The religious leaders are trying to trap Jesus.

“What is the greatest commandment,” they ask.

Now, this sounds harmless. But, it is really a doctrinal test. A test to see if Jesus agrees with them or not, a test to see if Jesus belongs in their religious club or not.

Religious people like their tests, to see if you are in their group or not. Are you in, or are you out?

See, the rabbi’s had found 618 commandments in what we call the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – but they called the Law. They even broke them down into positive commandments and negative commandments. So, honor your parents was a positive command and do not commit murder was a negative command. They had it all figured out.

Some of the religious people of that day said all the commands were equal. Others said that the negative commands were the most important while others said the positive commands were what you really had to focus on. So, they are testing Jesus to see where he falls in this argument.

Jesus does something interesting here, though. He answers the question, but not in the way that they asked it.

See, they asked for the greatest commandment – what is the most important thing to do. But Jesus instead replies “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

See, the one thing pretty much all Jews agreed on was there one command above all the others. We find it in the book of Deuteronomy: “Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. It was often the first verse they would memorize as children, and the one verse everyone knew. it was a lot like John 3:16 is for us today. If you were Jewish, you knew this verse.

But Jesus messes with their head here. He says that there is not one greatest commandment – he says that there are two equally great commandments – to love God and to love your neighbor. Loving God is good, Jesus says, but it is equally important to love your neighbor. In fact, they are not just equally important: They are equal – to love your neighbor is to love God. In fact, it is how we love God.

My friend Bart Campolo sums up this passage as “Love God. Love people. Nothing else matters.”

Some 2000 years later, not much has changed. We still have tests to see who is in and who is out. Sometimes, we stake out claims about God. We say “In order to serve God, I have to exclude this person”. We say “In order to follow Jesus, we have to offend or hurt this person.” But Jesus says that when we do that – when we say this person is outside of love, that this person or that person is not worthy of our love – when we do that, we are not loving our neighbor, and thus we are not loving God.

And for the many times that we do that, may God have mercy on us all.

In the name of the Father, and the Son and The Holy Spirit. Amen.

I have to admit – I have some big problems with today’s parable.

I think it is partly because I love so much a similar story that Luke tells in his Gospel.

Here is Luke has to say:

Jesus replied with this story: “A man prepared a great feast and sent out many invitations.  When the banquet was ready, he sent his servant to tell the guests, ‘Come, the banquet is ready.’  But they all began making excuses. One said, ‘I have just bought a field and must inspect it. Please excuse me.’  Another said, ‘I have just bought five pairs of oxen, and I want to try them out. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I now have a wife, so I can’t come.’

“The servant returned and told his master what they had said. His master was furious and said, ‘Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ After the servant had done this, he reported, ‘There is still room for more.’ So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full.  For none of those I first invited will get even the smallest taste of my banquet.’”

I love this story. And this is a story that tells us what God is like, because God is like the man who welcomes everyone at the table, with no one turned away.

But this is not the text we are looking at today.

Instead, this text is not about a man, but a king. And to be honest – this is not a very good king.

This king tries to force people to come to his banquet. And when some of them kill his messengers, he not only kills the ones who did it, he burns down their entire town. Then when he invites the common people, the good and the bad, and when he comes to the feast, he sees one guy dressed wrong, and has him tied up and cast into “outer darkness”, whatever that means. It does not sound good, regardless.

The crazy thing to me is that the king in this story is almost always interpreted as God. I guess I get where they are coming from, but I just can’t see God that way.

In the 11^th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence at the hands of the violent. But the king in this story does not suffer violence – he dishes it out. The quiet guest – the one who wears the wrong clothes, the one who does not belong – this is the one who suffers violence. He is accused; he does not respond to the accusations and is then punished and killed at the hands of a violent government.

Sounds a lot like Jesus to me.

And it sounds like what seems to me to be the normal experience of those who reject power and violence. The Kingdom of God experiences violence at the hands of the violent.

