The Third Sunday of Advent
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
Two Men Went to Church
Hespeler, October 1, 2023 © Scott McAndless – World Communion
Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16, Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32
In the gospels we are told that, when Jesus went down to Jerusalem for what turned out to be the last week of his life, he spent a great deal of time in and around the temple being challenged by various religious authorities. They would come up to him with these impossible questions, questions like, “Should we pay taxes to the emperor?” or “Who would be the husband of a woman married seven times in the afterlife?”
Looking to Trap Him
They didn’t really ask because they were sincerely looking for an answer to these conundrums. They were asking because they were sure that he would not be able to answer or that he would a mistake in his answer. They wanted to catch him, to put him in his place and show themselves as smarter than him. But, in a stunning display of wisdom and cleverness, he came up with the perfect answer every time, often putting them in their place instead.
But that long series of challenges finally comes to an end in the reading that we had this morning from the Gospel of Matthew. And what an end it is! In this passage, Jesus finally turns the tables on all his challengers. They tried to burn him, and he gives them third degree burns instead.
Jesus Turns the Tables
He does that first of all with a question about John the Baptist that he knows they cannot answer. He asks them whether John’s teaching and baptism came from God or human sources. It’s the same kind of strategy that they had tried against him with the tax question. No matter what they reply, they know that they will get in trouble. But where Jesus was smart enough to get out of their trap, they aren’t. They just have to admit that they don’t know and do so in front of everybody! Man, do you need some ice for that burn?
But it is what Jesus says after that that particularly interests me here today. He ends this whole series of stories with a real challenge that I do not think is only directed at his immediate antagonists. I suspect that this one is directed at us as well.
A Tale of Two Sons
He does it – and isn’t this typical of Jesus – by telling a story. It is a story about two sons that ends with a question: “Which of the two did the will of his father?” And the thing is that that is not even a difficult question to answer. The answer is obvious, and they get it right away. The first son actually did something that his father asked and the second one didn’t. It is clear that the first one did the will of his father, and they immediately say so.
But of course – and this is also typical of Jesus – there is a complication in the story. Because it turns out that the second son may not have done what his father asked, but he did say the right thing. He didn’t have the reality of correct action, but he did have the appearance of it. He may not have had the substance of obedience, but he had the form.
Appearance and Reality
And the problem is that, in our world, we tend to put more importance on saying the right thing than doing the right thing. We are more interested in appearance than reality and we applaud form over substance. For proof of that, just look at the way that we celebrate celebrities and how we respond to the promises and platitudes of politicians. They are all about form and appearance and saying the right thing, rarely about substance, reality and doing the right thing.
And so, Jesus is calling out the shallowness of his challengers with this little story. He is letting them know, in particular, that they are rejecting some people, treating them as less valuable and important than them and they are doing it for unimportant and surface reasons.
Let the Story Challenge You
You should not listen to this story without allowing it to challenge you to rethink how you – probably without even thinking about it – judge and reject other people for reasons that are unimportant and based merely on appearances and surfaces.
But perhaps the story doesn’t have quite the impact on us as it did on the people in Jesus’ time. After all, not too many parents today expect their children to do work in the fields for them. So perhaps we need to update the story to something that we can relate to a little easier.
Perfect Church Attender?
So, what if Jesus told the story like this: two men went to church on a Sunday? The first man, a very distinguished gentleman, was perfectly behaved. He stood when everyone else stood and then sat when he was supposed to. When there were hymns to be sung, he stood and held the hymn book at a perfect 30⁰ angle and mouthed the words in perfect sync with everyone else – not actually singing, of course, so it’s not to draw any attention to himself.
When the service was over, he politely greeted a few people and shook a few hands and left. After leaving, he never said anything about where he had spent his Sunday morning hour to a single soul and did his best to make sure that nothing that had been said or sung during the worship service had an impact on the way that he lived his life.
The Social Media Guy
When the second man entered into the church, the first thing he did was take out his cell phone and post where he was on social media. Right before the start, he was still taking a few selfies of himself in front of the organ pipes and one of the stained-glass windows that he tagged as being particularly “rad.” He then rushed to his seat as the service began to film the people singing the opening hymn.
The people sitting near him particularly noticed how he was constantly looking down at his phone while the preacher was preaching. They tisked to one another behind his back, but I don’t think that they noticed that he was posting some of his favourite quotes from the sermon on his twitter feed as he listened.
When the service was over, he tried to speak to practically everyone who was there, asking them (most intrusively some of them thought) how they were going to put the Gospel lesson of the day in practice over the next week. When he finally left (much to the relief of the woman who had the job of locking up for the day), he said that it was because he had to go and do what the Gospel had said.
