Our texts today give us the comforting picture of God as a farmer tending to a vineyard, but they also contain ominous words about God breaking things down. What does it really mean for us to be broken by God?

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 27, year A
Mount Olive Lutheran Church
Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:7-15; Matthew 21:33-46

Loving and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

It’s hard to find the good news on a week like this.

This is one of those weeks when we share stories that confront us with judgment and violence. In both Isaiah and the psalm, we read about the Assyrian invasion of the Promised Land. The psalmist cries out for help, begging God to save Israel from a terrible foreign power: “Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; preserve what your right hand has planted!” But we know from history that God didn’t show up to save Israel. The northern kingdom was conquered. Its tribes were lost forever – and many of the people of Judah were also killed or enslaved. So we look to the Gospel reading for some comfort, but in Jesus’ parable, we encounter a tale of greed, betrayal, and murder. And just to make matters worse, Jesus’ explanation of the parable has been misused for centuries to hurt our Jewish brothers and sisters. There isn’t a lot of hope shining out of texts like these.

And this is also one of those weeks where it’s hard to see the good news at work in the world. Our nation has been hit with a series of heartbreaking disasters, but it’s not just the human suffering that’s hard to bear. It’s the fact that none of this is inevitable. We don’t have to live in a world with so much injustice and violence, but it’s the world we keep choosing for ourselves. From where we stand this week, it looks like storms are going to keep getting worse, and our responses are going to be insufficient to meet the needs of those most vulnerable to a changing planet. It looks like guns are going to maintain their chokehold on the spirit of our nation, and they’re going to be used to end human lives. It’s hard to find healing when we have every reason to believe that we’re going to let all of this happen again. It’s one of those times when it rings a little too true when we read that God “expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry.” It’s hard to find the good news on this kind of week.

But there is good news here. There is always good news here, and we see that in the faith of Isaiah, because as disaster looms, Isaiah tells us that God is a gardener. The prophet is staring down the world’s most fearsome army, and even though he believes that the coming invasion is a sign of God’s anger, he describes God not as a judge, nor a warrior, nor a king, but a humble tiller of the earth. And he calls this gardener his beloved, and sings about God’s marvelous works. Isaiah is sad and scared and full of fury about how things have gone wrong in his nation, but even then, he addresses God with a love song. He tells us that God looks like a farmer who sweats and toils in the hope that life will emerge from the promise of the fertile soil.

And the psalmist goes even further than Isaiah. The author of Psalm 80 doesn’t just talk about God preparing and tending a vineyard; he remembers how God once brought the vine of Israel out of Egypt. It’s this beautiful, intimate image of God’s hands gently holding the beloved community. God, the creator of the universe, personally carried them out of slavery so they might flourish in peace and freedom. Even on the brink of losing everything, the psalmist reminds the people of the promise that they are carried in love.

We too are like that little vine. We are so fragile, so very vulnerable to the elements and to those who would harm us. The good things we create together are so easily destroyed. All too often we don’t produce the good fruits that we hoped to make for the world. But God holds us in love, and cares for us, and gives us all a chance to grow. We feel our gardener’s love in the richness of the soil. We feel our gardener’s love in the unfurling of tender leaves. We feel our gardener’s love in the sun and the turning seasons, in the world’s abundant beauty that surrounds us and sustains us and brings peace to our troubled spirits. Because we have a God who gardens, we know that we are never alone.

Now, that promise doesn’t magically erase the fear that these stories carry for us. We can’t escape the fact that Isaiah, the psalmist, and even Jesus all use some violent words to describe God’s work. Today, we hear of God tearing down the wall around the vineyard, leaving it vulnerable to the world outside. We hear of God’s cornerstone breaking those who stumble on it, crushing anyone who gets in its way. Those are hard words. It’s much easier to sing about a God who heals than a God who breaks.

But what does it really mean to be broken by God? To answer that question in faith, we must look to the cornerstone, to Christ. When Jesus broke those around him, did he bring justice down on the heads of his opponents? Did he kill, or injure, or seek revenge? No! He broke down the self-righteousness of those who thought they were without sin. He broke open the lonely, corrupt lives of tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus. He shattered the worldview of the Roman centurion, who could look at a criminal hanging dead on a cross and proclaim, “truly, this was the Son of God.” He broke down the divisions between male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free. He gave up his own body to be broken, and in the end, he broke open the tomb, freeing us all from the jaws of death, forever.