So maybe it is just me, but the way I understand Jesus says that I have to be on the side of the one who is rejected for not fitting in, instead of being on the side of the King that uses violence to get his way.

In the name of the Father, and The Son, and The Holy Spirit. Amen.

A friend told me one time that you don’t get to pick your family.

Sadly, this is true. I love my family, but if I could have picked a different family – one with better metabolism, say, or one that was genetically pre-disposed to living to 110 years old or maybe even one that was filthy stinking rich – that might have been better for me.

But you don’t get to pick your family.

A lot of us have family members we wish we could gloss over.  Like that cousin who creeps you out, or the Dad who is just a jerk to you, or the sister who tells you at every available opportunity that Obama is the anti-christ and you are destined for hell because you don’t attend her church.

As we say in the South, “Bless her heart. “

A lot of us in this room have felt what it is like to not be able to get along with your whole family.

And it hurts more to disagree with your family than it does someone outside the family. So what some guy you never met thinks your ideas are silly. So what?

But when your Mother says your ideas are silly, well, that hurts. And it can make us angry, and bitter, and before long, we don’t want to talk to them, or even be around them.

In the universal church, today is World Communion Sunday. It is the day when, all over the world, churches remember that we are not alone – that we are all members of the same family, scattered around the world, with differing views on various things, but still, family.

You know that crazy uncle you have that, every time he speaks, you shake your head and just wish he would be quiet? In the Christian family, we have one of those. In fact, I think we have a lot of those.

That abusive cousin who never says anything good and just pisses off everyone who he talks to? We have lots of those, too.

And we have our criminals, and those who ought to be criminals and the child abusers and the prosperity pimps and the people who spiritually abuse people.

And they are all family, and we don’t get to pick our family.

The early church liked this idea of family to describe the connection of all the believers. It is out of that new understanding that they came to call each other “Brother” or “Sister”.

I went to Nashville last weekend, and was only three hours or so away from where my parents live, so they came up since it has been a year or so since I have seen them.  And, of course, we sat down and ate together. Because that is what families do – They eat together.

Today, on World Communion Sunday, we have the opportunity to remember that every week when we gather and we eat the bread and drink from the cup, we are in fact sharing a meal with all those who have come before us and with all the church, scattered all around the world.

We don’t just share the meal with those in this room, but with the Christians hiding in basements in hostile countries and the Christians in the big steeples Downtown and the Christians in mud floored shacks in central America.

Our giant family is dysfunctional, but it is family, none the less. And today is the day we remember them and pray for them and they pray for us. And then they pass us the bread.

In The Name of The Father. And The Son. And The Holy Spirit. Amen.

Things have changed a lot since Jesus told this story. I mean, there are the obvious things, like cars and phones and the internet, but there are more subtle things too.

The biggest one is that most of the people who followed Jesus back then were the ones on the wrong side of the tracks. He spoke to the poor, the frustrated, the beaten down.

Today, those people still follow Jesus, but most people who claim to be Christian in this country are pretty comfortable. I mean, all you have to do is look at the big steeples and the elegant stained glass of most churches to know that not many of the people who gather there are poor.

The message originally spoken to the poor has been taken by the rich – and as a result, it is easy to miss what Jesus was trying to say. The scripture today is one of those stories – it means something a bit different, depending on who you identify with, with the assumptions you bring to the table.

As an educated white guy, it is pretty easy to identify with the land owner. I like to think I am kind, like the landowner in this story. And in the way we usually understand this story, the landowner represents God, and we all like to think of God as basically like us, only nicer.

But the story reads pretty different if you are reading it from the perspective of the first Jesus followers – people who were poor, people who were struggling to get by, people who worked day labor.

Yeah , that’s right– this is the story of the labor pool. This is a story about people who sit and wait for rich men to come and hire them, to do back breaking work at a rate that will barely pay their bills.

And so the farmer goes to the labor pool four times – first thing in the morning, at lunch, at three and again an hour before quitting time.

