Sermons

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

The most pernicious theological problem which Christianity has faced since its inception, and which likewise bedeviled our Jewish forbears, is what we call theodicy or “the problem of evil.” “Why do bad things happen to good people?” If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, how can He permit suffering? As I’ve said before, if you can answer that question sufficiently, be my guest; you’ll be hailed as the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas. The best I can tell you is read the Book of Job and see if you find it’s answer satisfying.

I sometimes wonder, though, if our real problem comes from a question antithetical to the traditional question of theodicy- namely, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” Now, this question is not very theologically difficult, but I think that if we were to interrogate our own sense of justice, we would find it poses some spiritual difficulty. The psalmist laments, “[The wicked man’s] ways prosper at all times; thy judgments are on high, out of his sight; as for all his foes, he puffs at them.” St. Augustine complains, “I live well and am in need; and the unjust man abounds.” Well, it seems like Jonah had the same problem in this morning’s Old Testament lesson.

Many of you probably remember the story of Jonah, but a quick refresher might be helpful. Jonah, an Israelite, is called by God to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, “an exceedingly great city” which served as capitol of the Assyrian Empire. This is in the 8th Century B.C., when Assyria is expanding and threatening the Kingdom of Israel. So, Jonah had reason to be a bit intimidated by God’s request, and in a moment of what may seem to us rather unclear thinking, he decides to try to run away from God, quite literally. He boarded a ship going the opposite direction from Nineveh, but the ship encountered a storm at sea. Jonah was forced to admit to the crew that the Lord God might have had reason to be a touch peeved with him, and offered to let them throw him into the sea. So, that’s precisely what they did, and as the Scripture says “the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah.” After three days in the belly of the fish, Jonah reckons prayer might help, and indeed upon the prayer’s completion, the fish “spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.”

God doesn’t waste time, and He comes to Jonah as soon as he makes landfall. “Get up,” God said, “go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message I tell you.” This time, having realized that his initial disobedience was more than a little unwise, Jonah got up and did as the Lord had commanded. When he arrives in Nineveh, Jonah preached repentance, and to his great surprise, the Assyrians listened. The king mandated acts of contrition, and the populace obeyed. God withheld His wrath; by all accounts Jonah had succeeded in his task.

By all accounts, that is, except for Jonah’s. Jonah did not rejoice because of the Lord’s mercy. Rather he sat beneath a bush and sulked. Why, he thought, did God not impose His judgment upon the Ninevites? He had sworn in His wrath that He would make an end of them, and Jonah really wanted them to get their just desserts. They had it coming, after all.

The funny thing is, though, that Jonah’s just desserts would have been to die at sea. He had it coming, too. But, God’s mercy, in both cases, trumped His justice.

Likewise, Jesus’ parable in today’s Gospel, presents a picture of God’s mercy which upsets our notions of justice. There are laborers who work in the vineyard all day, and there are those who put in a half-day’s work, and there are some who only put in a few hours on the clock. Yet the latter get just as much pay as the others. It might be hard to notice, at first, how counterintuitive the parable is, because we’ve allegorized it so much and have agreed (on a sort of cognitive level) to its theological point. But do we really, deep down, believe the Good News it has for us. What if we were hearing this parable for the first time, like the disciples, and if we were to take the story it tells on its own terms, without immediately identifying the landowner with God. Well, we’d find the parable terribly upsetting. It’s not fair! If we had been working all day, we’d either expect the late-comers to be docked some pay, or we’d demand a bonus. If the landowner were operating justly, he’d have to do that, we’d say. It’s just like Jonah’s indignant attitude. It wasn’t fair, but is fairness the only virtue?

It seems to me that in secular society and in some quarters of the Church there exists today an assumption that the moral life or the Christian Gospel are primarily, or even almost exclusively about effecting some vision of justice. But, such a vision of the moral life and of the Gospel cannot be the full picture. It cannot be the full picture because it leaves out the central quality of our faith. What did our Lord say? “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world: but that the world through him might be saved.” This is not primarily a matter of justice, but of mercy. Yes, we believe that Christ shall return to be our judge, but he also serves as our advocate before the heavenly throne. His sacrifice upon the Cross, and the perpetual sacrifice of the Eucharist were not given for our benefit because we deserved it, but because of God’s mercy and loving-kindness. We are not brought through the waters of Baptism as a symbol of our innate worthiness, but as a real act of regeneration, God’s mercy making us worthy despite ourselves.