In Christ, we see that even the boundary between God and humanity was forever destroyed, for when God became human in Christ, we learned that God is not just the gardener, but also the true vine that abides in us every day. Christ is with us and in us, teaching us that brokenness is how God brings life. The spirit breathes hope into the world’s most broken places, and breaks apart its callous triumphs. Like a farmer tilling the unyielding earth, God is at work in us, turning over our hard, unforgiving places until they are transformed into gentleness and possibility. When we try to close ourselves off, to harden our hearts, God is cracking us open to new realities, new relationships, new ways to live.

None of us want to be broken. In a world that demands success and strength, we hate the idea of letting ourselves be torn down. We are taught to hate the way of the cross. We might say we love the cross, but our world tells us to despise it, and we are very good at listening to the world. We want to keep our walls high and strong. We greedily hold on to the parts of ourselves that we know need to be pruned. Even when we can barely live with ourselves, we are afraid of letting go of what we have and living into what we could be. Change is a fearful thing, so when we hear that God is transforming us, we’re tempted to hear that as a threat and not as the promise that it is. We think that, in changing us, God is going to take things away from us, but that’s not right at all. The Gospel tells us that God is giving us the chance to give ourselves away. We want to flee the cross, to flee weakness and loss, but it is only in losing ourselves that we will find Christ growing in us. God is inviting us to see that the cross is the tree of life.

When we feel God tilling our hearts, we are being given a chance to let go of our defensiveness, to be free of our fear. We can hold tight to our hardness, we can choose to produce bitter fruit, or we can become the garden we were meant to be. We can delight in this beautiful vineyard Earth that God has planted for us. We can rejoice in the abundant mercies that sustain our every breath. In the living vine of Christ, we can grow fruit to feed the world, and in giving ourselves away, we can be fed with all our souls desire. We can let the good news burst through the life we have known, and nurture us into something more wonderful than we could ever imagine.

Sometimes it is hard to find that good news, but we know that, no matter what, we have a gardener who is making all things new. Out of our brokenness, God will let us grow. Out of our brokenness, God is already growing.

Amen.

God’s grace and goodness is hard to see with our bad eyesight both to the truth of God’s love and the truth of our brokenness; but God can heal eyes.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 25, year A
Texts: Matthew 20:1-15; Jonah 3:10 – 4:11

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Does my being good make your eyes sick?

That’s what the vineyard owner really asks. Jesus uses a common expression, and the translation, “Are you envious because I am generous?” is a fair interpretation. In that world, to have a diseased eye, an evil eye, a sick eye, was to be jealous or envious.

But stick with the colloquialism: it cuts to the heart of our problem with God. We simply don’t see as God sees. Maybe we don’t want to. Maybe we can’t. But our eyesight is diseased, clouded, and we don’t see God’s astonishing grace. We don’t see the truth about ourselves. We don’t see that God’s way is better than our way.

And so we don’t see a world that looks like the world God intends.

So what’s wrong with our eyesight, anyway?

Well, we can’t see this parable clearly.

First, we always reduce it to a moral tale about heaven after we die. How many times does this parable inspire the question, “You mean you could live your whole life however you wanted, and if on your deathbed you asked forgiveness, God would forgive?” The answer is, yes, of course. But that question itself exposes our eye disease.

Second, we’re pretty sure we’re the early workers in the day. We don’t often hear this with a sigh of relief, saying, “I feel like I got to this whole Christian life thing really late; I’m so grateful God’s love is fully for me.” We don’t see ourselves as latecomers to God’s work.

Third, whenever we hear this parable, we immediately criticize God’s economic sense. The first thing we think is, “fine – but what’s going to happen tomorrow? This guy’s not going to get anyone to work at six a.m., that’s for sure.” We can see all the problems such a way of doing things would have in the “real” world.

But this parable is about God’s realm now, about God’s justice today.

The parables envision life in God’s realm which exists here, now, wherever people follow God’s way. Heaven, where God’s realm also exists, can literally wait. Jesus has more important things for us to consider.