Who did the Will of Jesus?
So, let me ask you, which of those two did the will of his lord and saviour Jesus? The answer should be clear, right? Obviously, it has got to be the one who shared his experience of the word of God and who tried his best to live by it. That’s exactly what Jesus was looking for in a disciple.
But who, do you suppose, would we be more inclined to see as a good Christian? Most churches I have known would be much more inclined to recognize the first man as a good Christian than the second.
Most churches seem to frown on the use of cell phones during the service, some outright banning them, in an effort to protect the reverence of the occasion. And most churches that I have known have struggled with finding a place for anyone who challenges the way that things have always been done or disturbs the status quo.
Do We Focus on the Wrong Things?
But when we think that way, what are we focussing on, on surface matters or on what is actually going on in someone’s heart? And it goes deeper than that. Our obsessions with maintaining proper reverence in worship may be killing us.
We’re living in an age, after all, when information does not spread like it once did. All of the ways in which people once became involved in churches – by seeking them out when they moved into town or when they came to some transition in their life – don’t really work in the same way anymore.
Most people (and especially younger people) make their first contact with churches in the same way that they connect with most things: online, and especially through social media. And, while churches are creating more and more content in digital format these days, members seem hesitant to share that content with people outside the church. Yes, we could probably learn a great deal from the second worshipper in my story. The question is, will we?
A Bigger Challenge
So, Jesus challenges his opponents to rethink how they focus on the things that don’t matter to God – the surface things – when they judge other people. But if you think he would let them off easy with just that challenge, you’ve got another think coming. What he says next really must have hit them hard.
“Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him, and even after you saw it you did not change your minds and believe him.’”
The Worst of the Worst!
And I would just love to have been there to see how they squirmed when he said that to them. He just named the two groups of people who, as far as they were concerned, were the worst members of their society. For them, a tax collector was the worst thing that a man could be because he collaborated with the hated Roman occupiers. And a prostitute was the worst thing that a woman could be because of what she trafficked in. And yet Jesus has just said to them that these very people will proceed them when it comes to entry into God’s kingdom when it arrives.
There is no question that Jesus made this statement in a way that was calculated to upset his listeners. He wanted to disturb them with the very idea that the people that they thought were unacceptable were completely acceptable to God, certainly more acceptable than them. And that raises the question of how we ought to read this saying of Jesus today.
Tax Collectors and Prostitutes for Us
We, obviously, would not have the same reaction to the phrase “tax collector” that they would have had. We might all have various reactions to people who are employed at Revenue Canada. I realize that many of us do not really enjoy paying our taxes. But we do not think that there is anything essentially morally objectionable about people just because they work for that agency.
Some of us might have a negative reaction to the idea of sex workers, but even there, we today tend to be more sympathetic to people who are employed in that industry than people were in Jesus’ day. We are a bit more inclined to get upset at those who purchase their services or profit from them than the workers themselves.
Would Jesus let Us off the Hook?
So, the literal words to his opponents here, certainly do not have the same emotional impact on us today that they did on the original crowd. But I’m just warning you that I don’t think that we should let ourselves off the hook because of that. If Jesus were among us today, he certainly wouldn’t do that for us.
No, the Jesus that we encounter in the scriptures would probably put his finger on the very group of people that each and every one of us would be most scandalized to think that they might be ahead of us in the kingdom of God.
What Might Jesus Say?
There are certainly some Christians today in our world that I am pretty sure Jesus would look straight in the eye and say to them, “You know, the people in the LGBTQ community are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you because they choose to be true to who I created them to be, even at great cost.” And then he would step back and watch as they sputtered and complained and protested about their own righteousness. That was exactly the spot that Jesus loved to put people in.
But, at the same time, I also know that Jesus wouldn’t be about to let those Christians, and there are many of them, who don’t have issues accepting people in the LGBTQ community off the hook. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus went up to them and said, “You know, all of those people who get caught up in conspiracy theories around vaccines and election fraud and the World Economic Forum? They will be ahead of you in the kingdom of God, not necessarily because they believe all the right things, mind you, but because they have at least realized just how messed up the world’s system is.”
Equal Opportunity Offender
Jesus, you see, was an equal opportunity offender. He was always ready to say the thing that would shake you into understanding that he and God were much more open to accept someone different than you are. And, though I suppose we’ll never quite catch up to Jesus and God by being that accepting, never forget that he told these parables and said these things to push us in that direction.
