh. I never thought of it that way before . . . great is your faith!” But to us on the other side of the Trinity divide that’s not such a great solution, either, and for the same reason: if he were omniscient, how could she teach him anything?

Well. By now you probably get that it all this goes fascinating, age-old debate about what it means for Jesus to be fully human and fully divine, which all the creeds and orthodox Christianity affirm. One of the prime characteristics of being a human is that humans learn, and if Jesus is fully human, wouldn’t we expect him to learn as well? But on the other side of the coin, if he’s fully God, then how could he learn if he knew everything in the first place? He’d be like a seer who saw in advance that something bad was going to happen if he went somewhere, but did it anyway. “If you knew it, then why’d you do it?”

In the theology biz, we call this kind of a thing “a tension” and we make our hands go like this when we come up upon two things that seem to be mutually exclusive, and yet seem indubitably true nevertheless. And it’s important to recognize that this whole thing is far from academic . . . Jesus isn’t fully human, how can we identify with him or, equally important, how can he identify with us? The incarnation—the idea that somehow God became one of us and walked this earth, and experienced everything we do—is an incredibly powerful one that sets Christianity apart from other faiths. It goes to our basic understanding of the Christ: how can he tell us anything about life if he hasn’t experienced it for himself? And just how comforting is some distant parent, way up in the ether somewhere, whose power and knowledge and presence are far beyond even our wildest imagination?

To understand this passage, I think we have to remember the that this was written long before it became a common belief in the Christian community that Christ and God are one and the same . . . as we saw last week, Matthew called him Son of God and he probably meant it, in some literal fashion. As we also saw last week, as he stomped around all over the waters of Galilee’s sea, he could do some of the same stuff—namely make order out of chaos—that God could. But so could Peter, and it’s possible that Matthew believed Jesus was human in the fullest sense, a person with full connection to his maker, one that we as his disciples could participate in as well. And remember that Matthew was a Jew, and although the old canard that his gospel is the most Jewish is an oversimplification, it is true that the fact shows up in some interesting ways, and in the Hebrew Scriptures—that we call the Old Testament—God behaves in a number of ways we can’t square with our conception of God, things like crisping God’s enemies turning folks into pillars of salt.

In fact, another one of Matthew’s salient features, seen in other places in his gospel, is his conviction that Jesus’ mission comes to the Jews first, and only after his crucifixion and resurrection is the field thrown open to the Gentiles, in the “lo, I am with you always” speech. And in Matthew he says as much after his disciples—disgruntled that a lowly Gentile woman is bugging them—try to get rid of her. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he says, and it’s telling about Matthew’s theology that he doesn’t say it over in Mark. But she’s persistent, and comes and kneels at his feet so he can’t ignore her and says “Lord, help me.” And that’s when he gives out the dog comment, using an unfortunate term for gentiles that was making the rounds in Jewish circles in that day.

But she shoots right back at him, doubtless giving ol’ Peter in the process, she shoots right back and says: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” And it’s more than just a witty riposte, more than simply a clever rejoinder: it signals surrender, it signals submission, as in ok, you got me, I know my place . . . we’re dogs, but even dogs get the crumbs. She’s focused like a laser beam on her daughter’s health and well-being, if she has to grovel—as she has by falling to her knees—to save her.

And even this isn’t a particularly savory reading of the story, especially to modern ears conditioned by feminist thought . . . I can hear the grumbling now: why should a woman have to grovel at a man’s feet to get anything, some would say, and they’d be right, of course, but note what shines through even Matthew’s highly Jewish, highly male-centric gloss of this story. In spite of all that, in spite of all the “I came first to the children of Israel” stuff, Jesus still listens to her. And not only does he listen to her, but he reverses his position and dispenses some of God’s saving grace to this marginal person, this person from outside of God’s chosen children.

And look what he says when he does it: “Woman, great is your faith!” And this had to be a slap in the face to the other disciples, especially Peter, who’d been accused of having very little on several previous occasions, such as in last weeks episode. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And Matthew, perhaps the most Jewish of gospel writers, tells us that her daughter was healed instantly.

Last week, we talked about the nature of miracles, or a signs as I prefer to call them, and we said that to interpret a sign, we first start by figuring out what it points to. Here, the miracle, the healing, comes at the very end, and it’s a powerful pointer, to be sure . . . Jesus heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter, a powerful and potent sign that in the kingdom here and yet to come, even the most marginalized outsiders are welcome, are “deserving” of God’s grace. But there’s something more to this story . . . in a sense, it’s all a sign, the whole shootin’ match, maybe not a pointer to the kingdom per se, but instead to how we should connect with those to whom we minister. Jesus engages with her, he is changed by her, and in a sense, it’s just as much a ministry to him as it is to the Canaanite woman.

I might have told you this story before, but when I was going to seminary, I volunteered at a homeless shelter at First Presbyterian in downtown Atlanta . . . and the way we did it we would sit the men—the shelter was only for men—we’d sit the men down at these big, round tables and bring their food—boiled eggs, ham, and the best grits you ever had. And I felt all warm and tingly and righteous inside until the shelter director pointed out that standing and serving them was such an hierarchical way of doing things, that it was very clear by the distance between them that that we were in charge, that indeed we were slumming, and they were supplicants, not equals. And the director urged us to sit down at the tables and talk with the mainstreamed psychotics, the main-lining addicts and the other denizens of Atlanta’s mean streets, and let me tell you, it terrified me, they were so different from me, it was so hard to do, so that I did it only a couple of times.

