Skip links

Bill Countryman Talks About . . .

Scripture, Poetry, Gardens, etc.

Header Right

Judgement

GOD’S JUDGEMENT AND GOD’S LOVE

by Leave a Comment

Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, July 19, 2020

Proper 11A: Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

We find ourselves in a kind of limbo these days, with no clear path forward or back. We don’t know when our health will be more secure again. We don’t know how our country will move toward fulfilling its own ideals. We don’t know when we’ll be free to be in the same room with one another. We have some new hopes for our health and for our country. And I’m very grateful for zoom giving us this way to share our worship. But, still, we’re living in a bit of a fog—limbo. 

But our Scriptures today have surprised me once again by speaking pretty directly to our situation, even though they would be difficult to connect directly with one another—as is so often the case in the long green season after Pentecost.

I want to begin with our reading from Matthew—that awkward parable about judgement and punishment. I tend to have an allergic reaction to proclamations about God’s judgement. Too often Christians have used them as something to threaten other people with. The whole idea of a God who is just waiting for a chance to send people to Hell—couldn’t we just skip this passage?

Well, the problem then is that judgement does exist and we know it. We’re just more comfortable with it when the name of God isn’t attached directly to it. At least, I feel free to speak of the judgement that Nature is beginning to inflict on the human race. And I accept Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

There can be no question but that humanity stands under judgement for all sorts of reasons: our mistreatment of the earth; our mistreatment of one another; our willingness to worship the market before all other gods; our selfishness; the society we have inherited from a past stained by slavery and morphed into a present where “Black Lives Matter” becomes a revolutionary declaration. And none of us can simply wall ourselves off from these judgements. Innocent or guilty, we’re all inescapably involved, and most of us are at least a bit of each. 

The Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement are the prosecuting attorneys. And we are on trial. And, alas, being relatively innocent won’t get us off the hook. The pandemic doesn’t distinguish between those who deserve punishment and those who don’t. It just lays about with indiscriminate violence. And our American racism still seems to punish more victims than perpetrators. 

And what does Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and Weeds have to say to this confusing situation? It tells us that the ultimate judgement won’t happen immediately. And it offers a reason for it. God’s wheat, Jesus says, is for ever being infiltrated by weeds. The particular weed Jesus referred to, it seems, is something called “darnel.” And it’s particularly tricky to deal with because it’s a relative of wheat, and it looks a lot like wheat right up to harvest time, when the wheat seeds turn golden and the darnel seeds black. (Seed wheat, I understand, still has to have the darnel filtered out of it.) 

And the good news of this parable—yes, it does have good news in it—is that God doesn’t let the eager servants rush out and uproot the weeds at once. God gives us time—enough time to become, by God’s grace, more wheat, less darnel. God gives us time to grow into people who give more than we take, who preserve more than we destroy, who are ready to engage in the restoration of the world and the building up of a new, more just community. 

What is the alternative? Jesus describes it in terms of outer darkness, and fire, and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Only the wailing and gnashing of teeth are literal; the rest is metaphor. What is Hell really like? The closest I can come to imagining it is a confined space where Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their like have to deal eternally with one another. None of them can ever get a conclusive advantage over the others. They all fall victim to one another. And they no longer know how to find a way out. That’s the true outer darkness. We don’t want to go there. We know what our reprieve is for: it’s time for us to become wheat.

But what makes that so difficult for us? Paul in Romans calls it “the flesh” or “the body.” I’ve spent a lot of time in my adult life trying to follow Paul’s argument in Romans. (I even wrote a long discussion of it in a book called Reading Other People’s Mail.) But there’s no time in a sermon to unpack Paul’s complicated rhetoric. So I’m just going to tell you where my study has lead me. 

My guess is that when we heard the phrase “sinful flesh” this morning, we all thought of sex. In modern English, what else could anybody think? What Paul means by “flesh” and “body,” though, is something else. It’s our human finitude. Our limitation by time and place and physical strength and mental acuity and, finally, death. If that’s how we think of our lives, life is going to be a matter of struggle. We’ll do what we feel we have to stay ahead of our neighbors and cushion ourselves against the dangers of the world around us. We all become Hitler, and Stalin, and Mao locked up in that confined space together.