So we can’t dismiss this parable’s economic system. Maybe this is exactly how God means the world to work. What is right for this vineyard owner is that every worker gets a full day’s wage, every one of his workers’ tables gets food that night. Regardless of work hours. But, we protest, that just wouldn’t work.

Oh, yes? God says. Tell me, how well is your system working? Is everybody fed in your economic system? Everybody have a roof over their heads? Everyone have a job? Our system works well for those of us who, to borrow an old political barb, were born on third base and think we hit a triple. We were born in the richest country in the world, with an economy that’s pretty good for the middle class, even if we have worries. We’re pretty hard workers. But in the world economy, we’re definitely the folks that show up at 5 p.m and get all we want. Most of us have no comprehension of what it means to work harder than humanly possible to feed our family, to watch children suffer and die because we can’t provide. To work three shifts a day and still not have enough.

If we had healthy eyes, we’d see that for God, justice is when everybody eats tonight. When no child goes to bed aching with hunger. When all are satisfied by the world’s abundance. If we don’t see this as viable, that’s how diseased our eyes are.

We can’t see Jonah’s story clearly, either.

So here’s some context. Nineveh is the capital of Assyria. Assyria was no worse than other ancient world empires, but it was plenty wicked. It destroyed Israel, the northern kingdom, and subjugated Judah. Lots of innocent people were killed in Assyria’s wars, and Jonah’s people rightly hated them. So God asks Jonah to go into the heart of the beast, the capital city, and declare to them their sins.

You know what’s wrong with our eyesight? We don’t see that we’re Nineveh in this story, not Jonah.

Modern day Mosul, in Iraq, actually sits just across the river from where Jonah sat under his bush. After 9-11, in retaliation for the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people in our country, we went to war with Iraq. There was and is no evidence they were responsible for 9-11. But because, like Assyria, we have serious military power, we killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Even if Iraq had planned 9-11, hundreds of thousands for 3,000 is hardly just retaliation. This region continues to be unstable, and many in the Middle East would say we are the great enemy of their people.

Imagine God found a Jonah in Iraq today, and said, “go into the heart of the beast.”

“Go to Washington, D.C., and declare to that wicked people that God is judging them for their sin. Call them to repent.” If Jonah could even get through immigration here, how do you think he’d be received? Would we Americans do what the Ninevites do, admit our sin, repent in dust and ashes, ask God’s forgiveness? What do you think?

Now we can understand ancient Jonah’s desire for God to crush Nineveh. Imagine modern Jonah coming here, remembering his burned out village, the dead children in the streets. The destroyed hospital. How would today’s Jonah react if God said, “You know, I’m going to forgive these people”?

The harsh truth that we are Nineveh is even harsher when we realize how blind we’ve been, you and I. For the past 16 years we’ve gone about our lives, doing our things, trying to be good, helping where we could, and never really owning up to what our country did. We are good people. But we go about our days as if none of this really happened, as if we’re not individually to blame. And Iraq is only one of our great sins.

But here’s our hope: If we are Nineveh, God’s words to Jonah about Nineveh are God’s words about us.

“Should I not be concerned about America, that great country, in which there are more than 324 million persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Our blindly ignoring our participating in what we have done to so many other peoples is like not knowing our right hand from our left. And, thank God, there are lots of animals here. And, thank God, God won’t give us up. Much to Jonah’s rightful dismay, God can’t stop loving.

But it is worth remembering that Nineveh repented. They sought new eyes to see the truth, and new lives to live the truth. The cross tells us that God’s love comes first, even before we repent. But how can we live with ourselves once we start to see the truth, if we don’t also turn back to God?

We need God to heal our eyes, so our lives can also be healed.

Heal our eyes to see that God’s love is for all people, all animals, all creation, and it has nothing to do with who deserves what.

Heal our eyes to see how quickly we assume we deserve God’s love and how easily we assume others don’t.

Heal our eyes to see that our economic system is unjust and wicked, and that we stay blind to this because as long as we benefit, we don’t have the energy to change it.

Heal our eyes to see the truth about our nation so we can work with each other to make this a nation that lives up to our ideals of justice for all.

Heal our eyes to see as God sees, unable to throw anyone away, not even us, always reaching out in love, even if it costs everything.

Heal our eyes to see the truth and repent, turn back, begin to live in God’s realm, God’s way.