And it’s really easy for us middle-class Christians to just make out a check, or drop some cans off at the food bank, and we do it all the time, I do it all the time. And don’t get me wrong: money and food is absolutely necessary for good agencies, both secular and faith-based, doing vital work. But this passage calls us to a different way, a more intense way. It calls us to interact with those to whom we minister, to treat them not as numbers, but as humans, face to face, peer to peer. It’s not easy, it never is when you’re interacting with folks who are different from you are. But Jesus did it, and look where it got him: it changed him, it opened him to new possibilities, and it will us as well. The few times I sat and talked with the folks at the mission, I was blessed four-fold.

Through this story, we are called to engage with those to whom we minister, to interact with them, to let them be a ministry to us, just as we are to them. As we evaluate our mission programs over the coming months with the eye toward the renewal of our congregation, I hope we will keep this in mind. Amen.

Walking on water is a common pop culture motif, and of course it’s all thanks to this story here in Matthew, and its counterparts in Mark and John . . . of all the miracles, all the signs and wonders Jesus does in Scripture, perhaps this one has lodged in the modern mind more securely than any other. So much so, in fact, that it’s become the most iconic miracle of all, if somebody’s getting just a little too big for their britches, you’re liable to hear—sarcastically, of course—“What does he think – he can walk on water?” Of course, the snide innuendo is that the person getting a bit arrogant thinks he’s Jesus. Thinking you’re Jesus, in turn, has been a hallmark of insanity, right up there with funny-hatted Napoleons with their hands in their shirts and all . . .

Walking on water has been a staple image in the arts, as well. Hal Ashby’s droll film of Jerzy Kosinsky’s “Being There,” Chance the gardener is a truly dull man who all around him think is some kind of savant, and in a climactic scene he walks on water, and of course, Ashby’s point is clear: Jesus, in reality an insignificant carpenter, is like Chance: a tabula rasa upon which we write whatever we want, whatever comforts us the most. That there is a bit of uncomfortable truth in this is seen in the split between so-called liberal and conservative Christians—the one camp sees Jesus as a crusader for social justice (just like them!) and the other sees him as the defender of traditional mores, which are, amazingly, just like theirs!

Currently, an interesting appropriation of the walking-on-water image is by the Vegas magician Criss Angel—suggestive name, no?—who is nicknamed “mindfreak” and very convincingly walks on the water in swimming pools and lakes and birdbaths and such. As he does so, he spread-eagles his arms in a cruciform shape that leaves no doubt about his affectation, as well as the fact that he seems to be mixing his metaphors just a bit, ‘cause I can’t find anything in Scripture that says Jesus was ever an angel . . .

Criss Angel aside, there’s a reason it’s resonated through the ages, and to see it we have to imagine it in our minds: he’s just returned from the mountain where he’s gone to pray to God. And don’t think that Matthew means anything different, either: the notion that Jesus and God were one and the same didn’t begin to take hold until a well after the Gospels were written, so Matthew pictures him as very naturally going up to pray. This is just after, of course, he’s dismissed the crowds that had gathered to hear him preach, and that he’d just fed in another miracle we call the feeding of the 5000.

And so what we have here is a back-to-back telling of two of Jesus’ most well-known miracles, or signs, as I prefer to call them. Because that’s what they are, really, pointers to other things, things that are not immediately evident, hidden even, or to yet come in the future. And so the interpretation of miracles—and I’ve said this before—the interpretation of signs has a lot to do with figuring out what they point to. What reality that is not particularly self-evident, or clear, or not yet here, does the miracle illustrate?

To put it in linguistic terms—for all us pointy-headed Presbyterian scholars, and just because I can—a sign consists of two parts: the signifier—that would be the miracle—and that which is signified, which is what we have to figure out. And in the case of the feeding of the 5000, it’s pretty obvious, at least on the surface: Jesus takes the few crumbs they have on hand and he blesses the bread and breaks the bread and gives them to the disciples, and they feed 5000 men and who knows how many women and children from 5 measly loaves and 2 scrawny fish. And that’s the signifier, and we must pay attention to Matthew’s wording, it’s very specific, he takes the bread and he blesses the bread and breaks the bread and gives it to his disciples . . . take, bless, beak, give . . . this signifier is the four-fold eucharistic actions; that which is signified is the future, and yet already present, right there beside the Sea of Galilee, messianic banquet in the kingdom of God . . . Each month, we repeat that sign as the sacrament we call the Lord’s Supper.

And immediately, he makes them get in a boat and head out over the Sea of Galilee while he prays, and this in itself is a sign . . . or at least a pointer to what we ourselves should do . . . as we do God’s work, as we are God’s hands and feet and arms and legs, it’s important to heed Jesus’ example and replenish our batteries on the mountaintop. He’s been feeding the people, preaching to the crowds, and he takes time to take time . . . we all need time to ourselves, time to recharge, and Jesus’ example leads the way. And by evening, he was up on the mountain by himself, but the disciples were in trouble . . . the winds were against them, the waves were battering the boat, and they were still far from the other side.