The “sinful flesh” manifests itself in fear, in greed, in jealousy, in all the ways we try to make ourselves “safe.” To live in the Spirit, by contrast, is to recognize that we are loved by God and that this is the most important thing about our lives. Paul isn’t saying that it’s wrong to have a job and earn money and pay the rent and take care of yourself and your family. He’s saying it’s wrong to make that your central value in life. True human life is grounded in hope and generosity, based on God’s love for us and everyone around us.

The Covid-19 crisis gives us a new awareness of this struggle. Some people have decided that they’d rather have a good time or pretend that nothing has changed or insist on their personal mask-free liberty instead of protecting the lives of others. And we’re all reaping the consequences. That’s what Paul means by “sinful flesh.” Others have chosen to live in a way that benefits others as well as ourselves. That’s the life of the Spirit. Most of us—we are human, after all—have probably done at least a little of each. Paul exhorts us to live more and more under the guidance of the Spirit.

And that, as Paul says, means living in hope. Not so much the hope of any one thing in particular—the hope of having a vaccine soon, the hope of being able to gather again as church, the hope of being able to move around freely without the aid of a mask. All things worth hoping for—but not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is that we live and will always live in God’s love. That’s a trustworthy hope that can sustain us, whatever else happens.

And I can’t imagine a more hopeful message for our situation just now than the story of Jacob’s experience at Bethel: the heavens wide open, angels coming and going on their earthly rounds, God standing beside Jacob and blessing him and claiming him for God’s own.

Why do I find this so full of hope? Well, just think of who Jacob was at this point in his life. He was born the second of twins, which meant that, according to the rules of his time, his older brother was the real successor. British gentry used to say that every gentleman needed two sons: an heir and a spare. Jacob was the spare. He hated it. He was bright and resourceful. His older brother seemed to him stodgy and conventional and perhaps not too bright. And he longed for some way to reverse the terrible mistake of their birth order. He even weaseled Esau’s birthright out of him in exchange for a bowl of stew, the sort of thing he could so easily have just given him. And now, with his mother as ally, he has stolen Esau’s patriarchal blessing by impersonating him in front of their now-blind father.

In other words, he’s not a model of virtue or generosity. And when we meet him in this morning’s story, he’s also an outcast. He’s in the midst of a long trek from what is now southern Israel to central Syria, where his mother counts on her relatives there to take him in. He’s a shady character, in exile from his family, with few resources, on an impossible mission. 

And God picks him to open the heavens for and to reveal the heavenly ladder, and to give this astonishing blessing to. Why? What I learn from it is that God is in no hurry to judge us, to separate wheat from darnel, to start casting people into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. God is not an eager, punitive judge. God is out here among us looking for friends, not people to punish.

The good news, you see, is never about how good we are. It’s about how good God is. Whatever our inadequacies, our uncertainties, our failures of hope, God’s love still embraces us. We don’t know what our lives will look like next month—or six months from now—or a year. We don’t know what kind of progress toward justice our country will have made. But we do know that we are loved and blessed, no matter what and that God gives us the space and the hope to become people of the Spirit, not victims of our frightened finitude. We are free to join in the movement toward new life.

Yes, judgement is inevitable. But we are still capable of growth and change. And if God could give Jacob the hope of a new life, God can offer it to us, too. And does.

MATTHEW, 11: LOVE, NOT RELIGION, IS THE POINT (7:15-29)