Who are the last people you could imagine getting into the kingdom of God before you? Well, today, with this scripture, Jesus is giving you a little bit of an elbow and whispering into your ear. “Hey, did you know that that person is actually ahead of you in line for God’s kingdom?” And he may leave you to figure out why that is, but the main reason is that God’s grace is always much bigger than our wildest imaginations.
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The Parable of the Next Day in the Vineyard
Hespeler, September 24, 2023 © Scott McAndless – Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45, Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16
You know that there had to be at least one in the crowd. I’m not saying that this person was a wealthy landowner themselves. For the most part, it seems as if the people that Jesus attracted and who filled his crowds tended to be on the lower end of the economic scale.
They were the ones who loved it when he said things like, “Blessed are you who are poor.” (Luke 6:20) But even in such a crowd, there are always some who are extraordinarily sympathetic to the concerns of the landowners and the wealthy, sometimes so much that they can forget the needs of other people who struggle like them.
A Conversation
And so, I suspect that this person, whoever they were, struck up a conversation with somebody else as they left the crowd following this particular parable. “You know,” they said, “that is all well and good. In that parable of Jesus, at the end of the day, all of the people who had worked in the vineyard went home with one denarius in their purses.
“And I know that one denarius is not really a huge amount of money, but the thing is that it is enough. It is enough for one person to get by for the day – to put some food in their belly and perhaps have a decent place to sleep for the night.
“I want them to have that as much as anybody else. Lord knows that I appreciate it when I have a denarius in my purse at the end of the day! But there is just one problem with how Jesus told that story. He said it took place in the kingdom of heaven. But I’m wondering if that foolish landowner still found himself living in the kingdom of heaven the next day.”
An Alternate Parable
With that, the critic cleared his throat and began to do a passable imitation of Jesus’ manner of speaking when telling parables.
“Ahem, for the kingdom of earth is like a landowner who was a very successful vintner. He had done so well selling his wines that he had been able to purchase many vineyards. And so, after one very successful day of paying unskilled transient workers to gather his grapes, he was hardly done! The next day there was another vineyard that was just perfectly ripe and ready to harvest.
Looking for Workers
“And so, he went out early the next morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. He went directly to the place in the market where it was customary for those who were looking for work to gather. And, much to his surprise, he saw that not one single person was there.
“He didn’t think much of it at first. He just assumed that, maybe after they had all been paid a full denarius the previous day, they had eaten too well and then slept better in a decent bed. Maybe they had just slept in a bit. He decided to come back a little bit later.
“When he returned at nine a.m., however, there was still no one to be found. Much to his consternation, he also found the same thing at noon and then at two p.m. The landowner began to worry. The very thought of all of his beautiful grapes at the peak of ripeness hanging from the vines in the heat of the day disturbed him. Surely many of them would be at risk of spoiling and being useless to him!
Everyone Finally Shows Up
“Finally, he returned to the marketplace one last time at five o’clock. And what do you think? There were so many workers there looking for a job that he suspected that they had come from many of the surrounding towns as well.
“And what could the landowner do? He had no choice but to hire them all for a denarius and send them out into his vineyard. But it was too late, and the sun soon set. Despite there being so many workers, they had barely managed to gather even a quarter of the grapes and the rest were lost.
“And the landowner grumbled against the workers saying, ‘Verily it is true that nobody wants to work anymore!’”
There is Another Parable
I would suggest to you that, if you want to appreciate Jesus’ original Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, you need to understand that there is also another parable – what I like to call the Parable of the Next Day in the Vineyard, that we need to listen to.
And make no mistake that the Parable of the Next Day in the Vineyard is a story that is being told. It is being told constantly in our media, in our think tanks and on just about every level of our society. In fact, the story is so pervasive that we just assume that it is not a story at all, that it is just a statement of how things are.
The Stories we “Know”
I mean, you hear that story, and you say, “Well, of course, that is exactly how it would turn out. If you actually decided to pay everyone in society the same amount – basically enough money to live on – and you made it clear that you would pay them the same no matter how much or how little they worked, we all agree that the inevitable result of that would be that everyone would work as little as possible.”
We also know that other similar stories that we tell are true in the same way. We all “know” that if you give people who are unhoused a large amount of money, they will just spend it all on drugs and alcohol. We “know” that if you let office workers do their jobs from home they will definitely slack off work. We also have various stories that we tell about minority groups – stories that I won’t repeat here because they contain some very damaging ideas – but they are also stories that we think of as true in much the same way.
