The Same Mind as Christ Jesus

                                                                Proper 21-A 2014

                           Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78;Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

Father Adam Trambley

Sept 28, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

From Philippians this morning: Have the same mind as Christ Jesus.  He was up in heaven having a glorious time, but didn’t feel like he was entitled to that existence.  Instead he humbled himself to come down to earth, to be born like us, to live like us, and even to be crucified and die like us.  Saint Paul exhorts us to do pretty much the same, although we really can’t claim to start up there as equal with God the way Jesus did.

Heaven has better pyro-technics.

Christ’s willingness to come down from heaven to be fully part of humanity is the ultimate act of loving humility in the universe.  Christ Jesus is God, in the form of God, equal with God, living what we assume to be the pretty amazing life that God lives because, if you’re God, you probably set things up in the universe so your life is pretty spectacular.  All the scriptural visions of heaven are filled with choirs and incense and color and fire and all sorts of beautiful, amazing experiences worthy of the Almighty – things that make the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular seem like a toddler with a Fisher-Price piano and a Lite-Brite.  Christ had all of that radiance surrounding him, for eternity if he wants it, but he doesn’t need to keep it.  He doesn’t feel like he has to hold onto it or make some sort of guarantee to always have it.  He willingly sets it all aside to be with us, so that we have a chance to experience that heavenly life someday, too.  Instead of deciding that he is God and all the glory is for him, he decides that he would rather give it away to us – to you, and to you, and to you, and to you, and to me.  That amazing gift of not only to his heavenly position but also of his very life was made to people that we know don’t measure up to Jesus, but who were considered by Jesus important enough to give it all up for.  That humble, self-giving love of Jesus is what we are called as Christians to follow.

Paul gives a couple of guidelines about how we are supposed to live this life.  He says not to look to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  Instead of being constantly obsessed with all of our particular worries and anxieties, we are supposed to pay attention to the needs of others.  As Christians, we put others first and trust that we will get what we need from God. 

Then Paul says something that turns our prevailing attitude on its head.  He says, “in humility regard others as better than yourselves.”  He doesn’t necessary say others are better than we are.  He says don’t worry about whether someone else is better or worse, just treat them like they are better than we are.  Act toward others like we believe that they are more important to us than even we are to ourselves.  Take the time to really listen to them.  Make sure they have what they need if there is any way we can provide it.  See to their comfort and convenience in the little things in life instead of demanding they bend their comforts to our own.  Think about how Jesus acted in coming down from heaven to us.  He acted as if we were more worthy of receiving his life than he was worthy of keeping it.  We weren’t more worthy, of course, but he acted like it, and in receiving his life he actually made us worthy of it. 

The monks tell a story about a monastery that was beset by conflict, fighting and dissention.  Nobody new was joining and nobody, including the monks, really felt like anything holy was going on there.  Then one day some of them went to visit a wise rabbi on the other side of the forest.  The rabbi said, “I’ll tell you a secret.  One of you is the Messiah.”  Now telling a bunch of Christian monks that one of them was the Messiah is a bit ridiculous since they knew Jesus was the Messiah, but the monks thought that maybe God had something special in store for them.  So each of them starting thinking about just who might be the Messiah.  Brother Robert seemed like a good candidate – he was quite, hard-working and prayerful.  But Brother John was wise.  Then Brother Aelred was so difficult that it seemed impossible for God to do anything useful with him, which was the kind of person who would probably turn out to be the Messiah.  Pretty soon, the brothers all started treating each other as if any of them just might be the Messiah.  They regarded everyone else as better than themselves.  Pretty soon the quality of their community life became so profoundly loving that amazing things began to happen and Jesus the Messiah really did show up in their midst constantly.

In humility regard others as better than yourselves and look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  When we live into this calling in our lives, the quality of our relationships and communities change, just like they did for the monks in this parable.  If we treat our spouses and family members as better than ourselves, if we treat our co-workers or our fellow students as better, if we treat our church members as better, if we treat the people in the other cars on the road as better, if we treat people we don’t even really know as better, amazing things will happen around us.  Such willingness to love and serve others is hard, which is why we usually don’t bother to do it.  But we are called to nothing less.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. 

But Christ didn’t stop with just serving.  He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, humbling himself even to death.  He gave it all away.  Such sacrifice may seem excessive, and even impossible to us, so I want to share two examples of this kind of loving obedience unto death. 