by Leave a Comment

Where does this language about “false prophets” come from? I thought prophets belonged in the Old Testament.
The word “prophet” means someone who claims to be speaking on God’s behalf—in other words, almost any religious leader. Mostly, Jesus’ contemporaries used the word to refer to people who lived hundreds of years before their time, but Jesus is using it here in its more basic sense.
And there was a revival of prophetic claims at the time—especially among Jesus’ own followers, after his death. Sometimes, scoundrels found it pretty easy to impose on innocent Christian congregations by claiming to be prophets. The second-century Greek writer Lucian of Samosata (not himself a Christian) tells an intriguing story about just such a “prophet” in his satire “The Death of Peregrinus.” One might almost feel that Jesus was warning, in advance, against exactly such people.
Prophets made their impression through speech, often with the suggestion that they were in a trance or had been taken over by a spirit that was merely speaking through them. Accordingly, they claimed a degree of authority that was more than human. Jesus says, in effect: “Don’t get swept up in the words; wait to see how your ‘prophet’ lives.”
That means making judgements about people.
Yes, even after we just heard “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged” (7:1). But the judgement is to be based on works of love. Just as we can tell good fruit from bad, we’ll know the true prophet when we see that this person is motivated by God’s love and does works expressive of that love.
Jesus threatens the impostors with hell-fire! Not so very loving, is it?
He gets very angry about abuses done in the name of religion by religious leaders. And it’s clear that he fully expects that such abuses will crop up among his own followers, just as in other religious groups. (Of course, he’s been proven right again and again.) He was also talking about this in chapter 6, where we saw warnings about religious behavior being misused for personal aggrandizement. He sees that no arena of human existence is immune to abuse. That includes religion.
Is he against religion?
No. His teaching is itself religious. It’s about our relationship with the God who is the power behind the creation, the lover of the world, and the Pole Star of our human lives. But he has no illusion that religion is always good in itself. And he’s trying to give us a way to distinguish good from bad in it.
Later Christians have sometimes treated Jesus’ attacks on religion as attacks on one particular religion—Judaism. It’s a nice trick for shifting people’s attention away from our own misdeeds. But it’s nonsense. Jesus never separated himself from Judaism. That separation between Christians and Jews happened only in the generations after Jesus. His strictures apply equally to all religions. In fact, he applies them quite explicitly in this passage to his own followers as well.
The people who say, “Lord, Lord”?
Exactly. And this applies not just to ordinary believers but quite specifically to the elite who have prophesied in Jesus’ name and exorcised and worked miracles. If they haven’t done the will of the Father—haven’t led lives founded on love—he rejects them absolutely: “I never knew you.” We’ll hear a strong echo of this same attack on loveless piety near the end of Matthew’s Gospel in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (25:31-46).
He’s getting quite peremptory here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Everything seems to be either/or, doesn’t it? He didn’t seem so angry at the beginning of the sermon.
Yes. He says, in effect, that either we hang on to what is really central or our lives will fall apart like the house built on sand. The point, though, isn’t that we have to reach perfection immediately. Jesus’ inner circle of disciples certainly didn’t, as Matthew will point out again and again. In practice, human beings are seldom if ever completely good or evil. We are a mix of wisdom and folly—a constantly shifting mix. But the question remains: Where do our central commitments lie? Where is the foundation?
Remember, too, that God sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous (5:43-48). God continues to love us, even when we misstep. But Jesus wants us to understand that the foundation for a wise, centered, enduring human existence is here in these teachings, waiting for us to explore and learn and practice more and more deeply with our lives.
I can see why “the crowds were astounded.”
Yes. These three chapters that make up the Sermon on the Mount still astound. And the attentive reader never gets to the end of finding new insight into them. Each return to the text is apt to open up something we hadn’t noticed or understood before.
Was this really so different from what other religious authorities were teaching?
There is much in the teaching of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries that agrees with the Sermon on the Mount. The difference isn’t primarily one of content, but one of focus and certainty. Matthew’s phrasing here is key; “he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” The scribes, like the clergy of other religions, taught on the basis of an existing religious consensus, which existed in written form in the scriptures of Israel and also orally in the form of opinions offered by a long series of esteemed leaders. The scribes would have been less likely to say “I tell you” than to say “The Torah tells you.” That can tip over all too easily into the creation of an inflexible system that demands obedience and is willing to skimp on less sharply defined values such as love.
Jesus speaks like a prophet himself, claiming direct access to God. He was even wiling, back at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, to contrast what he said with what “was said to the men of old.” No wonder he was willing to make distinctions between authentic and inauthentic prophets! Unlike the false prophets, he is transparent to the gospel of love. The fruits of this tree are good. And they are on display for all to see. In fact, we’ll be seeing more of them in the next two chapters of Matthew.
So that’s the Sermon on the Mount? It’s very dense, and it doesn’t exactly leave you with three clear points or an agenda for concrete action.
You could say it even resists being reduced to a few clear points. Oh, the Golden Rule is clear enough. But putting it into action requires a lifelong process of learning how to love one another, of understanding the peculiar circumstances in which each of us lives, and choosing the loving course in those circumstances. We don’t find a simple set of rules either here or elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew.
Still, we will come back again and again to the themes that these chapters have raised for us, and it is worth the time we’ve taken to look at them closely as part of trying to understand this gospel. Next, Matthew will turn to showing us how Jesus behaved toward the larger public. Here are the “fruits” that authenticate his prophesy.