They are Stories
But, despite all of this, we need to understand that these are stories – not established facts. And, yes, they are stories that sound true and plausible. They have a certain logic to them that we can follow. They especially make sense to us because they fit with the worldview that we have already accepted. But all of this doesn’t necessarily make them true.
The Basic Income Pilot
In 2017, as you may recall, the Liberal Government of Ontario set up a Basic Income Pilot Project. The idea behind this project was to give individuals $13,000 a year and couples $19,000 over three years to see what happened.
It was not an enormous amount of money. It was sort of like a denarius a day in Jesus’ world – enough to cover the basics, but little more. But participants in this study would receive that amount whether they worked or not and no matter how much they worked (at least with only a small amount being clawed back from their earnings).
In many ways, that pilot project would have been a way of figuring out whether Jesus’ Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard or my Parable of the Next Day in the Vineyard was a better reflection of reality. We could have found out what really happens when you pay people enough to live on no matter how much they work. We could have found out whether it was reality or just a story.
The Cancelation
But, as you probably also heard, we did not get to find out. The government changed and the new government (despite having promised otherwise) cancelled the pilot after it had only run a few months. The government explained it by saying, that “instead of putting money into the experiment, which cost an estimated $115 million over three years, it would “focus resources on more proven approaches.”
Proven Approaches?
And, I don’t know about you, but that sure sounded like good news to me. What, do you mean to tell me that there are proven approaches that can be applied in order to lessen the problem of poverty in our society and the government knows what those approaches are?
If that is the case, though, then how is it that over recent decades the problems of poverty and income disparity have only gotten worse in our society? If we have proven approaches, either we aren’t using them or they aren’t working, so that hardly makes it seem as if they are proven!
But there is, of course, another possibility. Is it possible that the pilot was cancelled because people have already decided that they know what is true – that The Parable of the Next Day in the Vineyard isn’t just a story, but the truth?
Homelessness Study
There is another study that was recently completed by the University of British Columbia that involved giving homeless people a lump sum of $7,500. Now this study is not absolutely conclusive. Some people have raised some questions about how the participants were chosen. But the overall conclusions at the very least certainly called into question the story that our society had generally accepted about the housing crisis.
The people who received the money did not act according to our society’s dominant story. They did not waste the money on drugs or alcohol. They used it to do sensible things like pay off debts, secure housing and put themselves in better positions to get jobs.
Are our Stories Fairy Tales?
All of this makes me wonder whether the dominant stories that we tell about poverty and the housing crisis, about addiction and “nobody wants to work anymore” are just fairy tales that we tell to make sure that nothing really changes in the way we have organized society and to make us feel okay about that. Most of all, it suggests to me that we just don’t want to know that those stories may not be entirely true. We’d rather just keep believing our comfortable stories.
The Genius of Jesus
And this is where I want to bring us back to the amazing genius of the man we call our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. When he came along preaching about something he called “the kingdom of God” or “the kingdom of heaven,” he was actually questioning everything about how his society was organized. The kingdom of God was not merely about how things would be someday in heaven, it was about how things could be radically different here on earth right now.
But his greatest genius was in how he chose to present such a radical message. He knew that it wouldn’t work just to say radical things like, “We shouldn’t just organize our entire society around the needs of the wealthy landowners who want to make profits from their vineyards.” Or “We should make sure, no matter what, the people have enough to live on.” People would have just laughed and dismissed him as a dangerous radical.
The Power of Stories
That is exactly why Jesus told stories instead. Stories have this incredible power; they can help us to imagine how the world could be different.
And, yes, it is true that no story can answer all of the problems that come with imagining a different world. Yes, it is probably true that you couldn’t build a functioning economy just by paying every worker a denarius a day no matter how much work they did. You would probably have to build some incentives into the system.
But, at the same time, by telling a story of how things could be different, of how things could look completely different when you saw them from the point of view of the workers in the field instead of the wealthy landowner, the story that Jesus told called into question the way that things had always been seen.
Challenging our Stories
I certainly recognize that the economic issues around poverty and the housing crisis that we face in our society today are complex. There are no quick fixes. But I also believe that these are problems that cannot truly be addressed until we challenge some of the stories that we tell about wealth and poverty in our society. Jesus did that by telling an alternate story.
He invited us to dream of a different way of doing things, something that he called the kingdom of God. And he did all of that just by telling a few stories.
I think that that leaves a challenge for us. There are absolutely dominant narratives in our society that need to be challenged. It sort of looks like they won’t be challenged by doing things like running pilots on basic universal income or studies that include just giving homeless people some money. Those studies seem promising, but I’m afraid it won’t happen because people are afraid to challenge the dominant narrative.
