October 05, 2008

World Communion Day Sunday

Do No Harm. Do Good. Love God

 

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Matthew 21:33-46

Pastor Richard Allen

 

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The parable Jesus tells in today’s gospel lesson reminded me of a story I read some time back. Along a dangerous seacoast shipwrecks happened so often that the people there responded by building a simple lifesaving station.  It was just a hut, really, housing just one boat.  But a few devoted members of the station took turns looking out to sea. Spying a ship in trouble, often in the most difficult weather, they risked themselves for the sake of others.

 

They were successful.  The dedicated people at the little station saved so many lives that their work became famous. Others wanted to be part of this work, directly and indirectly.  Some of the new members of the life-saving station felt embarrassed that the building was so inadequate:  small and poorly equipped.  Soon the emergency cots and wool blankets were replaced with beds and cotton sheets and comforters.  The new building became a popular gathering place for members and guests.

 

The membership grew larger, even as the members themselves grew older.  They were less interested in going out in the lifeboats themselves, so they hired lifeboat crews.

 

The lifesaving motif continued to dominate the clubs decorations, and the jackets and sweaters of its members.  There was even a liturgical lifeboat in the room where new members were initiated.

 

One day, a large ship foundered in a storm off the coast near the life-saving station.  The hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, half-drowned people.  Many were dirty.  Some were sick.  Some had funny names and many of them didn’t speak English.  The beautiful new club was in chaos.  The property committee drew up plans for a new shower house where such folk could clean up a bit before coming into the clubhouse.

 

Intense feelings erupted at the next meeting of the life-saving club’s membership.  There seemed to be a split.  Some felt it was time to find a better way to help the victims of shipwrecks.  Bringing them into the club was ruining the regularly scheduled activities.  Others insisted that live-saving was their primary purpose, and they pointed to the little boats on their jackets.  In the end, however, they were voted down, and told that if they wanted to save the lives of people so foolish as to take a ship into their treacherous waters, then they could just leave, and begin a new lifesaving station down the coast. That’s just what they did.

 

Over the years, events repeated themselves in the life of the new club; and then another, and another.  If you go to that stormy coast today, you will find a number of very exclusive clubs with fancy houses along the shore.  Shipwrecks are still frequent in those troubled waters, but most of the people drown!

 

Howard Clinebell used that parable to begin his book on pastoral counseling, and he unpacks its meaning by saying that the story “depicts the perennial danger confronting the church – irrelevance.”  (Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, Nashville:  Abingdon, 1966, page 14.)

 

I thought about that story this week as I read and pondered the parable given us in our church’s gospel lesson from Matthew.  In that earlier parable, Jesus describes a man with a vineyard who leases the vineyard to tenants and goes away.  At the time of harvest the owner of the vineyard sends messengers – first servants and then his own son – to collect the rent that is his due.  But the tenants abuse the servants and kill the son.

 

This story, our gospel for the day, is more than just a story, of course.  In Matthew’s telling, the parable is clearly a dig at his church’s competitors: the members of the nearby synagogue whom Matthew says first rejected the prophets and then rejected Jesus, the son.  Matthew’s interpretation comes into sharp focus in the tag line at the end of the lesson:  “When the chief priests and Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.”  (Matthew 21:45, New Revised Standard Version)

 

Our challenge is not to be misled by Matthew’s use of the parable, but to hear this story also as Jesus more likely meant it.  After all, Jesus lived and died a faithful Jew.  Therefore, many scholars tell us, the original parable is probably not about the later second-century rivalry between the faithful in the church and the faithless in the synagogue.  Rather, Jesus uses his parable to crack open our hearts and open us again to the life changing call of God who seeks to make us a holy people. 

 

The parable, in short, is not aimed at “them,” but at us.  It’s not for a few, the enemies of our sweet self-serving holiness.  Instead, this parable is the Spirit’s reminder to all of us to bear the fruit of God’s new life.  Jesus himself invests a precious few years calling those who would listen to this new life.  He calls his visionary realm “the kingdom of God,” or, to use more inclusive and appropriate language, “the realm of God.”  And Jesus invitation is both brief and specific:  “Repent, for the realm of God is at hand.”  This language is aimed at us:  it is the gospel, or “good news.”

 

It is good news because we are all invited to walk with Jesus, and lend our best to him for the transformation of our world. This gospel is a message for the whole world, designed to make a world of difference.  The gospel is, as the 20^th century German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, costly grace:  grace because it comes to us freely, in Christ; but costly because God asks nothing less than our lives. 