Next up: TROUBLESOME MIRACLES

MATTHEW, 10: THE NARROW GATE (7:1-14)

by Leave a Comment

Aren’t we getting another sudden leap from one subject to another here?
Yes, it’s a big jump from not worrying to not judging. There’s no obvious continuity with the latter half of chapter 6. But if we look just a bit further back, we’ll find one. “Do not judge so that you may not be judged” is very reminiscent of “If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (6:15).
Even so, how can Christians live up to these commands? There are occasions when judgments have to be made. Sometimes other people’s thinking really is screwed up. Sometimes their actions really are bad.
Part of the point, I suppose, is that word “other.” We all like to think of ourselves as free of the faults we condemn in others, when in fact we are often guilty of the same things or, if not the exact same, at least equally screwy ones.
If we take these sayings with excruciating literalism, Christians would have to refuse almost any public office, especially juridical ones. But quite apart from that kind of literalism, we all spend a sizable chunk of our ordinary time judging one another and questioning one another’s sanity. It’s worse than ever in American culture right now, but it’s hardly new in our world—just more exaggerated.
Given the overall context of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to be aiming here at broader issues. He’s doing what he does all through the Sermon on the Mount—trying to change our basic perspective on life and religion. We’re all familiar with the tendency of the religious, both on the right and on the left, to become judgmental—not just willing but eager to pass judgment and ready to do so in perfect confidence that they’re right. After all, God told them so. Jesus is saying, “No, God did no such thing.”
So, should we get rid of religion?
It might be worth a try if it had any chance of success, but there is plenty of evidence to show it doesn’t. Generally, if you drop one religion, something else will show up pretty quickly to replace it. And the religions of consumerism or free marketism or ethnic purity or Marxism have proven at least as deadly as Christianity or Islam or Judaism or any of the other traditional offerings. We human beings can work up the enthusiasm for judgment in all areas of life and we can always find something in our current ideology to justify it. To date, fascism and soviet Marxism seem to hold the world championship for sheer bloodiness.
In other words, this is a universal problem of the human spirit?
Yes. It’s part of the same picture with our eagerness to prove our piety in public, our temptation to fudge our bets by worshipping all the available gods of Mammon (just to keep on the safe side, of course), and our propensity to worry ourselves into a stupor. What better companion to these traits than our willingness to jump on the failures, mistakes, and inadequacies of people who don’t see things our way? That gives us a kind of catalogue of what Jesus has covered in the sermon.
Christians are not exempt. There’s ample documentation in the New Testament of people judging one another over issues of leadership, spiritual gifts, circumcision, keeping kosher. And, of course, the people judged their leaders and the leaders their people. Nowhere in Matthew’s Gospel does Jesus accuse Judaism of being specially prone to judgmentalism. Every thing he says on the subject is equally applicable to every human being on earth of any religion or (if that’s really possible) none.
Okay! Okay! But then there’s another leap. Where do these dogs and swine come in? And what are these holy pearls we’re not supposed to throw before them? And how do you recognize them if you’re not allowed to pass judgment?
Hmm! Being a bit difficult, aren’t we? Do I need to have a look in your eye to see if there isn’t a speck there?