So, what are we left with? We need to be telling a different story, the story of the world as it could be. We are left with the challenge of doing what Jesus would do.
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Too big to fail
Hespeler, September 17, 2023 – Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 14:19-31, Exodus 15:1b-11, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35
I began my serious biblical studies in the late part of the last century – so long ago, in fact, that you might say it was in a different world. And, in that different world, I learned to interpret Jesus’ famous parable of the two debtors.
Unrealistic Amounts
One thing I learned about it, back in the last century, was that the amounts of money in it were completely ridiculous. The first debtor, for example, owes 10,000 talents. Given that the average worker at that time earned about one denarius a day and there were 6,000 denarii in a single talent, that would mean that the average worker would have to work <calculator keys clacking> about 200,000 years and save everything that they earned with no expenses in order to pay such a debt back.
Ridiculous, right? That is just an unimaginable amount of money. If we put that in terms of the average modern Canadian wage, we are talking about approximately 11 billion dollars!
Not Practical
And so, I was told and I read, obviously Jesus is speaking about a wildly unimaginable amount of money here. The very idea that someone could ever accumulate such a debt, much less dream of paying it off is clearly unthinkable. The notion that any creditor could possibly forgive such an amount, equally ludicrous.
So obviously, the conclusion went, this parable was not talking about practical earthly realities. It had to be about sin and the forgiveness of sin, and it could not possibly be any sort of critique of such things as the modern banking and financial system.
Sympathetic Interpretation
And there was even a somewhat sympathetic interpretation of the actions of the first debtor that went along with it. It was said that the reason why he refused to forgive the debt of the other fellow – the one who owed 100 denarii or about a third of a year’s earnings (placing him in what we might recognize as the middle-class today) was because he simply could not believe that his 10,000 talent debt had been forgiven.
He thought he still owed it and only had got what he had asked for, more time to pay. He thought he had to collect his debt in order to pay his creditor. That led, of course, to an application of the parable that taught people to accept that their own sins had been forgiven so that they could learn how to forgive others as well.
Possible Interpretations
And, don’t get me wrong, that is a perfectly acceptable application and use of the parable, it may even be at least part of what Jesus intended. It’s certainly what the author of the Gospel of Matthew understood it to be saying.
But I do not believe that parables only have one interpretation or application. That’s one of the things that makes them so powerful. They continue to surprise us with the various ways that we can understand them and apply them.
Completely Wrong
And besides, everything that I was told about this parable in the 1980s and ‘90s and early aughts turned out to be completely wrong anyway. Oh, you think that the amounts of money in this parable are so exaggerated that such a thing could never happen in the real world? Really? Then you probably have been hiding under a rock over the last couple of decades. What if I were to tweak Jesus’ story just a little bit, would you still find it to be impractical?
Shady Deals
The slave had a problem. Let’s call him Max because he had a problem of maximum size. Max had invested his company’s money into some pretty shady deals. He was particularly invested in loans and mortgages that were so bad that it was practically guaranteed that the people who had taken them out would default on them.
But Max had figured that that would be okay because when they all defaulted, he would just foreclose on them and sell their property again for even more money. It was foolproof.
And, in order to safeguard these investments, he had bundled them all together into what he called mortgage-backed securities so that, even though they were individually almost worthless, when you put them all together and pooled the risk, they seemed like rock-solid investments.
Indeed, he even had another slave friend certify that the mortgage-backed securities were very safe investments with little risk so that everyone else wanted to invest in them too. Things were going great, and he was making tons of money – living the high life.
A Crash
But then things suddenly crashed. Interest rates went up and all of a sudden it seemed that everyone couldn’t pay their debts and mortgages all at once. But since all of the houses and properties were seized at once, the market was flooded, and nobody was buying. All of the seized properties and houses were practically worthless! And even those who managed to hold onto their houses found that they lost their value too.
And so, almost overnight, the clever slave went from being extremely wealthy to being in debt? How much was he in debt? Was it ten billion dollars? Was it maybe eleven billion? Ha, that’s chump change! Max barely would have lost any sleep over an amount like that! But this was, he had to admit, a bit more! He was 700 billion dollars in debt!
Debts Forgiven
When the king heard that his slave had somehow managed to rack up such a massive debt, he was concerned. He summoned Max before him and demanded some explanations.
And when the slave came, he made a great show of regret and repentance. He put on sackcloth and ashes on his head as a sign of his deep repentance. He said that he was sorry, but he just wouldn’t be able to pay off his debts.
