Sermons

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

While I’ve almost always enjoyed being in school, kindergarten was not my finest hour. This is not because I failed to succeed academically in those early years, but rather because I felt as if it were impossible not to succeed, if affirmation were the mark of success. It bothered me terribly that my fellows received sticky little gold stars and colorful smiley faces on work which, in my callow youth, I believed did not warrant such reward. Something about it struck me as unfair, unjust. Certainly those who objectively succeeded (like me) deserved approbation, I thought, and those who couldn’t read or write or reckon very well ought to receive some kind of condemnation.

Looking back, I realize that even at that tender age I suffered from a sinfully inordinate amount of pride and resentment. But none of us is a saint, and very few of us avoid this pitfall all of the time. There are always those who seem to float by without putting forth much effort or to get affirmation for work which seems shabby to us. How many of us have never nurtured fantasies in which our co-worker gets his just desserts for sloth and underperformance? How many of us have not secretly wished (even just a little) that our neighbour would be found out and would get his comeuppance? I know I have these thoughts from time to time still, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Indeed, none of us is alone in this particularly insidious sin, because Jonah, from today’s Old Testament lesson, is right there with us.

Many of you probably remember the broad strokes of Jonah’s story, 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 8^th Century B.C., when Assyria was 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 quite literally try to run away from God. 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 (imagine that!) and, indeed, upon the prayer’s completion, the fish “spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.”

God doesn’t waste time. 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 arrived 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, was greater than the demands of 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–namely that this has less to do with First Century agricultural labor practices than it does with the salvation-economy of the Kingdom of God. 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 else we’d demand a bonus. If the landowner were operating justly, he’d have to do that, we’d say. It’s just like my outrage in kindergarten about the bad students getting gold stars. It’s just like Jonah’s indignant attitude. It wasn’t fair, but is fairness the only virtue?

There is a golden calf to smash here. In some quarters of the Church there exists today an assumption that the Christian Gospel is primarily, or even almost exclusively about effecting some vision of justice here and now. Those of you who’ve heard me preach over the years know that this is one of my hobby-horses, and that I blame it mostly on the lingering effects of Nineteenth Century liberal Protestant theology, and it persists despite great theologians like Barth and Neibuhr trying to snap us out of it over the last century. Such a vision of the Gospel cannot be the full picture. In fact, as important as moral action and the attempts to establish justice are (and they are terribly important) that’s not the Gospel. It’s the Law, which will eventually convict us no matter how seemingly succesful our efforts may be.

What did our Lord say? to give us an example of of the virtuous soul and society that we might emulate him?” No. He said “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 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, and quarterly reviews at the office. 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 can be an expression of His love.

But how much more lovely is mercy? The Church has something which no other ideology in the world has ever come up with: a full-throated endorsement of forgiveness. Forgiveness, 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 given, I like to say, 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 by one of his fellow slaves. 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 measure of weight 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 measure of weight. 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 or silver 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, or 350 tons of gold, or about seven or eight percent of the gold in Fort Knox. What we’re talking about here is an amount of money equivalent to not thousands not millions but billions of dollars.

Of course, this is ludicrous, and that’s the point, I think. Nobody would lend one’s slave billions dollars. This parable is meant to make us realize just how ridiculous such a proposition seems. How could one get so bent out of shape about a few thousand dollars when he just had multi-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 discouraged, as many of you know, when the misfortune of somebody, even a monster, causes us to feel warm and fuzzy about “justice being done”, about one getting one’s just deserts. I get very worried when state executions are presented as justice being done. Setting aside the fact that I happen to be pretty firmly opposed to it, I think Christians of goodwill can disagree about something like the death penalty. What concerns me, though, 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. I’d say the same thing about multiple consecutive life prison sentences and the little “are you a felon” box on job applications and the like, not because punishment at the hands of the state is never appropriate (it certainly is), but because so often it seems about letting the rest of us get our jollies out of retribution rather than disinterestedly administering justice. Here endeth my mini-rant on that topic.