Well, no. Actually, I’ve always had the same reaction to vs. 6. But, lately, when I ask myself, “What does Jesus treat as holy here in the Sermon on the Mount?” the answer that keeps coming back is “the intimate relationship of love and trust that God is offering you.” It’s the holy center of true human life. And taking it seriously means that our lives become centered on it.
Jesus has been telling us not to risk this relationship by seeking a reputation for public piety, or by building up this-wordly credits, or by falling into anxiety and the worship of idols or—just now—by setting up as the arbiters of good and evil for everyone around us.
“Do not cast your pearls before swine” is another way of saying “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” The love of God on Tuesdays and the love of shopping or the workers’ paradise or my own wonderful self the rest of the time? No. No effort at compromise will succeed. You will only lose your relationship with God without gaining anything in its place.
But life is more complicated than that. You can’t just go to church and skip the rest of life. There are real dangers and real responsibilities.
Well, Jesus seems to sense the need for an answer to that, as he goes right on with “Ask, and it will be given to you.” But it may not be quite the answer we’d like. What, exactly, will be given to us? Not wealth, not security, no guarantees of long life and easy circumstances. Jesus, after all, had none of these. Rather, it’s the things we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer: that God’s kingdom will be realized to some degree in our lives, that God’s will for peace and justice will be done, at least within the ambit of our lives, that we will find the day to day sustenance that makes life worthwhile, that God’s great gift of forgiveness will spread through the human family, that we will find strength for the tests we cannot evade and freedom from even those evils that we cling to most tightly in our lives. Maybe at some point we’ll even get the bonus of finding that we’ve lost the log in our own eye.
The Golden Rule (7:12) is the guide Jesus offers us for this life. When he says, “This is the Law and the Prophets,” he’s saying, “This is the whole message in a nutshell. Everything else has to be understood in terms of this one criterion.” In another place, he’ll say essentially the same thing about a similar formulation, the twin commandments to love God with our whole selves and to love our neighbors as ourselves (22:35-40).
That sounds awfully loosey-goosey. People use “love” to justify all sorts of mischief and mayhem—more like the road to Hell than the narrow gate to Heaven.
Which is easier, loving other people as we love ourselves or obeying a well-defined set of religious rules? And just think about those punctilious guardians of religion—the inquisitors of past and present—who have managed to persuade themselves that the rules require that they torture you and then claim they’re only doing it because they love you. If they started with love instead of the rules, they would have a much harder time getting to their ghastly conclusions.
And Jesus has already indicated that this business of loving our neighbors also involves forgiving a lot of things, some of them damned close to unforgivable. I suppose that inevitably follows if I hope to be forgiven my own wrong-doings and I’m trying to treat my neighbor as myself.
That’s hard to do.
Yes. as Jesus says, there are broad paths and narrow gates. The path of love has not, typically, been a crowded one. We often get Jesus’ image backwards here, assuming that the narrow gate is for the real sticklers, the people focused on the rules. Actually, no. The word “narrow” here applies to the gate, not the people trying to get through it. Narrow people are likely to have trouble sticking with the the path of love, and they won’t find the narrow gate easy to get through. Maybe they’d rather stick to polishing their reputation for piety. It’s either that or get a radically different perspective on life in this world.

