What's In Your Wallet?

Matthew 22:15-22

October 19, 2014

            “What’s in your wallet?” I want to give credit to the good folks at WorkingPreacher.org for the idea for the title of today’s sermon.  One of the commentators on their podcast mentioned this as a potential title, and I jumped on it.  Unless you watch absolutely no television whatsoever, it’s hard to not know those four words.  “What’s in your wallet?”  This has become a cultural catch phrase due to some funny commercials featuring Vikings and a few celebrity spokespersons; Alec Baldwin and Samuel L. Jackson, to name two.  The ads are for the Capital One credit card, and it promotes the idea that shopping and banking with this particular credit card earns you rewards.  Capital One makes even Christmas shopping easier, and earns the user so many travel rewards that you can bring your whole Viking gang on trips.  Each commercial, whatever its particulars, ends with that catch phrase, “What’s in your wallet?” 

            Of course the point of the commercial is to get people to apply for Capital One credit cards.  But I think that the underlying message it makes is that it is not enough to just have a credit card, the brand of credit card counts.  The name, the image that is emblazoned on that credit card also counts; maybe even more than the card itself.  So what’s in your wallet?

            This idea is played out in our story from Matthew’s gospel.  For the first time in a while, our passage isn’t centered on Jesus responding to his questioners with a parable.  The Pharisees have been confronting Jesus since he came into Jerusalem and into the temple.  But this confrontation is different.  Not only are the Pharisees trying to trap Jesus, this time the Herodians have joined in as well.  We don’t read about the Herodians on a regular basis.  In fact I think this story may be the one time they are mentioned at all.  Perhaps in a casual reading of this story, we might just accept their presence without question, but it is significant that this group we know little about are siding with the Pharisees against Jesus.  Consider the name; Herodians suggests Herod.  Herodians were Jewish leaders who allied themselves with Herod and the Roman Empire.  The Romans were the occupiers, the alien force who held them and their land under the empirical thumb.  Just as tax collectors were despised and given their own special category for sinfulness because they collected the taxes demanded by the Roman government, the Herodians would not have been popular or loved.  Certainly the Pharisees, the religious leadership and authorities, would not have cared for them.  But here they stand together trying to trap Jesus.  Picture the most extreme leadership of the Tea Party uniting forces with the most extreme knee-jerk Liberal in the Democratic Party to defeat a common enemy, and you may have an idea of how unusual and how radical this confrontation in the temple was. 

            Both groups hated Jesus.  Both were threatened by him.  He’d been stirring people up for a long time, but before he was a nuisance, an annoying thorn in their collective side.  Now he had become dangerous.  So, as Matthew tells it, they plotted to entrap him. 

            “‘Teacher, we know that you are sincere and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.  Tell us, then, what you think.  Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?’”

            Jesus knows what they are trying to do.  The text says that he was “aware of their malice.”  He turns the question back on them.  He asks them to show him the coin that they used to pay the tax to the emperor.  They produce a denarius, and he asks them to tell him whose head and whose title is stamped on the coin.  The emperor’s.  Then, Jesus says perhaps some of his most well-known words.  “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. 

Over and over again, this has been interpreted through the lens of separation of church and state.  See, even Jesus implies that there is a dividing line between them.  The two should not mix.  Keep them separated. Yet that kind of political and religious separation is our modern understanding.  Given the context and the culture of the time, I doubt that anyone listening to Jesus or even the first hearers and readers of Matthew’s gospel would have thought in those terms. Religious law was the law.  There would have been no separation between the two.  But that’s also why the empirical tax was so odious. 