But when it came time to settle up, he paid them in reverse order – he paid the ones who worked one hour, and then the ones who worked three hours, and so on.  But, and here is the kicker – he paid them all the same.

The people who had been there since early that morning, who signed in at the desk, who sat in the diert room, who waited for their name to be called and who went out at 6 that morning – they got paid the same thing that the ones who had only been out there an hour did.

And the people who went out early – they were hot about it.

Even though they did not suffer at all. They got paid exactly what they were supposed to get paid. And yet they were mad.

The people who worked all day got what they deserved. The people who worked one hour, yet got a whole day’s pay,  they got grace.

Last week, we talked about how there are two ways to view the world – the way of grace, or the way of power. Jesus invites us to live in a world of Grace, and here we see another example of what that looks like. The Farmer extends grace – rather than give people what they deserve, he gives them what they need.

The folks who worked all day – they have a chance to be graceful – I mean, they worked all day for the pay that they had agreed to, and the farmer’s generosity cost them nothing. But instead, they felt cheated. They appealed to power instead of embracing grace.

Yes, when we read this story, it does tell us that god is gracious. But it also tells us that we have a choice to decide which world we want to live in. And to follow Jesus means to choose grace.

In the name of the Father, and The son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Where is authority found?

In the small fundamentalist church of my childhood, we had no doubt where authority was found – authority was the older white guy behind the pulpit. But his authority came from the Bible.

In the summer, we went to Vacation Bible School. It was a big deal, and on the Sunday after Vacation Bible School, we kids performed a program where we recited our memorized bible verses and sang some songs. One of the songs that always got sung was

The B-I-B-L-E.

That’s the word for me.

I stand alone on the word of God.

The B-I-B-L-E.

We even had hand gestures to go along with it. For the sake of decorum, I will spare you the hand gestures, but we had them.

The word of God was our authority, we said. We stand on the Bible, we said. A friend started a local church and named it Bible Baptist Church, because that was where they placed their trust.

But here is the thing – what part of the bible? We heard countless sermons on being “Born Again”, because that was in the Bible. But we never heard a sermon on “sell everything you have and give it to the poor”, which was also in the Bible.

We heard endless teaching on the Ten Commandments, but Jesus said the greatest two commandments were to love God and to love your neighbor, and I remember no sermons on that.

I was endlessly told that in Leviticus, it says that same sex sex is wrong, but it was never mentioned  that in the same chapter, it tells you that it is also wrong to eat shrimp or to wear a poly cotton blend shirt.

Needless to say, I came to feel that making the Bible our sole standard of authority to be, well, problematic.

So where is authority to be found?

In the Jewish culture Jesus lived in, they had lots of the same problems we do trying to interpret scripture. For instance, steeling is wrong, according to the scriptures. But what if you find a chicken wandering down the road? If you took the chicken home with you, was that stealing?

So you would go to your local rabbi, who would here your question, and he would say something like “If you found the chicken within 50 yards of a chicken coop, then it is stealing. But if you found it more than 50 yards from a chicken coop, then it is not stealing.”

This decision making process, this discerning process, was called binding and loosing. You asked the rabbi, the authority figure, and he decided if you were bound to the law, or if you were loosed from the law.

This understanding puts a lot of the Jesus stories in context. We see Jesus binding and loosing all over the place. Throughout Matthew’s gospel, we have examples of Jesus binding and loosing. (I’ve taken these examples from Powell’s article.)

5:21-23: ‘You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.’

Jesus is binding the law prohibiting murder as applicable to anger and insults as well.
5:27-28: ‘You have heard that it was said, “Do not commit adultery.” But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ Jesus is binding the law prohibiting adultery as applicable to lustful thoughts as well.

5:31-32: ‘It has been said, “Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.” But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.” Jesus binds the prohibition against adultery as applicable to divorce and remarriage, and does so by saying that the Scripture that allows for divorce was a concession granted in recognition of ‘hardness of hearts’ and that it never expressed the actual intent of God – quite an incredible thing to say about the Scriptures.