Next up: LOVE, NOT RELIGION, IS THE POINT

FACING JUDGEMENT

by Leave a Comment

A sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California on November 19, 2017
Proper 28A: Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 w. Ps. 90:1-8(9-11)12; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

Every year, right before Advent, we hear readings about the Day of the Lord, the End of the World, the Last Judgement. Most Episcopalians don’t really greet these topics with much enthusiasm—and there’s a good reason for that. People who do wax enthusiastic about judgement usually seem to treat it as a threat to other folk. They think they have their feet firmly planted on the safe track to heaven, and they get some enjoyment from shaking the warning finger at everybody else. It is, to put it bluntly, not very Christian.
So. . . the Day of the Lord—there’s our topic for today. And just to make it worse, we also wind up with one of most awkward of gospel readings, the parable of the Talents with its violent and punitive central character. Is Jesus telling us that God is like this? eager to find fault and to throw people into the outer darkness to weep and gnash their teeth? I’ll tell you in advance that the answer is “No.” But first we need to set the stage for this passage.

So lets begin with the easy part: judgement or, to use the term Zephaniah and Paul preferred, the Day of the Lord. It’s an odd phrase with two meanings that, at first, seem diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand, the Day of the Lord is a feast day, just as Christians’ sometimes refer to Sunday as “the Lord’s Day.” On the other, it is the time of judgement. One is a celebration of God’s love, the other of God’s justice. And yet, the two things do belong together. It is God’s love that calls forth God’s justice.
The simple truth is that the world is full of evils that cry out for judgement.. We’ve had a rash of multiple killings in the news lately. Hate crimes are up in the US—as witness the Transgender Day of Remembrance that we’re observing today. Jesus told us that the central truth of all human morality is the commandment to love—love both God and our neighbors. Everything else, he said, depends on that. And it gets violated right and left these days, at every level of our American society. And there are other parts of the world even worse off than we. Yes, there is plenty of occasion for judgement. It’s God’s love for this world that makes judgement necessary.
That’s what the prophet Zephaniah was talking about in our reading this morning. “The Day of the Lord is at hand,” he begins. And at first he makes it sound like a feast day: “the Lord has prepared a sacrifice, he has consecrated his guests.” Well, yes, that’s what God wants to do. God loves us. But this God who loves humanity also judges humanity—judges us by the criterion of how well we love. And so the prophet continues:
The great day of the Lord is near,
near and hastening fast;
the sound of the day of the Lord is bitter,
[even] the warrior cries aloud there.
This feast isn’t going to come to a happy conclusion.
And just few decades later, the Chaldeans completely destroyed Jerusalem, which certainly helped imprint Zephaniah’s warnings on people’s minds. That’s how the dominant idea of the “Day of the Lord” went from being a hopeful one to a fearsome occasion of judgement.
Paul’s audience in 1 Thessalonians, also thinks it in terms of judgement. Paul is actually trying to recall them to the message that the Day of the Lord is also an expression of love. It judges only what is unloving in us. And it’s also the vindication of our efforts, however imperfect, to live by love. As we grow in trust for God’s love, we also grow in confidence. We begin to recognize that love as not just a demand, it’s the ultimate truth. In the long run, there is no power that can contend with love, for, as another New Testament writer tells us, “God is love.” We exist only because of that love. And we have chosen to live on the basis of love—not any of the alternatives so readily available in our world, not the basis of trying to grab as much for me and mine as I can and to hell with the rest of the world, not the basis of competitive consumerism, not the basis of hatred for people different from me, not the basis of arrogance and contempt for others, but the basis of love.
It’s not that we’re so perfect that we have nothing to be judged for. Paul would never suggest that! In fact, he always has quite a lot to say about all the stuff his converts have got wrong. But we have opened up to God’s love, we trust that God’s love will never—indeed, can never—betray us. God doesn’t judge us to destroy us, but to save us.

So let’s turn now to the parable of the Talents. A certain slave master with the temper of a Mafia don hands out stacks of money, big stacks of money to three of his slaves. Then he rewards the two wheeler dealers who made more piles of money to stack on top of it and punishes one timid slave who at least didn’t fritter his stack of money away. Wait a minute! Didn’t Jesus, earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, say “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are the meek?” What is he up to here?
Let me, for a start, point out an important element here that we tend to miss: this is a parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, the reign of God. Jesus starts the discourse in chapter 25 off by saying, “The kingdom of heaven will be like this. . . ,” and then gives us three rather alarming parables. The first is the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, which Sophia sagely interpreted for us last week as a warning that the kingdom requires our participation. “Check your oil,” she reminded us. “Stay lit.” Yes, love becomes meaningful only as we respond to it. It’s the only way to become a part of it. God’s love cannot transform us until our love begins to answer it.
Then our passage today begins with the words “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves . . . ” In other words, we’re still on the topic of the kingdom—or more exactly the topic of how the Kingdom of heaven can come into being within us. And this, of course, is exactly what Jesus told us to pray for. We pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” What are we praying for when we use these words? God’s “kingdom” is a metaphor for the kind of life that God lives and also seeks for the world at large. It’s a life characterized by love and justice and peace, by generosity and hope and courage, and by the kind of genuine community in which no one is scorned or pushed aside or treated as unworthy.
This kingdom can’t come on earth without our involvement. It can’t just happen around us. If it could somehow, it wouldn’t do us any good. We’d be totally unprepared for it. In fact, we might not like it much. What good is it to me if all the rest of the world is caught up in love and I’m still a prisoner of my angers, my resentments, my hatreds, my fears? I’d still be trying to live in my old ways in a world where they no longer make any sense at all. Imagine a Hitler in heaven, surrounded by all the people he hates and wants to destroy—and completely unable to do them even the least bit of harm. It may be Heaven for them. It would be Hell for him.
So this is a parable of the kingdom, about entering the kingdom, not a story about God. God isn’t a testy bridegroom who locks foolish virgins out. God isn’t a Mafia don who flips out into a state of rage at timid subordinates. God doesn’t work that way. These parables of the kingdom are about us and our difficulties. What threatens to keep us out of the kingdom that we pray for?

