Sermons

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

Back when I was in seminary a friend of mine had gone on a mission trip to Brazil, working with the Church in that country, and when he had returned, I asked him what his experience was like. I was expecting to hear that he saw a great deal of reason for hope, knowing that the church in Brazil had been very active in development work. In fact, the Anglican Episcopal Church in Brazil had met with some moderate success in alleviating the poverty of many families who lived in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.

To my surprise, my friend had come back rather disappointed. He said that in a generation he could envision a relatively successful social service organization bearing the name of the Episcopal Church, but that he suspected that fewer and fewer people would realize that there was once a worshiping community bearing that name in their country. The Church had established offices with large staffs to address the temporal needs of the people of Brazil, but had been derelict in recognizing that the Church could do more, that the church could—indeed that it had been commissioned by Christ himself to—address the spiritual needs of the people.

This is much like the argument that takes place in this morning’s Gospel. Judas’ motives were most certainly selfish, yet were we to distance his complaint from his thieving intentions, he seems to make a pretty good point: “Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” Why not, indeed? In fact our translation might lead us to underestimate just how valuable this ointment was. What we have as “three hundred pence” is actually “three hundred denarii”, which would have been nearly a year’s wages for a laborer. This is not pocket change! We could imagine the Judas’ complaint coming from a more trustworthy source, one who hadn’t meant to steal from the common purse of the Apostles, and perhaps see some merit in the grievance.

Jesus’ response was not to call out Judas for the charlatan he was, but to respond to the complaint on its own terms. And Jesus’ response might seem shocking at first: “The poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.” What does Jesus mean by this apparently callous claim.

I think we’re well off the mark if we think this gets us off the hook from helping the poor among us. Jesus preached extensively about the Good News he came to bring to the poor and the oppressed. Open up your bible to Matthew sometime and read the Sermon on the Mount. Or, spend a couple years with the Daily Office Lectionary (it’s in the back of your prayerbooks) and note how often God’s care for and our responsibility to the poor and needy shows up in both the Old Testament and the New. Jesus being a faithful Jew knew well the implications of the Law with regard to the poor, and he had surely heard or read the fifteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, which states quite explicitly “there should be no poor among you.”

I’m not often compelled to bring up cable news presenters in a sermon, because I dislike politics in the pulpit as much as anyone else. I can usually see both sides in the divisive political climate of our day, and I don’t want to be another source of division. Even so, I do feel compelled to mention a claim made by one talk show host I heard some time ago, who said, and I quote:

I beg you look for the words social justice or economic justice on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. … Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! …If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them… And if they say, ‘Yeah, we’re all in on this social justice thing,’ [you are] in the wrong place.

I was pleased when Christian leaders from all political and religious persuasions called this particular television presenter to task by pointing out that a thorough reading of scripture would show that, in fact, Jesus cared deeply about the plight of the poor and desired his disciples to care about them too, and to work to lift them out of their distress. This isn’t Bolshevism; it’s Christian charity.

All of this is to say that Jesus’ response to Judas is not a normative claim about our responsibility to the poor; it’s not a loophole to the ethical expectations of the rest of scripture. Rather, it’s a reminder that we have other responsibilities as well. Our chief responsibility is to love both God and our neighbor, and to do so properly means that we cannot be simply a social service dispensary with a cross on the sign. We’ve also got to be concerned with worshiping our risen Lord, with anointing his feet with perfume as Mary had done, and with bringing others into a relationship of worship and of faith.

This is why we don’t sell the church building off and distribute the funds. We’ve got something more than money to give. We are quite right to give of our time and treasure for the relief of the poor, as I think we do relatively successfully in this parish, but we’ve also got the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation to offer to all, rich and poor alike, who desire to approach the altar. As some of you know, I use the rector’s discretionary fund to help needy people who come looking for financial assistance, but I always try to make sure that accompanying that financial support is at least the offer of relational support, of the support which naturally comes when one is part of a loving community which gathers week in and week out to worship the God of love.