The king was a wise man who understood the consequences of things. He realized that this was actually a bigger problem for himself and for his subjects than it was for the slave. If Max’s various businesses and enterprises – which were deeply integrated into every part of the economy – failed, it would create so much chaos and disorder that people everywhere would suffer. Max’s impact was so maximized that he couldn’t be allowed to fail.
And so, the king heaved a big sigh and said, “Alright, I’ll do it. I’ll cover your debts.”
How the King did it
Now, how do you suppose it was possible for the king to take the hit of such an unimaginable debt? Well, of course, he had the theoretical ownership of all the assets of the kingdom. He merely needed to borrow against that.
The big problem, however, was that this would have many trickle-down effects on the very people who had already suffered so greatly from Max’s machinations. It would lead to rising prices while they saw their wages restrained. Their savings – if they actually had any – would also lose their value.
In fact, the problems that this would cause were so far-reaching that it was hard to even predict what they would be. It would be bad, there was no doubt of that, but nobody could say exactly how. And that uncertainty just seemed so much less urgent than the disaster that was looming in the moment. So what could the king do? He bailed his indebted slave out.
He did make an effort, to be fair, to set up a few guardrails in order to make sure that this kind of thing couldn’t happen again. But that was about all that he could do.
Max’s Reaction
As the newly debt-free slave left the presence of the king, he quickly took off his sackcloth and brushed the ashes from his hair, absently tossing the rough clothing and dirty brush to his assistant who hovered nearby.
Did Max believe that his massively impossibly large debt had truly been forgiven? Of course he did! He knew from the beginning that this was exactly how it would work out. And now that the unpleasant grovelling was over, he quickly turned his attention to the fun part.
Max started with generous bonuses for himself, and everyone had set up this whole scheme. Next, he started paying off the lawyers and the lobbyists who would make sure that any of the king’s guardrails were quickly demolished.
He had basically just brought his king and many people in the kingdom to the very brink of utter ruin and yet somehow only managed to end up richer and more powerful.
He knew, of course, that someone in his organization would have to be a sacrificial lamb. Some low-level person would get charged, maybe fired and possibly even thrown in prison, but that hardly affected him.
He was busy thinking about where he could go from here. What would be his next conquest? How could he become even more fabulously wealthy?
A New Crisis
Sometime later, another problem began to arise in the kingdom. Many of the king’s slaves, in order to do the specialized work of the kingdom, had received, at their own cost, specialized education.
They had been required to take out heavy loans just to afford it. But then, once they were done, their wages were so depressed and housing and other costs were so high as a result of all the fallout of Max’s affair that they just couldn’t pay off their debts, some of which were in the tens of thousands of dollars.
They began to petition the king for some debt relief, and he was making some very sympathetic responses and even prepared some legislation.
Max Sees a Problem
But then Max heard about it. Max knew that if the workers got some relief, it would make them less reliant on him and his industries and might even put some upward pressure on the slave wages that he paid.
And so, he and his friends began to put out a media campaign that condemned any debt relief measures for student loans. They complained that it made no fiscal sense, that it would cause inflation and that it would reward the bad behaviour of people who took out loans that they couldn’t pay back.
Finally, with their lawyers and lobbyists, they managed to quash the debt relief legislation altogether.
The King Responds
And what happened when the king realized what Max had done? Did he summon him and say to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slaves who were suffering, as I had mercy on you?”
And in anger did his lord hand him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt? I certainly hope that he did.
Hearing the Parable in a New Way
I must say that, ever since the 2008 financial crisis, I just cannot hear that parable of Jesus in the same old way. The crisis basically proved that everything I had been taught about the parable was just plain wrong. The amounts of money in it, far from being wildly exaggerated for effect, turn out to be just a little bit on the small side.
And, in fact, if you want to read it as a parabolic commentary on our modern economic system and priorities, it turns out that it is actually quite believable. It turns out that people who have massive, unbelievable amounts of debt find it so much easier to have their debts wiped clean than do those who have to borrow just little a bit to get by. That is unquestionably the world that we live in.
The Part that’s Hard to Believe
In fact, the only part of the story that really seems a bit hard to believe is where the rich debtor who gets his mistakes bailed out actually gets punished for opposing some basic debt relief for his poor fellow slave. I mean, when have you ever seen that happen in our world?
But, of course, that it why Jesus told the parable – to show us where the priorities of God actually lay. To promise that the ridiculously wealthy, the too big to fail, will indeed face the consequence of their actions. That is the kind of God that Jesus proclaimed.