Well, what did keep the third slave out of the kingdom? All three slaves are presumed to have similar abilities. What held him back? It was fear. Fear was the motivation by which he lived his life, and it paralyzed him. He couldn’t even think clearly enough to put the money into a savings account. (“What if there’s a crash? what if the bank goes under? What if the FDIC can’t fulfill its promises? What if . . . . “) So he opts for what seems like the safe thing: bury it in the garden!
Jesus spent so much of his ministry trying to convince us that we don’t have to lead frightened lives. “Do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ . . . Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” (Matt. 6:30-32) Or again, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” (Matt. 7:7) After all, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (5:45) He wasn’t counseling us to become lazy layabouts, hoping that God would drop peeled grapes in our mouths. He was counseling us to give up fear and anxiety.
You may well be thinking, “There are some things in life we do well to be afraid of.” That’s true—let’s say a falling tree, for example. But Jesus wasn’t talking about fear as a response to immediate danger. He was talking about the kind of fear that can become a guiding principle in our lives. Jesus wants us to jettison it and live out of love instead. And love and fear don’t coexist well with each other. In fact, “Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 5:18) The third slave’s fear means always trying to find perfect safety. He has imprisoned himself inside that search. His anxiety can’t help him become a part of the kingdom. It cannot open the gates of the kingdom. And yet, the kingdom is so near to him that if he could only come to a moment of new perspective—could only begin to love instead of fear—he would become a new person and find himself within the gates.

Does God demand justice? Yes. Because God loves this world that God has made and the people in it, including you and me. Yes. Because God is love. Not the sappy kind of love that says to us, “Okay I’ll let you off this time. But don’t do it again.” No, it’s the intense and purposeful and realistic kind of love that says, “You have to get a new grip on your life, you know. Your fear can only destroy you. But love can make you whole. It can bring you into the kingdom.”

FROM JUDGEMENT TO BETHLEHEM

by Leave a Comment

 

Bill Countryman

ADVENT SUNDAY, 2016

Sermon for St. James’ Cathedral, Chicago, Illinois

Year A: Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

This time of year, I always feel as if I’m caught between two different calendars, grinding against each other like two tectonic plates moving in opposite directions. One is the public calendar that’s hustling us from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It’s very goal-oriented. The tension of preparing for the great day builds and builds—until !boom! it’s all over in just a matter of hours. I confess I’ve come to hate that calendar for cramming way too much into one great climax and consigning the remaining 12 days of the feast to weariness and oblivion.

The church calendar version of this season carries us on a very different time scheme. Advent, too, is pointing us toward December 25th. But instead of plunging us into a goal-oriented scramble, it starts with a strange reverse flow of time. Advent begins far, far in the future with the End of All Things before drawing our minds and hearts back to an event now thousands of years to the past, the birth of Jesus. Luckily, Advent takes its time about this maneuver; otherwise, we’d all have whiplash. But why? Understanding this strange calendar of ours can give us some help and guidance for how to pray and live the four weeks ahead of us.

We begin, as I say, at the End of the World, at the Last Judgement. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, tells us about it. It is unforeseen and unpredictable, he says; “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” It’s unpredictable and it is sudden, he says, like the flood that swept people away in the time of Noah. It’s unpredictable; it’s sudden; and it is seemingly random. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

It sounds like a summary of our worst fears. And all Jesus tells us here, in the face of it, is “Keep awake.” That’s where Advent starts—with the unknown, the daunting, the uncertain, and the advice to stay alert.

Some years it’s been hard to take all this too seriously. Life was sailing along on an even keel, and apocalypse seemed no more than a topic for the movies—scary, but potentially entertaining. Not so much this year, following an angry and disturbing electoral campaign and during the first weeks of a transition in government that seems to many dauntingly uncertain. And this is not even to mention Syria, the Brexit, global warming, and all the other upheavals in the world around us.