It’s hard to argue that we see a better way.

Imagine a world where everyone earned a full day’s wage, no matter if they were male or female, no matter the color of their skin, no matter where on the planet they were born. Where no child ever went to bed crying for the pain in their stomach. Where all had homes to shelter in.

Imagine a world where there was no revenge, no retaliation, no destruction of enemies. Where the cycle of hatred and killing finally stopped, broken, no further steps. And reconciliation and love broke out between all peoples.

I’d really like to live in a world like that. I’d really like to see a world like that.

So would the Triune God. It’s what God’s realm on this earth is meant to be.

So, let us pray God give us eyes to see, and wills to do, that God’s realm would actually come among us.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Forgiveness is non-negotiable to God, and that’s our hope for ourselves. It’s also our challenge as we grow into Christ in our lives.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 24, year A
Texts: Matthew 18:21-35; Genesis 50:15-21

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Forgiveness is never about the math.

Forgiveness can’t be calculated or negotiated, measured or limited, written up in codicils. There are no loopholes. Forgiveness is all or nothing.

That’s what Jesus says.

We’re always negotiating forgiveness, framing it, setting boundaries. This parable shakes that all up and frightens us to the core. Just as the Lord’s Prayer makes us wince. “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us”? We have to pray that? Forgive from the heart as you have been forgiven, or you have no part in God? That’s what this parable says?

Virtually every conversation among Christians about forgiveness immediately moves to negotiation and compromise, rules and boundaries, seeking any options other than Jesus’ clarity.

Because Jesus is perfectly clear here: forgiven people forgive. Period.

We can negotiate all we want. We just won’t be talking about forgiveness then.

There’s no negotiating with Jesus about how often to forgive.

Peter seems reasonable. Seven times forgiving someone who repeatedly hurts you? Maybe James keeps making fun of him for that “Rocky” nickname. How many times does he have to forgive that nonsense? Who but a saint would forgive seven times?

No, seventy-seven times, Jesus says. And this isn’t a negotiation. But it is an insight into human nature. If you start counting to that kind of number, you’ll keep forgetting your forgiveness count.

So, unlimited forgiveness. No loopholes or opt-outs. No matter how often someone hurts us, if we are following Christ, if we are Christ, God asks us to forgive them.

There’s no negotiating with Jesus about forgiving but not forgetting.

Somehow this ridiculous phrase always comes up with us. But where does it ever say in Scripture that we’re asked to forget as well as forgive? The only one in the Scriptures who forgives and forgets is God. So we can’t dodge forgiving using this excuse.

This is another place for Jesus’ seventy-seven times. Every time we remember someone has hurt us, every time we see their face, we’re hurt all over again. We forgive, but then we think of it again. We forgive, but remember that we still hurt.

So, Jesus says, forgive it again. And again. And again. Seventy-seven times. As long as it takes for the hurt to be lost to you, unimportant, nothing. No keeping score or nursing past wrongs. If we are following Christ, if we are Christ, God asks us to forgive every time we remember the hurt.

There’s no negotiating with Jesus about commanding others to forgive.

The Church has long hurt people with this. People in power smugly tell someone who is abused that they have to forgive. People with no grasp of the pain involved glibly tell someone they’re sinful if they don’t forgive who hurt them. All in the name of Christ.

Listen: Jesus doesn’t permit this. Look at his story. Forgiveness is between the king and his slave, no one else. The king needs to deal with this man’s inability to forgive.

It’s not our place to tell others they have to forgive. As Joseph says, we’re not in the place of God. Forgiveness is God’s call, and only God can draw any of us into a new heart able to forgive. If we are following Christ, if we are Christ, we don’t get to tell others how to forgive. Only God does.

There’s no negotiating with Jesus on a proper order for forgiveness to happen.

We love this tactic. We’d be glad to forgive, if and when the other repents. If and when the other apologizes. If and when we think they’re sincere. There’s an order to this. First, they repent. Then they ask forgiveness. Then, and only then, we forgive.

But that’s not Jesus’ command. Jesus says, “Forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Period. We’re never told to wait for them to do something. Jesus says, “love one another as I have loved you.” Period. Jesus never gives preconditions for our self-giving love.