This should give us pause when we begin to judge. Of course, judgment is necessary in some cases: in courts of law, and academic examinations, for example. We hope mercy operates in these contexts as well, but judgment is necessary. Sometimes the Church must act on behalf of Christ her head to judge profound evil in the world and within Herself. In instances like these, God’s judgment and ours is an expression of love. But how much more lovely is mercy? The Church has something which no other ideology in the world, as far as I can tell, had ever come up with before Christ: a full-throated endorsement of forgiveness. Forgivenes, not for the sake of demonstrating benevolence and power, nor for the sake of currying favour, but simply because we were forgiven first.

We have been made a people of mercy, because in Baptism we were, I like to say, given a pair of cruciform spectacles. We were given the means of seeing the world through the lens of the cross. Thus, the mercy we are called to show is a sacrificial sort of mercy. Our innate sense of fairness, of justice, is transformed in our seeing, in the light of unbounded, unbidden mercy, because when we look through the Cross the light we see is resurrection light. May we be so illumined by that light that when we see each other on that day, the day of Christ’s return, we may see each other and ourselves no longer as unworthy Ninevites, nor as unaccomplished vine-dressers, but as fellow members of Christ’s one Body and co-heirs of His eternal kingdom.

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

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

One element of this morning’s Gospel which I think we rarely focus on is just how much money Jesus is talking about in the parable. We learn that the slave owes ten thousand talents to his master and that the same slave is owed one hundred denarii. It’s easy enough to leave the story knowing simply that the slave owes more than he is owed, but we miss an important element if that’s all we know.

In reality, we are dealing with measures of currency here which we can estimate. We know that the wage for a day’s labor in the first century was one denarius. This means that what the slave wants from his compatriot is no small sum. It’s almost a third of his annual income. It’s not like he had just spotted his friend a fiver. I think most of us would be more than a little concerned if somebody owed us this much and couldn’t pay up. So, at first we might have some sympathy for the slave.

But then, look at how much debt had been forgiven. Ten thousand talents. A talent is a weight of measure rather than a currency, but most scholars of the period in question have determined that a talent was worth roughly six thousand denarii. So ten thousand talents would be sixty million denarii. That’s sixty million days worth of wages- 164,383 and a half years, not counting Sabbath days.

If that’s hard for you to get your mind around, we can look at it a different way. Like I said earlier, a talent is not a currency but a weight of measure. It was roughly thirty-three kilograms or about seventy-three pounds. When used as a measure of debt and credit in the ancient world, the assumption would have been that gold was the basis of determination (there was no such thing as fiat money until very recently). So, if the slave owed his master ten thousand talents, he would have owed him 330,000 kilograms of gold. Right now, a kilogram of gold is worth nearly 60,000 dollars. So, if we were to assume that gold were basically as valuable then as it is now, the slave would have owed his master the equivalent of 19 billion 800 million dollars.

Of course, this is ludicrous. Nobody would lend an individual, especially his own slave, 20 billion dollars. Only 8 people in America, the richest nation in the world, have more money than that. I think the point, however, is just how ridiculous it seems. How could one get so bent out of shape about a few thousand dollars when he just had a twenty billion dollar debt forgiven?

Well, as ridiculous as it seems, we do just that. We have been regenerated—given new life and the forgiveness of sins—through Baptism. Christ died for our sins that we might live, but what do we do if somebody says something nasty about us? What do we do if somebody cuts us off in traffic or cheats us out of a few bucks or acts rude to us? We don’t forgive. We do what the enemy of the psalmist is described as doing:

He put on cursing like a garment*
let it soak into his body like water
and into his bones like oil;
Let it be to him like the cloak which he wraps around himself,*
and like the belt that he wears continually.

We love cursing and take no delight in blessing. We let our petty beliefs about what we deserve push us to clutch tightly to our resentment until we are defined by it.
I get very worried, as many of you know, when the death of anybody, even a monster like Osama bin Laden, causes celebration in the streets. I get very worried when state executions are presented as justice being done. What concerns me is public reaction, and I think it’s safe to say that mercy is not a virtue which our society values terribly much these days.