The first is Constance, who along with her companions are called the Martyrs of Memphis.  If you come to the Thursday morning services, you know about her because I always celebrate her feast around September 9^th.  Constance was an Episcopal nun in 1878 when a Yellow Fever epidemic hit Memphis, Tennessee.  She was the superior of the Sisters of St. Mary who had come to Memphis five years earlier to found a girls’ school adjacent to the Cathedral.  When the epidemic began, Sister Constance and the Cathedral Dean immediately organized relief work in their area, which was one of the most infected regions of the city.  Instead of looking to their own interests and fleeing to safety, Constance and six of her sisters, as well as priests, doctors and volunteers from Memphis, Boston and New York stayed to minister to the victims.  All but two of the volunteers came down with yellow fever, and Constance and five others died.   Throughout Memphis, 30,000 people fled and of the 20,000 who remained, more than 5,000 died.  Constance did not see her own position and connections in other places as something to be exploited.  Instead she emptied herself serving the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters, obedient to the point of death.  Similar love is being shown by African doctors and nurses treating Ebola patients today.

A second contemporary example is a Syrian Christian woman named Liena, whose story is told by Voice of the Martyrs.  As many of you know, the current violence in Syria is of particular danger to Christians, with many being persecuted or killed for their beliefs. Before the current civil war, Liena and her family had been praying for revival in Syria, their home.  When the war started, their Islamic neighbors apologized for the evil acts of the terrorists toward Christians, and Liena and her family had opportunities to share Jesus with them.  She and her husband had great love for their Muslim brothers and sisters that lived around them.  In prayer, she asked God what he would have her do to be his witness in Syria to these people that she loved so much.  Over a series of days in prayer, God asked her if she could give him her life and the lives of her husband and children.  With great prayer and fasting, she and her husband knew they had to be able to offer themselves and even God’s great gift of their children back to God.  The terrorist already knew who they were.  They knew that Liena’s family shared the Gospel with people.  Her family was in danger.  But Liena and her husband decided they had to stay and do God’s work, refusing opportunities to escape to the safety of Western countries.  They had to talk to their children about what to do if they were attacked: to be quiet and not say anything except to tell the terrorists that Jesus loved them and that any pain would be short-lived and then they would be with Jesus forever.  Liena and her husband and children have emptied themselves and are obedient, even unto death, although we all pray it will not come to that.  But the same mind is in them that was in Christ Jesus, looking not for their own interests but for the eternal interests of those around them and to the interests of future generations who need a holy homeland in Syria and not a country handed over to terrorists.  They do not regard their privileges and connections to the West as things to be exploited, but to be turned over to God – and we trust God will exalt them in God’s good time.

We at St. John’s this morning face neither terroristic persecution nor fatal epidemics -- thank you, Jesus.  But we are called as individuals and as a church to be of the same mind that was in Christ and empty ourselves for one another.  Most of the good things that have happened at St. John’s over the past 150 years have occurred when, instead of ensuring we preserve the church for us, we have opened it and given it away to others that have needed it.  As a parish, we pray that we will have the wisdom and courage to keep looking to the interests of others, having the mind of Jesus to will and to work for his good pleasure.   Then, as we practice emptying ourselves as a church, we are better able to support one another as we as individuals humbly regard others as better than ourselves, and live into sometimes difficult and even dangerous consequences of such discipleship. 

Of course, these consequences are not the final consequences.  Paul writes:

Therefore God also highly exalted him…

So that at the name of Jesus

Every knee should bend in heaven, on earth and under the earth,

And every tongue confess

That Jesus Christ is Lord

To the glory of God the Father.

Parable of Good Employer

Proper 20-A 2014

                         Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105;Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

Father Adam Trambley

Sept 21, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

Today’s collect, which is the special prayer for the week that we say before our readings, asks God not to let us be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly.  So let’s think on some heavenly things for a while, and we’ll come back to the collect a bit later.

Jesus says in the gospel that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who goes out to find laborers for his vineyard.  He gets all the laborers who are standing around at CareerLink Palestine, and he agrees to pay them the usual daily wage for their day’s work.  The daily wage is one denarius, and the daily work is twelve hours, from sun-up at 6:00am to sundown at 6:00pm.  A few more times during the day he goes out and finds others standing around, and tells them to come and work for him.  Now we might notice that after the first crew is hired, no one is negotiating for a wage.  The laborers who, for whatever reason, got there late, aren’t likely to have any other offers and will happily take whatever they can get.  The last time he goes out, there is only one hour of day light left to work, and, since this is taking place outside in a vineyard around 40 A.D., there are no halogen street lights, or nor even Victorian gas lamps, for working after dark.  When the sun starts to set, everyone comes in from the vineyard, gets paid, and goes home. 