If we are following Christ, if we are Christ, God commands us to forgive, regardless of what the other one does.

And in fact, our whole life now and forever depends on this. Because the Triune God in Christ has utterly destroyed our neat little forgiveness plan, and saved our lives.

The cross overturns it all.

At the cross, the Son of God, carrying our lives in his body and filled with the life of the Triune God, forgives the entire cosmos. Without anyone asking or doing anything.

At the cross, God says, “first, I forgive you. First, I love you.” Jesus didn’t look out from the cross and say, “before I die for you all, have you all repented? Are you all sincerely sorry?”

This is God’s pattern of forgiveness, the 10,000 talent forgiveness of the parable: God loves us beyond comprehension and dies to prove that love. Dies to break our hearts. Dies to forgive and heal us.

Then, risen from the dead, the Son of God does what the Son of God always does: invites people to follow that love and repent, invites people to love, invites people to become Christ themselves.

If we follow Christ, if we are Christ, this is our pattern. Forgive first, because God does. Love first, because God does. If the other repents, asks forgiveness, tries to do better, or doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. The healing act that saves us is God flipping our negotiation on its head and forgiving us into life. The healing act that will save the world is when we do the same.

This is God’s truth that changes us forever.

This is what Christ wants us to see at the cross. That once we grasp the astonishing love of God for us, how beloved we are, how God forgives before we even figure out our mess, once that actually touches us, it will be impossible for us to act like this person in the story.

Our hearts of stone are thus replaced with hearts of love, just as we prayed at the start of this liturgy. We’ll have no interest in doing forgiveness math, negotiating limits or boundaries. Instead, we’ll find such joy in offering forgiveness that we’ll understand why it’s God’s way, too. It’s how relationships are healed, life between people is restored, and hope is brought into reality.

Replace our hearts, O God, with hearts of love, that we might become Christ’s forgiving love to others, and find our true joy.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

The way of Christ, the way of the cross, is the pattern, the blueprint for our truly human lives and the pattern, the blueprint for the life of the whole cosmos.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen 
Holy Cross Day
Texts: John 3:13-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-24 (also with reference to John 1, other parts of John 3, and Philippians 2)

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

In the middle ages many important churches had an ornate, precious box with a splinter inside.

It was believed to be a piece of Jesus’ actual cross. In the 380s, the pilgrim Egeria saw the whole cross at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It was encased in silver to prevent pilgrims who came to venerate the cross from biting out pieces to carry away. Somehow churches in Europe still often ended up having tiny pieces of wood reverently coffined for pilgrim prayer and adoration. Some suggest that if every piece on display in those churches were brought together, you’d have enough wood for Noah’s Ark.

We might chuckle at such naiveté to trust the holy origins of one’s special toothpick. But we might have similar problems with our view of the cross.

Having a relic suggests a value in the past, that clinging to a physical piece of history connects one to that history. Is that different from a theology of the cross that focuses only on the past? Many of our hymns that speak of the cross could lead one to assume that our focus on Christ’s cross is that of a remembered history, a past event that secures our place in heaven. We might not cherish tiny bits of wood, but if the cross is only a history to us, confirming a promise of heaven when we die, we’re not very different from our medieval forebears.

But if we read John’s witness, we see the grace of a cosmic, present, eternal, and transformative view of the cross that shapes not just our lives but the life of the universe.

John teaches us that the way of the cross, the way of Christ, is also the way of all things.

The Son whose death on the cross is the heart of John 3 is also the Logos, the Word of God present at creation in John 1, now enfleshed as one of us. As John uses Logos, it carries the meaning of pattern or blueprint. So God’s Blueprint present at the creation, God’s Blueprint who is also God, is now Jesus, the Christ, the human. So the way of Christ, what we see in Jesus, must also be the pattern, the blueprint for the Creation.

That means the blueprint of the universe is that power is only found in weakness, in letting go. The blueprint of the universe is that beauty is found in what is broken. The blueprint of the universe is that wisdom is found in what looks foolish. The blueprint of the universe is that life is found in dying.

Had Jesus lived another time, the symbol of this pattern might not have been a cross. But John claims that the deeper pattern is always God’s sacrificial love for creation. This is God’s heart John says the Son of God reveals for us, so this self-giving, dying, powerless, broken love is also the way the world is meant to work.