And let’s pause right there to think about what the sea represents . . . in the ancient mindset—and you’ve heard this from me before—but in the ancient mindset, the sea represented chaos, it represented misrule . . . predictability was all-important to the agricultural enterprise, and the sea represented the ultimate in unpredictability. It was a force that could be sunny and calm at one moment, and in the next instant rear up and strike you down . . . a storm could come up out of nowhere, the Sea of Galilee was notorious for that, and that’s what doubtless happened to the disciples in the boat that day.

And so when Jesus appears to them, walking on the water, it’s a sign, but of what? What does walking on the chaos mean? Well, what does walking on anything mean? What does it mean when we use it colloquially, when we say “she just walked all over ‘em?” Of course, it means she dominated them, beat them, took them down. Or, looking at it schematically, Jesus is on top of the sea, on top of the chaos. So, to the original hearer of this story, Jesus has conquered chaos, he’s walked all over it, he’s made it his own. Chaos has bowed under the heel—literally—of the Son of Man.

But does it mean that Jesus conquers chaos? What does it point to that he’s walked all over the sea? Who else do we know who’s done the same? Who else has tamed the sea, the primordial chaos? Well, God, of course, at the dawn of creation . . . remember? The earth was a formless void? Darkness covered the face of the deep? And God blew across the waters, and dry land appeared, appeared, and God called it Earth, and the waters God called Seas, and God saw that it was good. And so in our creation story, God tames chaos, and makes it his own. And now we have Christ doing the same . . . so what our sign points to is that Christ is somehow like God—remember Matthew probably didn’t think he was God—or that Christ is God’s child.

But the disciples didn’t get it, as usual, they thought he was a ghost, or in Greek a phantasm, and they cried out in fear . . . and immediately Jesus reassures them, saying take heart, or better Courage! It is I; Do not be afraid. And that’s part of the sign, too . . . do not be afraid. Christ comes to us, calming the chaos, striding over it, taming it, saying do not be afraid . . .

But Peter needs proof . . . and here we should acknowledge something else . . . whenever Peter appears, it’s like he’s a stand-in for all the disciples . . . more, perhaps: he represents something universal in the human condition, and here he’s clearly a doubter, a person who has not enough faith even to believe that it’s Jesus coming on the water toward them. Like doubting Thomas, he asks for proof, if it is you, command me to come to you . . . and I can imagine the heavy sigh with which Jesus does it, but he does do it, he commands Peter to come, and he does. And notice what’s happening here: Peter is doing the same thing as Jesus, he’s participating with him in the creative act of taming chaos, he’s co-operating with Christ in doing God’s work.

But not for long: when he sees the waves and the strong wind, he panics, he loses it. He begins to sink. Help me, Lord, he says . . . and immediately Jesus reaches out and pulls him up, but chastises him saying: you of little faith . . . why did you doubt? And this faith—and the Greek here can be translated also as belief—its belief in what? Not in Christ as his savior, as we often suppose, but its belief, its faith that he himself can stay on top of the water. It’s faith that he is—through Christ—a child of God. But Jesus reaches down and pulls him up, and steadies him, and all the disciples acknowledge it, and they worship him saying “Truly you are the Son of God.”

And we in our little boat—literally, here at Covenant, our sanctuary’s like an inverted boat—we in our little boat are being tossed around more than usual, these days . . . our people are aging, our numbers shrinking, and the church has lost much of its influence on our world. It’s changing so much around us, so quickly, that it is difficult to keep up, hard to know how to do our mission which is to spread the Gospel in thought, word and deed, to people who think so different, behave so different, have such different values. And so, we’re foundering, taking on water, sinking into oblivion or worse, irrelevance . . . and it’s difficult to keep our chins up, it hard not to be terrified as the chaos threatens to sweep over us and drown us out.

But there is a way . . . Jesus does come to us in the chaos, on the very waters that threaten to engulf us. And he commands us to join him there, to not stay in the boat, to not do what is natural and burrow under the seat-cushions, hiding our heads while the water gets inexorably higher and higher. Jesus commands us to come to him, to be out working in the world, so we do not sink with the boat.

But how do we do this? How do we respond faithfully to all the chaos, how do we meet the needs of the new generations while still being faithful to the old? By learning a new way of being church, a new way of responding to crises, a new way of being faithful to God . . . and we will be doing that, brothers and sisters, we’ll be doing that . . . because it’s not too late to teach old dogs new tricks, it’s not too late to learn new ways of thinking about how we do our mission and ministry.

But the key is getting out of the boat, removing ourselves from our old conceptions, taking those first tentative steps out onto the waters, walking and shaping and savoring the chaos for ourselves. And if we are afraid, all we have to do is call out, and our companion along the way, our guide across the waters, Jesus the Christ will reach out and lift us up. And before long—and not in some trivial, illusionary way like Criss Angel or Chance the Gardner—we’ll be walking on the waters as well. Amen.