But Jesus also looses his own prohibition of divorce for those instances involving infidelity, both here and in 19:9.

In 5:43-48, Jesus binds the commandment to ‘love your neighbour’ as applicable also to loving your enemies.

In 12:1-8, Jesus looses the ban on working on the Sabbath to get food when you’re hungry. He says that the way Pharisees bind the law in the same situation ‘condemns the innocent’.

In 15:3-9, Jesus binds the command to “Honor your father and mother” as applicable to caring for your parents in old age.

So now, we see that Jesus is doing something radical here – he is saying the authority figure for binding and loosing is not the scriptures, not the rabbi, but the community.

Is it right or wrong to work on the Sabbath? We know what the scriptures say, but what does the community say? Is it right or wrong for woman to preach? I know what the scriptures say – but what does the community say? Same sex relationships, eating shrimp, helping our hungry neighbor, wearing poly cotton blend – you ask me what is right or wrong, and I will tell you simply this:

What does our community say?

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On the small has-been farm I grew up on, we had lots of gates.

There was the gate that kept the goats in their pen. There was the gate that kept the hogs in their pen. There was the gate at the bottom of the driveway that kept the stranger out when we were away. In shop class, I learned how to make a gate that will never, ever sag or drag the ground.

I know a little bit about gates.

So, in the passage we read today, when Jesus says “ I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it”, I noticed that.

To prevail means to be effective or to be victorious. How is a gate victorious? How is it effective? How does a gate prevail?

Gates have two functions: To keep people or things inside. And to keep people or things outside.

Gates are effective when they keep things in or out.

So, when Jesus says that He will build his church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, he has to mean that the gates of hell cannot keep the church out.

According to Jesus, the church belongs in hell.

Hell is where we find the drug addicted. Hell is where the single mother struggling to pay the bills lives. Hell is where the alcoholic sleeps, hell is where the pimped out and the pimps both live. Hell is where we find both victims of abuse and abusers.

We want the church to be a place where we meet and hang out with our friends, but Jesus pictured the church as an expeditionary force, bursting down the gates of hell itself and bringing liberation to those who are imprisoned there.

Jesus is calling his church to wade into hell itself to bust out the homeless, the hungry, the adulterer, the pornographer. To drag them out of the depths of hell, after we tear down those gates.

Hunger, homelessness, addiction – all that is one kind of hell. But there are other hells.

There is the hell of being told your sexuality or your gender somehow makes you less than acceptable to God. There’s the hell of being made to feel less than human because your skin is darker than everyone else’s, or because you were born in another country.

And there is the hell of being poor and losing your job and being told it’s the fault of the immigrant, who, in reality, you have much more in common with than you do the rich man who laid you off.

Whatever hell people find themselves in, the gates that keep them there are to be torn down by the church. We are most like the church Jesus had in mind when we proclaim to the captives that the hell they live in is not part of the plan – that there is another way to live, and we find it when we work together to bring about the Justice of God.

The justice of God is a personal justice. It involves sacrificial love. It means dying to ourselves, our ambitions, our preconceived notions of how things work. The way of Jesus invites us to be the means by which God’s justice comes into being. It invites us to go to Hell, for the sake of those imprisoned there.

Today, my brothers and sisters, my most fervent prayer for the church is simply this: I pray I will see you in hell. They need us there.

In the name of the Father, and The Son, and The Holy Spirit. Amen.

We are most influenced by who we model ourselves after.

I learned how to deal with people by watching my Dad deal with people. I learned how to read Literature by modeling after my teachers. I learned how to cook by watching the old ladies that raised me.

A big part of the Christian story is that we are to model ourselves after the example of Jesus.