This tax was the Roman census or the “head tax” that was instituted when Judea became a Roman province.  The tax was not only considered unfair, it went against Torah.  The land of Israel belonged to God alone.  Since Caesar was a usurper, paying the tax was considered an act of disobedience to God.  Not only would Caesar’s image have been on the denarius, the inscription would most likely have read something like, “In Caesar we trust.”  Caesar was not just the governing ruler; as emperor, he was, for all intents and purposes, a god.  So paying the Roman head tax meant that the Jewish people consistently broke the first two commandments.  They put another god before the Lord God, and they used a coin that bore a graven image.  When Jesus asked to see the coin, he essentially asked the religious leaders what was in their wallet.  How interesting that they could produce this coin which went against the Law and he couldn’t.  How interesting that they could produce this particular coin in the temple. The hypocrisy of that, of the religious leaders having a coin like in this in the holiest of places, was not lost on Jesus. 

Even when this passage isn’t interpreted as a reason for separation of church and state, it is used as a way for believers to find their way through a complex world that is driven by money.  Just give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and the rest goes to God.  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  But real life is a different beast altogether.  We are, like it or not, driven by money.  It is a reality of our lives.  You need a certain amount of money just to survive.  If you don’t have it, survival can be tough to say the least. I get enough calls every week asking for assistance with utilities and rent to know how necessary having money is, and, more importantly, what it means not to have it.

            Yet we don’t like to talk about money in church, not unless it’s stewardship emphasis season. Even with stewardship we’d prefer that the money talk only happen on that one Sunday.  Once that Sunday is over, we can return to not talking about money the rest of the year.  But money is being talked about in this passage.  While I think that it is a critical element of this confrontation, what I really think is being called into question is allegiance.  Perhaps when Jesus questioned the Pharisees and the Herodians about what was in their wallets, he was also questioning their allegiance?  Who do you belong to; God or the emperor? 

            Jesus was the master at turning questions meant to trick him back onto those doing the questioning.  But the question of allegiance, the question of priorities is also asked of us?  Who do we belong to?  Where does our allegiance lie? 

            We might glibly answer that we, of course, belong to God.  Along with that everything we have, everything we are, everything in God’s creation belongs to God.  Yet how does our answer play out in our daily lives?    

            I don’t really know.  I’m not sure that it does in my life.  I certainly don’t think there are any easy answers to the question of my allegiance.  I know that just making a separate check list of what belongs in which category doesn’t really work.  In theory it should.  I’ve tried.  But in reality, those kinds of categories are ambiguous at best.  Like it or not, as much as I believe and proclaim that my allegiance is to God first, money is always an issue.  Money is a part of our lives and its necessity is not going away.  Part of being citizens is being responsible for taxes and paying our bills, etc.  But if we claim and that we belong to God, shouldn’t that impact how we view money and how we spend it? 

            Again, there are no easy answers. We live in a consumer culture, and I am a consumer.  But I am a child of God, first.  If I can remember that, and try to live in light of that, then perhaps how I spend my money will reflect that truth more closely. 

            David Lose told a story about a former pastor who encouraged her parishioners to engage in an interesting experiment.  One Sunday, they found markers in each of their pews.  She invited them to take a marker and make a cross on a credit card or debit card, or even a bill or coin, and look at that cross whenever they shop.  Lose said that he still spent money, but he began to notice that when he shopped he was more mindful of what he was buying.  He was more intentional about his purchases.  When he pulled out his credit card with the cross on it, he found himself asking, does this purchase reflect my faith?  Does it make manifest that I, and everything I have, belongs to God? 

            I need to ask those questions of myself.  When I pull out this card, does what I’m buying make manifest that I belong to God? 

            At the beginning of this sermon, I quoted the Capital One commercials.  “What’s in your wallet?”  The point of the commercials is that what’s in your wallet, the credit cards you carry, the brand you proclaim, counts.  They’re right, but not about credit cards or brand names.  We proclaim who we give our allegiance to, who we belong to, in all that we say and in all that we do; including how we spend our money.  What does our spending say about our allegiance?  Who do we belong to?  What’s in your wallet? 

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!”  Amen.