The surprise comes during the collection of the pay.  The first unusual practice is calling the last people hired to come in first.  Normally you call the first people in first, especially if you are going to do something irregular that might make them upset.  Easier to pay them, send them home, and then deal with the rest.  But the manager first called the people who only worked an hour and gave them a denarius, which was a full day’s pay.  Then he gave the same pay to everyone else, finishing with the folks who worked a full twelve-hour day in the vineyards in the scorching heat.  Guess what?  Those guys feel like they should have gotten a bonus.  I mean, if they were kept for last, there was probably a reason – like to give them some extra pay, or a fruit basket, or two tickets to the Jerusalem Giants playoff game, or something a little extra special.  But the landowner says, “You got what we agreed to.  If I want to be generous to someone else, I’m  allowed.  Don’t be jealous.”  Pretty straightforward.  The workers think life isn’t fair.  The landowners says it is fair to you, and it’s better than fair to somebody else.  Be happy about it. 

We can get caught up in the same worries that the laborers have about what is fair or not fair.  We want the rules to be the same for everybody. Or, if the rules aren’t exactly the same, then we should be able to play by the best set of them.  We way too easily can move from being grateful for having everything we need to being upset because someone else seems to have more, or to have the same things we do but not to have worked as hard for them, or to need more than we do for some reason and to have gotten it.  Instead of being happy that we were able to work all day when some else wasn’t, or that we only need something basic when someone else needs some special accommodation, we get envious.  Our Christian call is to contribute as much as we can to the work in God’s vineyard, and true strength of character is shown by the self-control of not needing everything.  Modern consumerism says we should take as much as we can and that the more we take the better off we are.  The message of consumption which is inculcated into us with very sophisticated advertising says we need more to be OK, and that the more we focus on things temporal the more successful and more powerful and more beloved we can become.  Jesus doesn’t say that, of course.  To quote another line from our collect: “Grant us, Lord, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.”  Take your denarius, spend it on the important things you need, and be grateful that God is also taking care of everyone else. 

Now this parable is actually about a few things beyond just telling us not to be jealous, as important a message as that is.  One of the parable’s other points is that we are meant to go work in the God’s vineyard.  In another place, Jesus talks about the harvest being plentiful and the laborers being few.  The harvest is obviously plentiful in the parable, because the vineyard owner hires every worker he can get.  Everyone is ideally showing up first thing in the morning to worship God, care for people, and grow as Christians; to teach everything that Jesus commands and to baptize; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and visit the sick and those in prison; to proclaim that the kingdom of God is at hand; to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself.  This work is what we are made to be about, and we don’t stop once we start.  We work the full day, and, as the laborers talk about being in the scorching heat, sometimes the work is hard.  People can be difficult.  Time and energy can be short.  We might have to struggle with ourselves to do the right thing and to love others.  Occasionally, Christians face persecution and other hardship.  And, if we do the work, what is this denarius that we get?  What is our daily wage?  On the one hand, we get what we need – remember “give us this day our daily bread” and “seek first the kingdom of God and all these will be added unto you?”  But at the deeper level, what we get is the eternal life of the Kingdom.  If we start doing Kingdom work, we are going to be living the Kingdom life, and at the end of the day we have our eternal Kingdom life.        

Another point being made by this parable is that the reward of eternal Kingdom life is the same for everyone.  Now it is always dangerous to talk too much about what heaven is like, because we can’t really know.  But the reality this parable points to is one where we all have an equal inheritance with our Father in heaven.  This attitude flies in the face of most of the jokes we tell about heaven.  Like the one about the cabbie and the preacher who get to the pearly gates and Saint Peter gives the priest a small hut and the cabbie an elaborate palace.  The preacher asks why, and Saint Peter says, “Easy, it based on performance.  When you preached, people slept.  But when he drove, people prayed.”  Our parable this morning says we shouldn’t expect palaces or other status differentiations in heaven.  This same wage for all the laborers also goes against any religion, philosophy or spiritual system that differentiates places in heaven based on works, on spiritual maturity, on enlightenment or on any other measurement, and such systems continually work their way into the country’s spiritual landscape and need to be guarded against. 