In today’s passage, we see Jesus describing what the future will be like. Jesus has seen the writing on the wall. The powers that be were after him. The questions, the accusations, the stares. Every time he stops to rest, someone wants to quiz him, to ask him questions, to try to put him in a box.

He knows what is going on. He sees that this cannot go on forever, and if it comes down to it, he knows what the outcome will be.

So now, Jesus is trying to tell his disciples what the story is. How powers will collide, and how it might look like the Kingdom of the world is winning, and to not be afraid. In the days and weeks ahead, it will be important that the disciples not forget the vision he has given them of how the world works – of what it means to live in the Kingdom of God. What it means to imitate him, and by extension, God.

Peter is appalled.  How can this be? What, are you kidding? You will be king! This cannot happen! God forbid it!

See, Peter had a vision of how the world worked too. Peter knew that when it comes down to powers colliding, the side with the most swords, wins. So, this Jesus who he had followed and sacrificed for and given up everything for – this Jesus is talking about being arrested by the powers that be – and of being killed by those same powers. It sounds like Jesus is giving up!

Jesus tells us that if we have seen him, we have seen God – in other words, Jesus imitates God, and how God acts.

Peter is imitating someone here, too. Peter is imitating the world that surrounds them. Peter is suggesting that Jesus’ way is wrong. And Peter doesn’t just think this – he tries to convince Jesus of this. Instead of imitating Jesus, Peter wants Jesus to imitate him.

The way of Peter is attractive – after all, who wants to seek out a way of life that will mean suffering and trial? By choosing to imitate Peter, Jesus could have avoided the cross. Jesus could have lived to a ripe old age, had kids, been somebody.

And it is because the way of Peter is attractive that Jesus calls Peter a stumbling block. In fact, Jesus calls Peter evil personified. He tells Peter that he is focused on earthly things, not heavenly things.

In the Way of Jesus, sometimes, things seem upside down. Jesus told us that the way to be first was to be last. That the way to gain our lives was to lose it. That to get the best seat at the table, pick the worst one.

And that victory comes by death at the hands of the powers that be.

Ultimately, it seems to me that life offers us a choice of two visions of how the world works. Imitate Jesus, or imitate Peter.

I hope that we will choose wisely.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Rabbi Harold Kushner says that all conversations about God either start with, or end with, the question: “Why do bad things happen to good people? “

Why, indeed.

The fundamentalist Christianity of my youth would answer that there are no good people, that the question is not why do some folks have it bad, but why are we not all burning in hellfire, because of our inherent unworthiness next to God’s righteousness, etc.

That was not very helpful, you know?

I know a woman who spent her whole life working in a rural Mississippi school, teaching rural country kids to read. On the weekends, she taught Sunday School and in the summers, ran her church’s Vacation Bible School. She and her husband personally helped at least a dozen kids to go to college. The woman was a saint.

She was retired and serving as volunteer librarian for her small town when she found out she had cancer. The phones in this small town lit up, spreading the news that Martha was sick with the cancer, and that the family was asking for prayer.

The town prayed. All five churches in the town held prayer vigils. Every Sunday school class in each of those five churches put her on their prayer list. I bet it is safe to say that over the next six weeks or so, there were thousands of prayers for Martha.

But Martha died. Her last few days were horrible, as she coughed up blood and was drugged beyond sensibility on morphine to make the pain bearable.

As deaths go, that one sucked.  Not sure where our prayers helped.

And then there is a guy I know, who has impregnated six different women, taken responsibility for none of them, who is a crack addict, who is always stealing other peoples things, who defrauds the government and churches… and he is doing fine. He seems to thrive, actually. If I could pick who would get afflicted by cancer, this guy would be a candidate, for sure.

But no, he keeps rocking along, while good folks like Martha die horrible deaths.

And anyone with sense thinks this is sorta jacked up.

Why do people get raped? Why do people end up homeless? Why do good people lose the job they desperately need to feed their families?

Why, why, why?