Come to the Feast

Matthew 22:1-14, Isaiah 25:1-9

October 12, 2014

            The late humorist, Erma Bombeck, wrote about the horrors of the banquet table.  Whenever she and her husband, Bill, would be invited to attend a banquet, it seemed that Bill was always seated at the opposite end of the table.  Erma wrote that not only was she not seated near her husband; she also seemed to be seated between two people she didn’t know.  When she would turn to make polite conversation with the person on her left, he would be in an animated conversation with the person on his left.  It was the same with the person on her right; he would be engaged in an intense discussion with the other person sitting next to him.  So she would sit, talking to no one, turning her peas and carrots into mosaic art.  Once, a person sitting across and several seats away from her waved at her.  She didn’t recognize him, but thought she must know him somehow.  After all, he was waving at her.  She waved back, smiling brightly.  He mouthed something to her, but she couldn’t understand.  So she leaned forward, dragging her necklace through the mashed potatoes, and mouthed, “What?”  Again, he silently formed his question, but this time she understood him.  “How’s Marjorie?”  Not having a clue who Marjorie was, she pantomimed back, “She’s fine.”  Then she realized that he was talking to a person two seats down from her. 

            No, the banquet table, indeed banquets in general, are not for everybody.  So it would seem with today’s parable from Matthew.  While Bombeck’s story is funny, our parable isn’t.  But a bit of humor seemed the most positive way to open a window into a difficult, even frightening parable. 

            With each week that goes by, Jesus’ parables are getting more and more challenging.  It’s painful just to hear or read them; making sense of them seems impossible.  The parable that we read this morning is not only difficult, it’s bizarre.  Following his last parable about a vineyard and wicked tenants, Jesus tells yet another difficult story.  This time it is designed to once again illumine the kingdom of heaven.  “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.” 

            It’s not unusual to hear God’s kingdom being described in the language of a banquet or a feast.  We see this same sort of analogy in the beautiful language found in our passage from Isaiah as well.  I personally love the image of a feast or a banquet in the context of the kingdom of heaven.  It is a welcoming image, an inviting image.  It speaks of hospitality, abundance, joy, celebration.  The kingdom of heaven can be compared to a great party, where there is enough for everyone and everyone is invited.  That’s good stuff in my opinion.  But the image of banquet, of feast, takes a different turn in this parable. 

            “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.” 

It could almost be the beginning of a fairy tale.  But what happens after this is not the stuff of Disney.  The king sent out his slaves to bring the folks who had been invited to the feast.  But the folks would not come.  In the version of this parable told in Luke’s gospel, the guests offer excuses.  I can’t come because I just bought some land and I have to go out and see it.  I can’t come because I have five new oxen and I have to try them out.  I can’t come because I just got married and I have to stay home.  But there are no excuses offered by the original guests in Matthew’s telling.  They just don’t respond at all to the servants. 

Then the king sends the slaves out again.  Basically the king instructs his people to tell the guests that the feast is ready.  Supper’s on the table.  Essentially it was the king’s way of saying “y’all come.” 

This is the king we’re talking about.  This isn’t a neighborhood potluck.  It’s an invitation from the king.  You would think that this announcement would have brought the invited guests running to the party, but two of the guests made light of the invitation and went on their way.  The other guests seized the slaves.  They mistreated them.  They tortured them.  They killed them. 

Just as in the parable we heard last week about the tenants turning on the emissaries of the landowner, this is an unexpectedly violent response to not just an invitation, but a royal invitation.  It is understandable that the king is furious at the treatment of his servants.  But the king’s response is unnerving as well.  The king sends his troops who destroy the murderers and burn their cities.  Think about that.  The servants are killed by the guests.  The murdering guests are killed by the troops.  It’s horribly violent. 

If we were reading this in a novel or watching this as a movie, we’d expect this to turn into an all-out war.  But once the murderers have been murdered, the king tells more servants that the wedding feast is still on.  This is what strikes me as so odd, so bizarre.  It’s as though the king says, “Well, that’s taken care of.  Oh look, the food is still warm.  Y’all come.”  But the king tells his remaining servants that the ones who were invited originally were not worthy.  So now they are instructed to go to every major intersection, every major thoroughfare and main street, and invite the people they encounter there.  Gather every person you can find, both good and bad, so that the wedding hall will be filled with guests. 