The Last Judgement suddenly sounds more relevant, doesn’t it?

But what, after all, is it intended to accomplish? Our usual reflex answer would probably be “punishment.” But that’s wrong. Contrary to the libelous claims made by generations of religious zealots, God actually takes no delight in punishing. If the Last Judgement occasions suffering, that is a byproduct of its true goal.

The true goal is a very simple thing, really: the ultimate unveiling of all hearts. What God already knows about us, we, too, shall learn in that opening of souls. We shall know it for ourselves and know it inescapably. And it will be unpredictable. It will be sudden. It may well seem, to our eyes, random. What distinguishes that man taken out of the field from the one who is left? this woman taken while grinding grain from the one who is left?

Still, it all seems quite daunting. What ancient bishop or monk, we might well ask, had the perverse sense of humor to put something like this into the calendar a scant four Sundays before Christmas? But there’s more to it. The Judgement is not an end in itself.

We heard about it from the prophet Isaiah this morning:

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains. . . ;

all the nations shall stream to it.

It was not in some happy, peaceful, safe era that Isaiah uttered this prophecy of hope. It was in a time of multiple threats, a time of change and uncertainty—a time like ours.

And then Isaiah reveals God’s purpose in this hope filled future:

[God] shall judge between the nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more.

I

Isaiah and Jesus are not in conflict here. God’s goal, the goal of the New Jerusalem, even in judgement, is to see all nations beating our armaments into tools that will sustain human life and the world around us.

The Last Judgement, whenever and however it comes, comes to show us who we truly are. Parts of that revelation may be painful; parts of it may be occasions of joy and thanksgiving. But whatever the Judgement shows us, it is granted to us precisely so that we can wake up and become part of the cloud of witnesses, the saints of this world, who are building the Holy City for everyone, transforming our thirst for enmity and destruction into love—love for God and God’s world and one another. The Judgement by which we see ourselves as we are frees us to join in God’s great work of creation and restoration.

And, yet, as we know, we live now in the in-between time. The Judgement is not yet. We are still trying to figure out where we can get the strength, the hope, the love to live through the present time. And that is where we turn from the Judgement and the New Jerusalem to another much humbler time and place—Bethlehem. No, it wasn’t mentioned in the readings. Those cranky old bishops and monks were too clever for that. Don’t show your hand all at once. Build up the tension before you get to the heart of the story. But they knew what lies four weeks off. And they knew that we would know, too.

This is really all about Bethlehem.

BETHLEHEM

Here comes to birth

the One who birthed us all.

Here lies the Upholder of all,

too weak to raise his head,

God, choosing helplessness instead,

has left the throne of deep tranquillity

to live in human poverty—

Has come to earth.

We speak today about the Last Judgement and the New Jerusalem in order to say that this is a world God has risked entering into. God has not sat back in the throne room of the universe, looking on while we struggle with fear and hope, blessings and disasters, failure and success. God has chosen to experience all this with us, alongside us.

I suppose God had the same thought that occurred more recently to the songwriter Eric Bazilian: “What if God was one of us?” “Risky,” God must have thought, “but worth the danger and the sacrifice. That’s what I choose to do.”

Our times are difficult. We find ourselves caught in deep national conflict, in a changing world order, in a crisis of ecology, and in a time when religion has again become, as it has sometimes been in the past, a stimulus to violence. We also find ourselves uncertain of our direction. Perhaps that’s why we follow the public calendar of feasts so intently: we find the distraction comforting.

The sacred calendar is trying to help us find our footing. If we start with acknowledging who we are, both our failures and our hopes, our weaknesses and our gifts—in other words, with the Judgement—we shall also begin to see ways, large and small, in which we can contribute to the New Jerusalem and grow into our citizenship there—citizenship in the city of peace.

Yes, there’s much to be done in the next four weeks as we prepare to greet the infant of Bethlehem again. But the great truth we encounter there is that God has already come more than halfway to meet us: “has left the throne of deep tranquillity/to live in human poverty.” And the God who was willing to take that risk that will stand with us in our time of struggle here and now.