And who are we to deny this?

Every evil done since time began has been done by power, violence, domination. By people seeking their own good above others, forcing others into their way. And every good ever done since time began arose out of love, and true love is always self-giving. Everything holy and good has come from people offering themselves to others for hope and life.

Paul agrees that this pattern is not only God’s way. In Philippians he explicitly says it is our blueprint, too. To have the same mind and heart as Christ Jesus and empty ourselves out of love for the other, love for the world. This is how God means the world to work.

We can’t say God’s wrong until we start to live this path ourselves. Allow our world view of might makes right, be in control, take charge, all that pattern, to fall away, and open ourselves to the pattern of losing to win, dying to live. The Son of God went to the cross to prove this is God’s path and our path for the life of all things.

And it is all things John is talking about. Everything is part of this pattern. So everything is part of God’s love.

John’s Gospel claims that the cross is the sign of the heart of God for the whole universe.

Much like our theology of the cross is often too narrow, so often is our view of John 3:16. Painted on signs at sports venues, plastered on car bumpers, this verse has become an invitation to a personal view of salvation. “God so loved you,” not “God so loved the world.”

But John actually says “God so loved the cosmos” here. It means what you think. John 3:16 is about God’s love for all the universe. John declares that in the cross of Christ we see God’s love for the whole of creation, all galaxies and stars, all cells and mitochondria, all things. The cross proves God’s love for everything God has made.

So not only is God’s self-giving love the pattern for how the universe works, it’s the heart of God for all things. Any view of the cross and resurrection that doesn’t account for God redeeming the entire creation in all its breadth and depth is just not big enough. It’s like having a piece of wood in a fancy box, instead of living in a healed creation, now and forever.

Paul figured this out. And he knew it would meet resistance.

The world’s ways of power and exclusion and control can’t cope with an all-powerful God who gives up power, a God of life who offers to die to show the universe its pattern and hope.

Some will call it foolishness, Paul says. Others will trip over this, and won’t accept it.

But we are gathered tonight to remember that the Triune God who made all things took on our bodies and carried such self-giving, foolish love to death on the cross. We celebrate a meal based on that death, certain that this same Son of God is risen, thus proving that this pattern of the cross brings eternal and present life.

We might fear it’s foolish. We might stumble over it. But we’re here. Because we know it’s true.

And so tonight, we ask only to be shaped to this pattern.

We seek the Spirit’s new birth, also promised in John 3, to make us new beings formed to God’s blueprint of self-giving love.

Because when we’re lined up to God’s pattern, we’re in harmony with the pattern of the universe. And our lives begin to vibrate and sing the song of the undying sacrificial love of the Creator who turns every worldly expectation upside down because we’ve actually been upside down all along and want to be turned back to God’s way.

So we remember our Lord’s death tonight, as we do each Eucharist. We make the sign of the cross tonight, as we do each Eucharist. We do it to remember God’s blueprint, the pattern of the Christ, the pattern of the universe, the pattern of abundant life that God wants all to know.

And that’s a pretty good reason to celebrate the feast day of the Holy Cross, come to think of it.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Shame tells us that something about us is unworthy of life and love.  Human beings wield shame as a weapon to control one another, but Jesus teaches us that there is no room for shame in the body of Christ. 

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 23, year A
Texts: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

Let us pray.  Loving and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer.  In the name of the Father, and the + Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Shame is a powerful weapon.  It tells the shamed person that there is something about themself that they should hate.  When we wield shame against someone else, we tell that person they are somehow unworthy of belonging, respect, or even life itself.  And we are living in a golden age of public shaming.  Our world loves to use social media to subject wrongdoers to the judgment of millions.  On facebook and twitter, we define ourselves and our values by the objects of our scorn.  The internet has made this easy, but the cross, the pillory, and the scarlet letter all testify that human beings have long known how to use humiliation to control each other.  The history of the church shows how often we try to demonstrate our righteousness by what, and who, we reject.  We’ve long acted as if we could exorcize our own sins by pinning them to a scapegoat and casting that person out of our midst.