The people come.  The hall is filled.  The wedding banquet is full.  Everything should be copasetic, right?  No.  Not even close.  The king arrives in the hall to see the guests and he sees this one guest without a robe.  One guest.  He questions him about it. There’s a hint of sarcasm in the king’s use of the word, friend.  “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?”  The hapless guest is speechless.  So the king orders his attendants to tie the guy up and throw him out.  And we are left with the final word, “For many are called, but few are chosen.” 

Had the parable ended with the inviting of all the guests, as it does in Luke, I think we could have overlooked the violence that happened early on.  Instead it ends with more judgment, more violence.  And a statement from Jesus that is, quite frankly, terrifying.  What does this mean?  What do we do with this?

  As always, context matters.  As I’ve said often these past weeks, we have to be careful to keep this as a parable rather than see it allegorically. 

The parables Jesus tells are getting tougher and tougher.  But the cross is getting closer and closer.  Jesus is well aware of the consequences for his words, yet he’s ready to accept them.  Jesus is willing to die.  Jesus knows that death is upon him, so what does he have to lose?  When you think about it in those terms, it’s understandable that his parables have a razor sharp edge to them.  If I knew for a fact that I was going to die soon, I’d like to believe that I would not mince my words.  I would say what I have to say regardless of the cost.   

So Jesus’ stories, his parables, his teachings have taken on an intense urgency.  Jesus is saying, again and again, “Look folks, the time is upon you.  Here is the kingdom of heaven.  Here is the invitation to come along.  Do you accept or don’t you?”

That’s what this wedding banquet really is, an invitation.  It is an invitation to be a part of this great feast that is being served in our midst.  And the invitation is urgent.  Come now.  The food is on the table.  Everything is ready.  Will you join us or not?

When the original guests don’t respond; when, in fact, they turn on the servants of the king, new guests are invited.  Anyone from anywhere can join the feast.  Certainly we can understand this call as inclusion of all people.  No longer is the banquet restricted.  All are invited.  This is the finale of Luke’s telling of this parable.  But Matthew’s gospel is an intense gospel and he doesn’t leave it at that. 

All are included in the invitation.  But our response still matters.  The clothes we wear count.  Here we come to what I think of as the strangest part of the whole parable.  That poor guest dressed in the wrong clothe wasn’t merely ostracized for being underdressed.  He’s thrown into the outer darkness.  Forget fashion police.  Try fashion hell.  Clothing in a parable like this one doesn’t just mean fashion choices.  Clothing represents change.  The guest who showed up without a wedding robe responded to the invitation of the king but hadn’t made any significant changes.  Hence the king responds with such terrible retribution.  You wouldn’t think that not wearing a wedding robe to a banquet that you didn’t expect to be invited to in the first place would bring such a horrible punishment, would you?  But that’s what happens.  It is a violent ending to a story of violence.

This seems to fly in the face of how we understand salvation and grace.  We affirm wholeheartedly that we cannot earn our way to heaven.  It is grace alone.  Yet, if we take this parable seriously, our response counts too.

Our response counts too.  I know that this is where the rubber meets the road.  I also know that more often than not I show up to the feast wearing my old clothes.  That’s what’s so frightening about this parable, that’s what is so hard to hear.  We may all be invited to the feast, but responding means that we have to work to change our clothes.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about “cheap grace.”  It was his way of expressing that our response counts.  Yet while I know that grace isn’t cheap, I do believe that God’s grace is extravagant.  It’s given to me in spite of the fact that I don’t deserve one ounce of it.  But believing that does not negate the impact of this parable. Our response counts.  So where is the good news?  Is it just in our belief in grace, although that grace is not present in this story?  I don’t have a clear way of reconciling this.  Maybe I’m not supposed to.  Although this parable leaves me shaking in my unacceptable, shabby boots, I do have hope.  I put my hope in grace, true, but I also find it in the words of Isaiah. 