And, though I know that we are not going to be able to completely overturn the economic priorities of our society today, I think it’s important to remember that we are called to stand up for the belief, for the possibility, that things could be different – that priorities could be more aligned with God’s vision of economic justice.
And maybe we shouldn’t be afraid to speak the words of Jesus in this story – the words I think he was saying are the words of God – to those who have contributed so much to our present economic mess: “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?”
It just isn’t church for me if…
Hespeler, September 10, 2023 © Scott McAndless – 15th Sunday after Pentecost
Ezekiel 33:7-11, Psalm 119:33-40, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20
Today is the effective beginning of a new year in the life of St. Andrew’s Hespeler Presbyterian Church. I mean, that has always been true of the first Sunday after Labour Day, but in many ways, it feels especially true today because this September 10th comes at the beginning or rebirth of many things.
It comes after we have completed a process, working with Cathy Stewart as our coach, in which we have taken a hard look at where we are and come up with plans for where we need to go. We effectively begin to implement many of those plans today.
A Restart
It is also the Sunday when we begin to enthusiastically restart a number of things that lapsed during the chaos and difficulties of the last few years – things like regular worship assistants, Sunday School and childcare and we will soon see more action from the choir benches. This is part of an exciting rebirth in many ways.
But I was just thinking that this might also be a good time to pause, take a bit of a breath and talk about what is essential to the church. I can’t help but feel, after all, that one of the things that has made recent years so difficult is that people have certain expectations of the church that we haven’t always been able to fulfill.
It just isn’t church for me
What I mean is that people have been saying to themselves that they don’t want to go to church or aren’t ready to come back yet because, as they might put it, “Well, it just isn’t church for me if we don’t have x.”
And of course, that x is a variable that might be different for different people at different times, but I suspect that all of us have a few x’es. A big one early in the pandemic for many people, for example, was, “It is not church if we can’t all be together in one place.” I suspect all of us felt that one to a certain extent.
But there are many others that we have felt keenly as well. “It is not church if there is no Sunday School, if the choir doesn’t sing, if there isn’t organ music, if there is no stained glass, if the preacher doesn’t dress a certain way, if there aren’t a sufficient number of people there, if there is arguing or fighting, if… if… if…” And the list can go on and on and on, right?
And I am not denying any of those feelings. If you are having a hard time being in a church that isn’t quite what you were expecting or hoping for, those are valid feelings. But, at the same time, if we are missing something simply because it is comfortable or familiar or brings back positive nostalgic memories, that doesn’t necessarily mean that such a thing is essential to the very nature of the church.
What would Jesus say?
So, let’s ask the question. What really does make a church a church? When Jesus looks at what we call a church, does he ever say that’s not a church because it’s not a church if it doesn’t have x? And what is that x for Jesus?
The New Testament, especially in the Book of Acts and the Letters, obviously has many things to say about the church. But I am specifically interested today in what Jesus has to say – particularly what he says during his life and ministry. That has got to be a reflection of what is most essential, right?
Little in the Gospels
Well, it turns out that, if you look through three of the gospels, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus actually doesn’t say anything at all. The word “church” (the Greek word ecclesia) does not ever appear in any of those gospels.
And that is not really that surprising when you think of it. The church didn’t even exist yet during Jesus’ life. And, in those gospels at least, there is no indication that Jesus even anticipated it. Jesus clearly states over and over that he has come to announce the arrival of something else, the kingdom of God, which may have some things in common with an ideal church but is clearly not the same thing.
Jesus’ Response to Peter
The word church does appear three times, however, in the Gospel of Matthew, twice in the passage we read this morning and once two chapters before this one. The first time comes after Simon Peter gives an important answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am.” When Simon answers him by saying, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus says to him, “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)
And right there we see a couple of things that are truly essential about the church. We see, first of all, that the church has one rock or foundation. That foundation is not, as far as I can see, the person of Simon Peter so much as it is the content of what he has just confessed. Jesus is saying that the church is built on the rock of the confession of Jesus as Lord, Messiah and Son of God. There is, of course, nothing more essential to the church than that and if we don’t have it, we don’t have a church.
The Gates of Hades
And then there is the business of the gates of Hades. When Jesus says, “the gates of Hades will not prevail against it,” that is a symbolic way of describing what the church is supposed to be doing in this world. Hades, as you may recall, is the name of the Greek god of the dead. But Hades was also the name of the kingdom that the god ruled over, the place where, in Greek mythology, the souls of the dead went after death.