My friend who came back from Brazil discouraged about what he saw was right to reckon that the Church could be more than an ambulance driver for the state, indeed that the Church had to be more in order to live up to its commission. For all the good that we can and should do in meeting the very immediate, physical needs of Christ’s poor, we must remember that there is a gift which surpasses anything that we can do in this regard. As Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Let us not hesitate to reach out to those in temporal need, helping them to the degree that we are able; but let us also be mindful that all are in spiritual need, all need to know Christ Jesus our Lord, and this relationship is something that we, as the Church and individually members of it, can offer which nobody else can.

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

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

Sometimes there is a certain serendipity which strikes when presented with the readings appointed by the lectionary and other things going on, either personally or in the world. As it happens, before even realizing that we were to hear the parable of the prodigal son this morning, I had been thinking about father-son-brother (or, more broadly parent-child-sibling) relations. If you pray the daily office, you will have been reading the story of Jacob’s discovery of Joseph being alive in Egypt, both in spite of and thanks to Joseph’s brothers. Thursday we read the moving account of this father-son reunion:

And Joseph made ready his charet and went up to meet Israel his father, to Goshen, and presented himself unto him: And he fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while. And Israel said unto Joseph, now let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive.

I wonder if our Lord had this scene in mind when he told the parable of the prodigal son, cleverly reversing the characters’ positions.

I also, quite unconnected to this, recently started re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s magnum opus, (which I haven’t read in nearly twenty years) and I was struck by that author’s inversion of the themes of the parable. I won’t spoil the novel for you, but I’ll just say that one of the brothers, Dmitri, is most certainly a prodigal figure, but the Father, Fyodor Pavlovich, is in every way the opposite of the loving father of the parable, and despite Dmitri’s brother Alyosha being himself the polar opposite of the prodigal son’s angry brother, this leads to a less than happy conclusion.

In each of these stories–that of Jacob and Joseph and his brothers, that of Fyodor Pavlovich and his sons, and that of the prodigal son and his father and brother–we see how filial relationships can be defined by both mercy and wrath, both within literal households, and most importantly for our purposes, within the household of God in which we are all brothers and sisters.

As with so many of the parables, it bears considering where we find ourselves in the story. The more I think about this parable, the more I realize that I’m not best served by thinking of myself as the prodigal son; at least I’m not at this point in my life. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I’m a lot more like the older brother. I’m a lot more like the irritable young man who sees injustice more clearly not when the good are denied their reward but when the wicked and the lazy don’t get their just deserts. I don’t care about the fact that I get the inheritance; I’m mad about my good-for-nothing little brother getting a party he doesn’t deserve.

Understand, I don’t mean this just in spiritual terms. I mean it in very real, material terms. How come that fellow over there gets so much money or affirmation or love or attention when he’s not nearly as worthy as I sometimes think I am? “How come I work so hard,” I say to myself, “and still have to deal with little irritations, with minor perceived injustices, and that guy over there gets a pass?” A few weeks ago I said that Lent is my favorite time of year, but it can also be my least favorite sometimes because it is this time of year when God and his Church really force me to interrogate my own thoughts and fears and motivations. How I need it, and probably a heck-of-a-lot more than forty days out of the year and the minute or two I manage to cursorily accomplish while saying my daily prayers the other 325.

Perhaps you feel more like the prodigal son. Maybe you can even identify with the father who rejoices over his return. Sometimes I can cast myself in those roles, too. But most of the time I’m probably more like big brother.

On the front of your bulletins this week is the most famous artistic depiction of this story, Rembrandt’s painting of the same, and I think it’s such a powerful image because it succeeds in placing us within the story and within the hearts and minds of each of its characters. Henri Nouwen, the famous twentieth century priest, professor, and activist went to what was Leningrad at the time to see the painting made the following observation:

Rembrandt is as much the elder son of the parable as he is the younger. When, during the last years of his life, he painted both sons in Return of the Prodigal Son, he had lived a life in which neither the lostness of the younger son nor the lostness of the elder son was alien to him. Both needed healing and forgiveness. Both needed to come home. Both needed the embrace of a forgiving father. But from the story itself, as well as from Rembrandt’s painting, it is clear that the hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.

Now, I don’t know much about Rembrandt’s life. I can only assume Nouwen did. In any event, I take comfort in knowing that someone felt the same connection I do to this less-than-likeable character.