“On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.  And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.”

We are invited to come to the feast.  It is an urgent request, requiring a serious response.  But the good news is that it is a feast; a feast where all are invited.  It is a feast where tears and death and heartache will be no more.  We are invited to come to the feast, and we are cautioned to dress appropriately, but it is a feast.  It is God’s feast on God’s holy mountain in God’s magnificent kingdom.  It is a feast that changes not only the world, but us.  We are invited to come to the feast.  What will our answer be?  Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!”  Amen.

Foolish Love -- World Communion Sunday

Matthew 21:33-46

October 5, 2014

            We are no strangers to warning labels in our society.  It seems that just about everything we use or consume or touch or even smell has a warning attached to it.  Pharmaceutical advertising is a stand-up comic’s dream come true, because while an ad spends 50 seconds of a 60 second spot touting a new medication’s amazing, miraculous, curative benefits, it spends the last 10 seconds listing every conceivable side effect.  More often than not, the side effects sound worse than the illness that warrants the medication.  But if the warnings weren’t given, whether it’s on a new medication or something else, there would be an outcry.  We believe we should be warned about something potentially dangerous or threatening to our health or well-being. 

            That being said, I sometimes think the same should be true for scripture.  Before a page is turned in the Bible, there should be a warning that if we’re going to read it, we read at our own risk.  Maybe we need an even stronger admonition, like the robot on the old television show, Lost in Space.  “Danger, danger, Will Robinson.” 

            I don’t say this to be irreverent.  I say that because I truly believe that being faithful means that we have to read scripture on its terms, not ours.  Doing that might force us to not only see God differently, but to see ourselves differently, and vice-versa.  This passage from Matthew could do just that.  So we read and hear at our own risk.

            One thing that I read over and over again in my study of this passage is that this particular parable told by Jesus has been used to justify anti-Semitism.  Repeatedly.  If we read this story as pure allegory, it’s easy to see how that happens.  As we have heard over the last few weeks, Jesus is in the final days before his arrest and crucifixion.  He is still in the temple.  He is still in a confrontation with the Pharisees and scribes, the religious authorities.  They want to stop him, silence him, at any cost.  So as we read last week, they challenged his authority.  Jesus responded with a parable about a vineyard, a father and two sons.  Today we hear another parable.  This one also takes place in a vineyard.  The vineyard would have been a relatable, familiar example to the people listening to Jesus.  In this story a vineyard was planted by a landowner.  The landowner plants it, puts a fence around it, digs a wine press, and builds a watchtower.  This was what any responsible landowner would have done.  He leaves the vineyard in the hands of his tenants, and goes to another country.  When harvest time rolls around, he sends his slaves or servants to the tenants to collect his share of the harvest.  Again, this would have been standard practice.  But the tenants turn on the slaves.  They beat one, they kill another, and they stone a third.  Yet the landowner doesn’t retaliate.  Instead he sends more slaves to them, and those slaves are treated the same way. 

            I suspect that everyone who heard Jesus tell this was thinking that surely the landowner would now rain down punishment, rain down vengeance on the heads of the tenants.  It was bad enough that they beat and killed the first slaves sent to them, but to do that a second time?  No landowner would put up with that.  But here’s the twist.  Not only did the landowner not retaliate, he sent his son.  Surely, he thinks, his son will be respected.  Surely they won’t harm the landowner’s own flesh and blood.  But when the tenants see the son approaching, they plot.  “Let’s kill the son, and then we’ll receive the inheritance.”  So they seize the son, throw him out of the vineyard, and kill him too. 

            When Jesus finishes his story, he asks the Pharisees, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”  The Pharisees respond, “He will put those wretches to death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

            Just as Jesus did in the parable of the father and the two sons, the question that Jesus asks of the Pharisees puts them in a position to condemn themselves.  Last week the one who does the will of the father is the one who said, “no,” to the father’s request, then changed his mind.  But the one who said, “yes,” then doesn’t is in the wrong.  This week, the ones who refuse to give the share of the harvest to the landowner, the ones who kill the slaves and son of the landowner, then have the audacity and sense of entitlement to believe that the inheritance will still come to them, are the ones who will be put to a miserable death.  They are the ones who will lose their place in the vineyard to others.  The point of the parable seems obvious.  Jesus says it.  The Pharisees are the wicked tenants. 