This parable also makes the very important point that God keeps coming back to find people and bring them into his vineyard.  We probably should try not to miss him when he shows up, but notice how the landowner keeps going out every few hours to see if anyone else is standing around idle?  The parable doesn’t say why they were idle.  Maybe they were too sick to be there on time, or were injured and couldn’t walk from their houses quickly.  Maybe the owner paid them first so they’d have time to drag themselves back home.  Or maybe they were too lazy to get up, or sleeping off a few too many from the night before, or engaged in any number of other activities that might have meant that missing a day’s work was their own fault.  The options are wide open, but however we see it doesn’t matter, because that exceedingly generous landowner brings them in to work whenever they show up, and he gives them the reward of the Kingdom.  The length of service is immaterial to God’s generous reward.  For us, the implications of this generosity are important.  Those who die too early and do little tangible work have a place in God’s eternal kingdom just as those who live full lives for God.  Also, those who don’t accept God’s call to work in his vineyard until later in life are also given a full wage like everyone else.  One notable example is Saint Augustine, who didn’t come out for work first thing in the morning, but famously spent a few hours praying, “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.”  God keeps going out into the vineyard because he wants everyone to join in his work for as long as they can.  They will receive their daily bread in this life and their eternal place in the Kingdom to come.    

Going back to the collect before we close, we pray “Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly.”  We can worry about a lot of earthly things, and those anxieties can make us jealous, make us want to apply our earthly standards to heavenly things, or even keep us so distracted that we almost forget to show up for our vineyard work.  Our worries can seem so overwhelming that we lose focus on the heavenly things.  The history of this collect can put our anxieties in perspective, however.  This prayer goes back to Roman Christians at the fall of the Roman Empire.  They wrote this prayer when their city was being threatened and overwhelmed by Barbarians.  Anything they had that was earthly, they had good reason to be anxious about.  So they wrote this prayer asking God to let them “love things heavenly and…to hold fast to those [things] that shall endure.”  And we can pray the same as we go to work in God’s vineyard, rejoicing at all the people that God will bring in to join us in our labors, and in his everlasting Kingdom.   

Forgiveness

                                                                Proper 19A 2014

                         Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114;Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

Father Adam Trambley

Sept 14, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

In last week’s gospel, Jesus talked about prayer, but only after first describing how we can reconcile with those who have harmed us.  This morning’s gospel reading is directly after last weeks, and Jesus takes up this idea of forgiveness more directly and more emphatically.

Simon Peter, of course, prompts the discussion.  He heard Jesus’ instructions that when someone sins against you, you should go directly to that person and work it out.  He understood Jesus’ emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation and restoring relationship with our brothers and sisters.  But Matthew has taken Peter’s falafel six times in the past few weeks.  It’s great to be the generous forgiving one, but at some point enough is enough, right?  We can almost imagine Peter asking “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” while he casts a smug glance in Matthew’s direction.

Now let’s face it, six times is a lot to forgive someone.  Six is a lot more times than we want to forgive.  Once could be a mistake.  Twice, and there could be extenuating circumstances.  But three strikes and you’re out, buddy.  By about the third time someone offends us in some way, even if the offense is almost entirely a figment of our imagination, we feel entitled to be upset, unpleasant, rude in return, and still feel morally superior for being generous the first two times.  Somehow we think everyone else should further our comfort and convenience, and that we should be rewarded anytime our behavior might possibly indicate that we are not the center of the universe.  So if we have already gone so far as to forgive six times, then move over Mother Theresa and somebody please put a call in to the Nobel Committee.

Now, honestly, forgiving somebody who really hurt us even once is hard.  That reconciliation takes strength, courage, prayer and usually support from the community around us.  But following Jesus means doing that hard work.  Jesus is the one on the cross who said, “Forgive them, Father.” 

But we also know, when we are on the other side of things, that being forgiven six times isn’t really enough. We hurt the people closest to us a lot more than that, and if they just wrote us off after somewhere between two and seven times, we’d all be renting rooms by the week at the Sharon Hotel.  Jesus knows how much forgiveness we need, too, and that’s why his response to Peter is, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”  Jesus knows how hard it is to forgive that freely, but we all need that much forgiveness from God and from each other if we are going to have any chance to live as a loving community.  We can’t put a limit on how often we forgive. 

Just to note here, for the mathematically precise, that seventy-seven times is just a poetic way of saying a whole lot more than seven.  The assumption is that you can’t use your fingers and toes to count that high, so just keep forgiving.  If anyone out there is keeping a list of offenses and forgives people the seventy-sixth time but not the seventy-eighth time, please call and make an appointment to see me.  I think we have some things to talk about.