But Jesus says that shame and rejection have no place in the church.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus recognizes the power of people to hurt one another.  We might be knit together by the Holy Spirit, but we too often treat each other in ways that have little to do with patience, humility, and love.  So Christ says that, when someone in your community hurts you – because someone in your community is going to hurt you – you shouldn’t air your grievance with them in the court of public opinion.  You shouldn’t avoid that person, or gossip about them, or work to drive them out.  Your sacred responsibility is to approach them in private, and to lovingly try to repair the hurt together.  If the other person won’t accept what you are saying, then invite in a few other trusted people, who can help the two of you discern the nature of the problem.  If the other person truly is doing harm, and if they still refuse to acknowledge it, then you need to engage the church to try to fix things.

That all sounds great, but then Jesus drops this scary-sounding line: “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  Historically, that’s been read as though Jesus is telling us to kick the unrepentant person out of the church.  In living memory, we have used this text to excommunicate people.  But Jesus doesn’t say anything about exile or excommunication.  He doesn’t say anything about public humiliation, or the severing of ties.  He says to treat the wrongdoer as a Gentile or tax collector.  And how did Jesus treat Gentiles, tax collectors, outsiders, sinners, and everyone else whom the world said he should reject?  He reached out to them.  He ate with them.  He healed them, and he loved them, and he died for them.

In his words and in his life, Jesus teaches us that change has to grow out of relationships.  It is only in love that we can become something new.  If we go about it in any other way, if we try to bludgeon someone into repentance, we will only further wound the body of Christ.  There is no room for humiliation, isolation, or expulsion in the church.  If we act from a place of judgment and shame, instead of a place of fierce, persistent love, we will destroy ourselves.

Because we see in Ezekiel that shame is paralyzing.  When this passage takes place, Ezekiel had already been a prophet for seven years.  For seven long years, he had been trying to convince his people that they were headed down the wrong path, but they weren’t ready to listen.  They didn’t want to believe that they bore some responsibility for the way that things were going terribly wrong in their world.  They covered their ears to Ezekiel’s hard truths.  But in this passage, we see the reality finally sinking in.  Ezekiel’s people at last acknowledge that they have sinned.  But then, they get stuck there.  They cry out, “our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?”

How then can we live.  The weight of their shame is destroying their very will to go on.  They feel so ashamed of themselves that they aren’t working to change their lives, they aren’t trying to return to God – they just want to curl up and die.  Ezekiel has finally achieved his goal, he has finally opened the eyes of his people, but his long-awaited victory rings hollow.  He witnesses that shame doesn’t work, because a message of shame is a message of death.

Shame kills because it tells us that there is something about us that can never be fixed or accepted.  It tells us that we have something to hide, that there’s something that could reveal that we’re not really worthy of life or love.  Shame is that thing that, when we face it, makes us cry out, “How then can we live?”  Shame chokes human spirits, and shame has ended far too many human lives.  It leads us only to death and despair.

So God gives Ezekiel a new message, a word of love to temper his words of judgment.  When God’s people are hurting, God says, no, I don’t want you to hate yourselves.  I don’t want you to suffer for your sins.  I don’t want to lose you.  I want you to return to me and find abundant new life.  Because God’s forgiveness is so much bigger than our shame.  The terrifying, wonderful truth about grace is that there is nothing about us that God finds irredeemable.  There is nothing about us that God finds unlovable.  God sees both our shining goodness and our ugliest, most secret places of shame, and God loves us in our entirety.  God doesn’t want us to keep making the same mistakes, but there’s nothing we could ever do to make ourselves the least bit more or less worthy of God’s love.  And that means that shame has no place in our relationship with God.  In Christ’s resurrection, we are free from the power of death, and so we are free from the power of shame.

This is the way that the gospel calls us to love one another – for if God does not shame us, then how could we ever shame each other?  As Paul writes, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”  God’s law may call on us to change, to confess, to repent, but the entire purpose of that law is love.  Only love has the power to truly transform us.  Only love brings healing and wholeness to the body of Christ.  This means there is no room for shame in our shared life in Christ.  There is no room for shame with God, and there is no room for shame with each other.

Christ says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.”  We encounter the good news in each other.  When we witness to the saving love of Christ, we have the power to free one another from shame.  When we love each other in all our sinful humanity, we loosen our bonds of death and despair, and bind ourselves together into a community of life.

And that is what it means to live as the body of Christ.

Amen.