Jesus calls us to forgive our brother. There is a translation issue in Jesus’ response to Peter. He might have said “forgive seventy times” or “seventy seven times” or “seventy times seven” (that’s 490 times, but the way). What precisely Jesus said doesn’t matter so much, though, because it seems that what he meant was “keep on forgiving”. There’s no limit.

There’s a lovely prayer attributed to St. Francis in the back of the prayerbook (page 833 if you’re interested), and it seems to sum up what Jesus is saying to us today: it is in pardoning that we are pardoned. The greatest gift we’ve ever been given is pardon, but it comes with a caveat. Being forgiven we are obliged to forgive.

It’s hard sometimes, particularly when we are sinned against in ways more brutal than a rude word or being cut off in traffic. Unless we get around to forgiving, though, the Cross is emptied of its meaning for us. When we fail to show mercy, we are even more ridiculous than the slave who demanded his hundred denarii. When we confuse justice with revenge we may as well be nailing Christ’s hands to the cross ourselves, because we’ve forgotten what that sacrifice was all about to begin with. But when we forgive, we start to become more worthy of that label which we give ourselves. We become more worthy of being called Christians.

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

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

We had a joke in seminary about coming up with something to preach about about when you weren’t sure how to approach the week’s lessons- when in doubt, denounce something. It’s not really the best approach, but sometimes the readings make it impossible to avid. So, considering this week’s Gospel, I want to speak this morning about gossip. We love hearing gossip, and we love sharing it. We love to be voyeurs, to know what’s going on in the lives of our fellows, even if we have no business knowing it. We love to whisper secret slander to our friends, because it makes us feel like we’re the source of all knowledge worth possessing. And we love most to share evidence that we ourselves have been mistreated, even if we have no intention of confronting the person who mistreated us. Indeed, it can be a great deal more fun to remain aloof from our enemy, because we can tell more people and gain more satisfaction by vilifying him than by being reconciled to him.

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus gives us another way. If we feel somebody has mistreated us, talk to him in private. If that doesn’t work, take a friend or two and try to hash it out. If that doesn’t work, bring it to the church, which is to say discuss your grievance openly with the authority of the community in which the accuser and the accused wish to maintain bonds of affection.

This is a great deal more effective than whispering insults to those uninvolved. But, as I said, we do not always wish to rectify the situation, loving the opportunity to gossip more than we desire to live in love with our brothers and sisters. The important thing about Jesus’ mandate here is not that it is more effective, but that it is more Christian. If we love our brother, which is our obligation, then we should avoid what scripture calls “murmuring in the tents” and which today we call malicious gossip.

Did you know that there is more in the psalms about malicious gossip than any other sin? Well, there is. Do you know what led God to declare that the generation of Israelites who left Mount Sinai would wander in the desert until only their children and grandchildren were left to enter the Promised Land? It was neither idolatry nor sexual promiscuity nor any other sin which we are quick to denounce. It was because the Israelites were “murmuring in their tents”, gossiping, that they were forbidden from entering the land which had been promised.

We must be careful about gossip, then, because it is deadly serious. We must catch ourselves, because we can do it without even thinking about it. We must examine our intentions before sharing information about another, because sometimes our intentions are hidden from us. Is something we say meant to encourage prayer and concern or is it meant to share a bit of juicy information?

I once heard a podcast of This American Life about gossip. An author read a short story she had written about a reality television producer whose job was to encourage malicious gossip during individual interviews with the fictional program’s contestants. If you’ve watched any reality TV, you probably know that backbiting is encouraged because it helps ratings. This is the culture in which we live and at least television executives have figured out that we love to hear and share gossip so much that even the murmuring in the studios of people we don’t know can draw us in and entertain us. This makes it so much more difficult to follow Jesus’ directive, given in a time well before television and blogs and all the other media used to air people’s smutty laundry.

This makes it all the more critical that we speak with care and discretion. It’s not just a matter of propriety; it’s a matter of Christianity. Living in love with the brethren means speaking with love about him. Only in doing this within can Christ’s Church be prepared to weather the storms which beset her from without.

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