Jesus calls us to forgive our brothers and sisters. 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). How precisely one does that math 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 this gift comes with an expectation. 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 practical 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 just a little more (though never perfectly) worthy of that label which we give ourselves. We become a little bit 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.

It is good to be back. I remain grateful for this parish’s graciousness in making it possible for me to take all of my annual vacation in one go rather than a week here and a week there; I might have said before that I realized years ago that this was the only way in which I could actually manage to take all of my vacation time. In any event, it will be no surprise that the greater part of our time away was taken up with visiting excellent museums, listening to serious music, and (especially!) visiting churches.

One of the most unexpected interactions we had came in visiting a church in Bergen, on Norway’s western coast. One thing that surprised me in all of the Scandavian countries is just how many weddings were taking place in churches seemingly every day. It was encouraging when all the doom-saying out there suggests that both marriage and religion are on the decline. Sometimes it meant that one had to come back an hour or two later to see a particular church, though that minor annoyance is greatly overshadowed by the aforementioned boost in optimism this reality gave me. (As a side-note, the reality that one can have a church wedding in the middle of the day and only require the church building for an hour or two rather than taking over every possible room for hair-and-makeup, floral arranging, photography opportunities and so forth for the better part of a day suggests, perhaps, a healthier view of the liturgical and sacramental nature of a wedding, though I suspect this is not a battle I’m going to win.)

Anyway, we were in this church in Bergen and noticed that the priest was rehearsing a couple up by the altar for their upcoming wedding. We looked around quietly and then I went to the narthex to ask a question of the docent who had greeted us when we entered. The pulpit was surrounded by carvings depicting the cardinal and theological virtues, but not the traditional seven. Justice had been replaced by truth (a close cousin, no doubt, but not the same thing precisely), fortitude by penitence, and the carving depicting temperance was not on the pulpit itself, but on the wall next to it. So I asked the docent what that was about, and he quite rightly reminded me that while the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) are clearly enumerated by Paul, the other four have always been fluid. Then he told me that he had just been reading one of the Greek Fathers whose name he couldn’t remember (it was Peter Damascene, I later discovered) who had listed 228 virtues while acknowledging that this was not an exhaustive list. He mentioned how often chastity came up (not among the seven, either, but one could class it as related to temperance), and in the middle of this conversation the priest and the couple had finished their rehearsal. The couple left, and the docent asked the priest how it went. He just shook his head and muttered “fire barn.” I am not conversant in Norwegian, but I understood that. Just in case, though, the docent turned to me and said “the vicar says they have four children.” “Better late than never,” I replied, “and what were you just saying about the virtue of chastity?”

Now, that docent shouldn’t have translated that for me. Neither should I have taken delight and made a joke about it. It was not the most malign example of gossip ever, since we both knew that I was just a tourist. Even so, it reminds me that delighting in gossip is a vice from which I am not immune. I hope it goes without saying that I would never imagine sharing privileged information known to me by virtue of my pastoral role; that is a serious violation and a line I’d never cross. But to hear a juicy bit of gossip still naturally gives one a literally sinful pleasure, and we must all be on guard against that. Hearing gossip can easily lead to sharing it, and even worse this can itself lead to intrigue and taking sides and manipulation and it can–as Jesus knew when he spoke the words in this morning’s Gospel–to fractured relationships and even schism.

And so, Jesus gives us another, better way. If we feel somebody has mistreated us, talk to him or her 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. 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 (though it is!) but that it is more Christian. If we love our brother or sister, which is our obligation, then we should avoid what the Old Testament called “murmuring in the tents” and which today we call malicious gossip.

There may be more in the psalms about malicious gossip than any other sin. 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?

This may be even more difficult and even more important in the age of social media, where “oversharing” is ubiquitous and bad enough, but also often leads from an ill-considered post to casting aspersions, ganging up, and “cancellation.” My brothers and sisters, avoid this. It’s not just a matter of propriety; it’s a matter of Christianity. Living in love with our fellows means speaking with love about them. 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.