 

I said that for Jesus, parable is not aimed at “them,” but at us.  What I mean is that for Jesus, the parable is not a rejection synagogue down the street, but a challenge to each of his disciples to live fully, freely, and fruitfully in the dawning “realm of God.”  When Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom,” (Matthew 21:43, New Revised Standard Version) he’s not giving us a club to use against our enemies, but a reminder to open ourselves to a faith that makes a difference in our own lives.  Jesus’ parable is, in a word, a call to relevance.

 

Here is today’s challenging word, friends:  relevance.  We worship a God who loves us, yes; but this God also calls give ourselves to the world in God’s service.  We worship a God who saves us, yes; but this God also wants us to make a difference in a world of hurt.  We worship a God who sets us free, yes; but this God also sends us forth.

 

Well then, if we are called to some accountability as disciples, we are called, as the lesson says, to produce “the fruits of the kingdom,” what will that look like?  What are we to do?

 

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, offered three simple rules for the life of faith.  He called them the “General Rules.”  And these general rules are both simple and difficult.  But the doing of them, he found, made all the difference in the lives – the disciplined lives – of the people called Methodist.  Here they are, in a nutshell:  One, do no harm; two, do good; and three, love God.

 

In a sense, you might say that Wesley’s General Rules echo today’s lesson from the Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments.  Many of them are simple, too.  The Ten Commandments, or ten words, invite us, first, to love God by having no other gods; second, we love God by not worshiping idols; we express love for God, third by not trivializing God’s name and not making God irrelevant.  Fourth, we honor God by honoring the Sabbath as a time of rest for us, as it was for God.  Then we are called to specific fruits of living rightly:  honoring parents, not killing, not committing adultery, not stealing, not lying about others (including the gossip of telling only part of a truth); and not coveting the things of others.  These final six commands are a call, as Wesley reminded us, to do no harm to any of our many neighbors in our increasingly small world.

 

That covers not doing harm and loving God.  But both Wesley and Jesus call us to an even more active faith.  We are to bear the fruit of the God’s realm in our lives, here and now.

 

There are many “fruits” of the kingdom, of course.  Certainly one of them is the love of justice spoken of in the prophets and echoed in the ministry of Jesus.  Another two fruits of the God’s new realm are the worship and study.  The lively worship of the living God and the study of God’s word both seem important to Jesus, and are surely fruits of the kingdom.  Then there is prayer, another fruit of the realm of God:  and prayer not just for us and for our families, but, as Jesus commands, for our enemies, too.  Importantly, living the love of all our worldly human family is a fruit we’re called to bear in God’s realm.  This means loving the powerless AND the powerful, the neighbor AND the alien, the family member AND the enemy.  Such love is surely a fruit of God’s realm that we see dawning in the life of Jesus and his followers.  And let’s not forget the kingdom of God’s call to generosity as an important fruit.  Giving so that the God’s work is done and God’s word is shared, and so that the poor are both respected and supported is an outcome that Jesus sees as a fruit of God’s realm. 

 

There are other fruits of the kingdom, of course, which we expected to embody.  Not the least of these is to witness to the kingdom itself.  At the end of Matthew, Jesus commands his followers to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”  This verse and the next to the last verse in all of Matthew, is often called “the great commission,” and it isn’t given to a few of his followers, but to us all.  By it, we are all made evangelists, called to share the “evangel” which is simply the English version of the Greek word for “good news.”

 

And here’s a bit of shocking news.  We’re all evangelists, we Christians.  And we who bear Christ’s name are all evangelicals, like it or not.  We are called to bear fruit in the name of Jesus.  We are called to live in such a way that others will see the life of Jesus in our lives. We are called to tell the story of Jesus, of God the creator, and of the Holy Spirit, using any means necessary.  Sometimes, as St. Francis said, we will tell the story with words.  This world communion Sunday we celebrate nothing less.

 

Finally, friends, the call to bearing the fruit of God’s realm is a call to doing good in any number of ways. Ultimately we watch the stormy waters of this world for any who may be lost, and to go to them even if our lifeboats seem too frail.   The sea is large.  And our boat is small.  But God is with us.  And with God’s good and Holy Spirit, we will not be lost.  By God’s grace, we may even make a bit of a difference, to ourselves as well as to others.

 

Amen.