So, you have to wonder why Jesus would say anything based on Greek mythology. I know that sometimes people have taken this as Jesus saying that the central role of the church is to take on the power of evil in the sense that the church is supposed to be storming the gates of hell – taking on the forces of evil firsthand. But Jesus doesn’t say hell, he says Hades, which is probably the Greek translation of the Hebrew concept of Sheol. He is simply referring to the power of death and its dominion, not evil as such.
Opposing the Power of Death
So, I would say that the second essential to the church is that it stands in opposition to the powers of death in this world. It is to be an enduring witness that that death is not the final word and that its power has been defeated once and for all.
So far, therefore, we have learned that Jesus taught that the church is to be founded upon the confession of Christ and that it is to bear witness against the power of death. These are very important essentials that we must never lose sight of.
The Only Other Place
But let us turn now to the second saying about the church, the one that we read this morning. This is the only other place in the New Testament where the word church is found on the lips of Jesus in the gospels. And they offer a very interesting perspective on what is essential about the church.
This passage is interesting because it is all in the context of the church not quite getting along together. Jesus starts by saying, “If your brother or sister sins against you…” He takes it for granted that there will be arguments and disagreements and that people will act against others within the life of the church.
The Unity of the Church
That is actually a rather odd assumption to find in the New Testament which often tries to communicate the opposite. The Book of Acts, for example, which offers an account of the early church, goes out of its way to present the church as being remarkably unified. “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul,” it says at one point. (Acts 4:32) This sometimes sets us up with an expectation that the church is supposed to be this place where we always get along and where we will always see things the same way.
Jesus Expect Conflicts
But Jesus clearly doesn’t have that expectation of his followers. That’s because he knows that the church is going to have to be a place where people aren’t going to be afraid to be themselves, to speak even difficult truths. This will necessarily lead to disagreements, to fights, to people getting hurt and maybe even intentionally hurting others, thus sinning against them.
And so, Jesus offers methods for the church to constructively work through these things – methods that are indeed very useful and helpful and that we really ought to employ more consistently. But the implications of that are very clear. The church is not intended to be a place where we are merely nice to one another, but a place where we are not afraid to have the truly difficult conversations because we actually love one another.
Two or Three
But there is one more thing in what Jesus says about the church here that is even more important. I hope you don’t miss it. There is an underlying assumption about the nature of the church that I think we cannot afford to miss.
You cannot read this passage without noticing that a couple of words are repeated several times. Those words are “two or three.” He speaks of two or three witnesses in a dispute, two or three people gathering and of two people agreeing. In fact, I suspect that the reason why the author of this Gospel has gathered all of these sayings of Jesus together here is because they all contain those numbers.
And this tells us a great deal about the church that the Gospel of Matthew was written for, and about what Jesus might have anticipated about the future of his movement.
Our Expectations Around Numbers
We seem to have all kinds of expectations regarding the church when it comes to numbers. In fact when people say, “Well, it just isn’t church for me if we don’t have x,” the x often has something to do with numbers. There just seems to be an expectation that a certain number of people is essential in order for there to be a church and that until your church reaches a critical mass, it is just not really a church.
Now, I am not saying, of course, that numbers don’t matter. There is no question that the number of people in a church definitely contributes to what it can do, the impact it has and the programs it can carry out. Of course, we want to see more people participating in the life of the church. What’s more, I expect that we will as we are faithful to carry out our mission and ministry.
How We Prevent Growth
But the irony is that when we begin to define the essence of the church in a way that requires certain numbers, we can actually prevent that kind of growth from happening.
To put it in the simplest mathematical terms possible, if people fall into thinking that a church is not really a church unless there are more than, say, 10 people there, you just guaranteed that the church will never grow to that point. I’m not going, people will say, because there are only nine people there. It’s not a real church.
The only way that such a church will grow (no matter what number people consider to be the minimum) is if people are willing to love and participate in the church as it is – even with all of its flaws and even if it doesn’t quite fit their idea of what size a church should be. It requires faith in what the church could be, not merely liking what it already is.
How Many for Jesus?
So I think that it is significant that, if you were to ask Jesus how many people it takes to make a church, he would almost certainly respond “Two or three.”
I do believe that there is great potential for the church – and for this congregation – and what it can be. There are so many exciting possibilities. But I think it is also important to note that we may never discover that potential until we realize what really is essential to the church.
We must be founded on our confession of Christ. We must be witnesses to life in a world of death. We must love each other enough to have real conversations even if they are sometimes difficult conversations. And we must love the church that is – including whatever size it is – enough to give it the opportunity to become the church that is meant to be.
Fall Watercolour Workshops