I used to scream at God about this. I used to get so mad at God – I mean, God is in charge, right? God has a plan, right? Is this the plan? If so, it is a pretty stupid plan.

Then I read this parable.

In the parable, Jesus tells a story about a farmer who plants good seed, but an enemy comes at night and plants weeds. When the weeds show up, the workers want to pull them up, but the farmer says no, because if you pull them up, it will hurt the wheat. So they let them grow, and get rid of the weeds at harvest time.

One thing you probably ought to know is that this was no ordinary weed. It was a weed called Darnel, and it looks a lot like wheat while it is growing. It also was poisonous and had a pretty intense root system that wrapped itself around the roots of whatever was nearby, so if you pulled up the Darnel, it would pull up whatever was around it – in this case, the wheat.

OK, make sense now?  Maybe not. But you are not alone. It made no sense to the disciples, either.

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!

So, Jesus is saying, “God has a plan. There is an enemy to God’s plan, who seeks to disrupt it. The weeds are mixed in with the wheat, and to pull the weeds means I hurt the wheat. But one day, the harvest happens. Then, the weeds will be destroyed and the wheat harvested.”

In other words, I hear in this that God is not completely in control – yet. God has enemies that disrupt God’s plan. So God has a plan B – harvest time.

In the name of The Father, and The Son, and The Holy Spirit. Amen.

A good friend of mine has a nephew named Mason that was always getting in trouble. He is a little guy, Mason is – at the time of the story, he was about three. One day, Mason was just being particularly troublesome. He was into everything, and Mason’s mother was at her wits end. She was just ready to scream.

Mason was grabbing things off the coffee table and throwing them – things like magazines, nick-nacks, and things like that. “Mason!,” she shouted. If you pick up one more thing, I am going to put you in the corner.” Mason looked at her – thre years old, mind you – looked at her, looked at the corner, turned, picked up the ashtray off the coffee table and ran over and put himself in the corner!

The problem was not that Mason did not know what was right and wrong – the problem is that Mason still wanted to do what he was not supposed to do, despite knowing the consequences for doing it.

There are times when I read something in the Bible and I think – that’s nice. Then there are other times, like today, reading this passage, when I think, “They are talking about me!”

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

…when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.

I surely know that feeling. May be you do too.

Why is it that we know what to do, we know how to do it, and yet, we still don’t do it – in fact, we do the opposite of it?

We know we have a problem with drinking, so we shouldn’t take that drink – but we do it anyway. We know that person brings out the worst in us, but we go to a party we know they will be at anyway.

When it comes to this passage in the Bible, there are two theories of what Paul is talking about here. One group says that the “I” here is hypothetical – that Paul is talking about what it means to be outside of the Christian faith – that a believer does not have these sort of struggles.

I tend to distrust this theory. Because everyone I know who follows Jesus and is honest still has these sorts of struggles. Just because you follow Jesus, it does not get easier to not drink too much, or to not curse out the guy who cuts you off in traffic or to be kind to the stranger. In fact, sometimes, I think it is harder.

There is a particular woman I know who is not homeless, but always shows up whenever we hand out free stuff – blankets, coats, food, whatever – if there is free stuff, she is right there. That is somewhat annoying, but to make matters worse, she is just a brat – she pushes, she cusses, she calls me a racist for not giving her stuff before I give it to the folks in line – she is a pain in my ass.

I was complaining to a friend of mine about her one time, and my friend said “That is not very Christian of you. Whatever happened to “Love Wins”?”

I told my friend that the proof of my following Jesus was not in my undying love for this woman – because honestly, I am not there yet. Loving her is very hard for me. The proof of my following Jesus is that I am still trying to love her, despite how I really feel. And I find that when I try really hard to be loving to her, I dislike her a little bit more each time.

But whether I am feeling loving to her or not, I know what I am supposed to do. And for the times I don’t manage to do it, I know that God’s grace is wide enough to cover my failures.

In the name of the Father, and The Son, and The Holy Spirit. Amen.