            If the Pharisees are the wicked tenants who kill not only the slaves, but the son, then it’s not difficult to make the leap that the Jews are the ones who are sent out of the vineyard, and the Christians are the new tenants who “produce at the harvest time.”  Reading it this way makes it an “us versus them” scenario.  But here is where the warning label is needed.  What makes us think that we – Christians, good church goers, etc. – are always the good guys?  Jesus pushed the Pharisees and the religious leaders and all those who thought they knew God’s will to realize that God was and is doing a new thing.  God would not be limited by their dogma.  Nor will God be limited by ours.  Jesus goes on to quote, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” 

            The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. 

            Yes, reading this strictly as allegory, it is far too easy to point fingers and make judgments and believe that we got it right.  Warning.  We should never assume.  But you know what’s really troubling about this passage?  You know what really bothers me about the story that Jesus tells?  The landowner must have been a fool.  Why did he persist in sending people to these tenants?  Why did he not learn after the first time?  There is nothing that I read in the passage that suggests that somehow the landowner was oppressive or evil or deserved this kind of violent response from his tenants.  But they did respond to every person he sent to them with violence.  I don’t think anyone hearing this parable would have blamed the landowner if, after the first time his slaves were beaten and killed, he had retaliated in kind.  But he didn’t.  He just sent more people.  He sent his son.  What a fool. 

            But if this story, whether it’s meant to be heard and read allegorically or not, reflects on God in any way, shape or form, then doesn’t that mean that God is foolish?  Is God foolish?  Is God’s love, God’s persistent, unending, unconditional love, foolish? 

            Maybe it is.  But then again, it all seems foolish, doesn’t it?  It’s foolishness that God is born as a helpless, homeless baby.  It’s foolishness that God suffers and dies.  It’s foolishness that God takes on this weak and finite flesh of ours to show us what it really means to be human, to open our eyes to the kingdom right here in our midst.  God does everything a fool would do.  God doesn’t give up on us, even though we deserve it.  God doesn’t stop loving us, even though we would stop loving someone else who treated us the way these tenants treated the  landowner; the way we treat the Creator and the Creation.  God persists for our sake, foolishly.  It is a foolish love, and an undeserved and unreserved forgiveness, and an extravagant grace that God has for us.  It’s foolish.  Isn’t it?  Paul says that the cross is foolishness.  As the cornerstone of God’s new thing, Jesus says that “The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” 

            I’ve always heard those words as terrible, violent punishment, a terrible, violent judgment.  But perhaps what it really is foolish.  Perhaps the only way that we can truly recognize and feel and respond to God’s foolish love is when we our hard hearts and our closed minds are finally broken open.  I know that in my own life, it has been those moments when I feel the most lost, those moments when I have felt the most alone, when I had nothing left but to cry out to God; those were the moments that I found God was right there beside me.  It was where God had been the whole time, loving me: extravagantly, unreservedly, foolishly. 

            Today, as we come to the table to take bread and wine, we do so knowing that Christians around the world are doing the same.  To many people it must seem like a foolish thing to do.  How can just eating a piece of bread and swallowing a bit of wine be sacred?  How does this one act proclaim hope when the world is so hurting, so broken?  Maybe in the eyes of the world it is foolish, but this bread and wine reminds us that we are more alike than we are different.  Whatever our language or look, we come to this table in hope that love still has the power to overcome evil, that light can still conquer the darkness, that peace is not just a fleeting dream.  We come to this table hopefully, trustingly, foolishly, knowing that the good news, the amazing, wonderful, overwhelming good news, is that God loves us foolishly first.  Praise be to God for that foolish love.  Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!”  Amen.