Then Jesus tells a story that changes the focus from continual forgiveness of repeated offenses to a requirement to forgive offenses no matter how large.  A king, who represents God, has a slave, who represents us.  That slave owes the king a ridiculous amount of money – ten thousand talents.  A talent was about seventy pounds of gold and was the denomination that provinces would use to pay their tax obligations to the Roman Emperor.  Ten thousand talents is an astronomical amount of money, and probably no one alive but Caesar could ever have repaid it.  Imagine being called in to the boss and told to bring in seven hundred thousand pounds of gold.  The slave appeals for mercy, and the King forgives the entire amount – he doesn’t even have to pay back the office papyrus he used surreptitiously to draw up his fantasy chariot team.  Then that slave goes out and encounters someone who owes him one hundred denarii, which is about ten thousand dollars.  Not a small sum.  Not ten thousand talents, but probably not something he could easily lose.  When his debtor begged for mercy, the slave who has just been forgiven everything decides to send him to prison until he pays up.  The crowd isn’t impressed, and tells the King what happened.  The King changes his mind and hands the ungrateful lout over to the torturers until the unpayable debt is paid in full.  Then Jesus says that’s what will happen to us if we don’t forgive our brothers and sisters from our hearts.

Jesus parable tells us two very important truths: that we desperately need God’s forgiveness and that we cannot receive God’s forgiveness if we do not forgive one another.

I hope I don’t need to convince anyone that we need God’s forgiveness.  We have sinned and turned against God in any variety of ways.  Since God created everything, including us, when we hurt others, mess up his creation, or even hurt ourselves, we are incurring a huge debt we can’t pay back.  We may as well owe all the gold in the Roman Empire because we have nothing of our own to repay God with.  God gave us everything we have, including our bodies, our time, our labor, and anything else we like to think of as our own.  So without God’s forgiveness, given to us in the gift of his Son Jesus Christ, we are hopelessly lost.  We can only ask God for mercy, and, just like in the story, when we ask we receive it.  Our only requirement is to go out and forgive others, as well.

When I was younger, I use to think this requirement was just plain mean, as if God was waiting for a legalistic “Gotcha” to withhold his forgiveness from us.  But God is always waiting to forgive us. The problem is that when we don’t forgive others we erect barriers between ourselves and God that make our own forgiveness impossible.

See, forgiveness is not really about us and the person who sinned against us.  Forgiveness is mostly about us and God, with the offending party playing a very minor role.  When we forgive, we claim our faith in God as God of the past, of the present, and of the future.  Forgiving our brothers and sisters acknowledges that God was with me no matter what offense, injury or harm was done to me.  Forgiving acknowledges that God is with me right now in this moment to strengthen me to act out of his boundless love even for my enemies.  And forgiving acknowledges that God will continue to be with me in the future even as I go forward having lost whatever it that was taken from me – whether dignity, property, relationships, status, or life itself – and that God will provide what I need so I don’t have to resent someone else because I am afraid that I won’t have enough for whatever I think I’ll need.  Forgiveness is about faith that God will be God for us, and that no one else can take that fundamental relationship away.

When we refuse to forgive, however, we decide that God cannot make right what someone else did wrong.  Unforgiveness professes that our injury is beyond the reach of God’s love and mercy.  Hardheartedness toward others is our decision that we prefer the self-pity of resentments and anger to the healing presence of God.  By not forgiving someone, we put our emotions and our lives in their hands, instead of in the hands of God.  We bind ourselves to the one who hurt us instead of to Jesus.  We decide to hitch our future to the fear and hurt done by another human being instead of holding the hand of our Almighty Father in heaven as we walk through even the valley of the shadow of death. 

Remember last week when Jesus said, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven”?  When we refuse to forgive, we bind ourselves to the sin committed against us.  When we hold onto sin, whether our own sin we refuse to repent of or the sin committed against us that we refuse to forgive, we put up a huge wall between us and Jesus who took all sin to the cross and got rid of it.  If we don’t want to forgive and hand the sins over to Jesus, we’re telling him to stay on his side of our walls.  I’m not sure a better definition of hell than being stuck in a place with a huge wall between us and Jesus, and that hell can happen in this life, and usually we put the wall up ourselves.  How ironic that when the King hands the slave over to the torturers at the end of the parable, it is really the slave himself who has built the jail and designed the torture.

God’s love and mercy is so great, however, that he can forgive even our unforgiveness.  When our hardness of heart has isolated us from God and neighbor, Jesus is always willing to help us tear down our walls and forgive.  He will help us with the difficult work of healing our pain, seeing a way forward, and loving those who hurt us.  He is always waiting to forgive us and help us to forgive others. 

There is an old monastic story that I like, where someone goes and asks an old monk what they do.  He says, “We fall and we get up.  We fall and we get up.”  Forgiveness, the getting up and helping each other up, is at the center of the Christian life.  We ask forgiveness for ourselves, and we forgive others, whether one time or seventy-seven, whether small inconveniences or unspeakable harms, and God’s mercy is always there for us.