I also take comfort in knowing that the big brother isn’t in charge of the family estate, even if I’m more likely to be the big-brother of the story. I take comfort in knowing that God’s a lot more gracious than I am, even when I don’t like that fact. I take comfort in knowing that whether any of us is on our journey back home or are already there waiting, the rules of the house are based on mercy rather than judgment, generosity rather than stinginess, love rather than indifference.

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

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

Streams will not curb their pride

The just man not to entomb,

Nor lightnings go aside

To give his virtues room

These lines, written by Matthew Arnold in his poem Empedocles on Etna, get to a truth which we know all too well: bad things happen to good people. We know this so well that while we may still struggle to see God’s hand in such situations, we would nonetheless be shocked to find that the average Jew of Jesus’ day believed something quite the opposite.

This is why they come to question Jesus about those “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” Most of Jesus’ contemporaries believed in something called a deuteronomic view of history. Some of you might have heard me mention this before, but for those who haven’t, such a view holds that the righteous are invariably rewarded by God and the wicked invariably punished by God, and if you’re experiencing pain or sorrow in this life it’s likely that you did something to bring it on yourself. Those who were slain by Pilate were presumably of the righteous sort. They were making proper sacrifices to the God of Israel, which from an Old Testament perspective embodied righteousness. This should have led, according to the deuteronomic view, to prosperity and security rather than death at the hands of a tyrant.

Of course, this isn’t how it works. Job had figured that out, and Jesus knew it all too well, as he, though sinless, was drawing ever closer to his passion and death. But Jesus makes an interesting move in this morning’s Gospel. He acknowledges that bad things happen to good people, but instead of trying to explain why this was the case he proceeded to call those around him to repentance, warning them “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did”.

You see, even though good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, our actions are not without consequences, in this world and the next. This is because as moral creatures, as beings made in the image of God, our own thoughts and actions affect us at the deepest level, which is to say that what we do affects our very souls. We prayed in this morning’s Collect “that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”

While we can do good and not necessarily experience God’s beneficence any more than the next person, while we can do ill and not necessarily feel the wrath of God within our lifetime, both courses have profound effects on our souls. In an 1819 letter to his brother and sister-in-law, John Keats wrote “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world.” In other words, life and all of the choices it throws at us gives us the opportunities to harm or help the growth of our souls, to either stagnate (thanks to sin) or to grow (thanks to love) into the fullness of Christ.

Jesus doesn’t use such a modern term as “Soul-making”, but he gets at the same thing by use of a culturally significant metaphor:

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’

Here, Jesus is commenting on the soul of a society, as it were. The soul of Israel, cast as a fig tree (then a popular symbol of Jerusalem) had withered. The tree of the culture had not born the good fruits of righteousness. For three years the gardener had seen no fruit. For the three years of our Lord’s earthly ministry he had been rejected by the children of Israel and was about to be crucified. For the next few centuries the Roman Empire, which executed our Lord, was to live in relative peace and prosperity, while faithful Christians would be assailed by those who wished them dead.

Yet it is not the body so much as the soul whose health is most important and whose salvation is paramount. The withered tree may be spared while the fruitful tree is cut down by the merciless vine-dressers of this world. Even so, the good vinedresser, our Lord Jesus, cares for the spiritual fruit, which is the faith, hope, and love borne by the souls of the faithful.

And thanks be to God, that the gardener in the vineyard of the faithful is a patient gardener. Hear again the words of the gardener to the vineyard owner:

‘Sir, let [the fruitless tree] alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’

Just so does our Lord Jesus plead to the Father on behalf of wayward souls. The patience and unbounded mercy of God will give us a little longer, another year, another twenty, in hopes that we too may bear the good fruits of righteousness. He is kind in giving us sustenance in the Sacraments, as the gardener fertilizes the soil around the tree- sustenance our souls require to bear the fruits of faith, hope, and love.

God is patient, but we’ve not all the time in the world. As the psalmist put it:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

We have only a limited time in which to permit God to let us grow, in which to take heed of our souls and the fruits we are capable of bearing with God’s help. May we then, “deeply aware of the shortness and uncertainty of life” but sincerely thankful for the same, be ever mindful of our need and of the power of Christ to tend our souls and help them grow if with humility and repentance we permit him.

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