Ninteenth Pentecost
Matthew 21:23-32
I have a confession to make. I am addicted. Ever since we got cable and the cable company signed up the FOOD channel I have become addicted. I love to watch people making food. The more complicated the better. I love the sight of knives slashing, the sound of egg whites whirring in the mixer or better yet the clip clipclipping of a wire whisk lightly hitting the side of a bowl. I can throw around terms with the best of them. I know what a ban marie is, I can tell you how to clarify butter, I've seen how to roll out a puff pastry. Wow am I great or what. I guess the truth is in the "or what". Because there is something missing in the whole experience--because food is meant to be tasted to be experienced. I can count on one hand the times I've used a bane marie, and use a whole pound of butter in a puff pastry, never!
I know I'm not the only one so addicted.. My son Jon is also, oh not to cooking shows but to home improvement programs. He knows the ins and outs of putting in ceramic tile. He can tell you how not to run that pipe from the sink to the drain. And he even knows the newest products for gutter replacement and how to install them. What he doesn't always understand is the vast distance, nay the light years from the seeing of it to the doing of it.
Perhaps we have become a nation of people who compensate for not doing things by watching things. We watch others play the game of football in our stadium seat on the couch. We experience the tension of relationships in Reality T.V. .
And maybe even our Christianity has become a spectator affair.
Jesus tells a simple story. There was a father who had two sons. The father asks them to go out and work in the field. One of the sons impudently replies, "No! I won't go." A little later the father looks up from what he is doing and there is the son, working, out in the field. His other son when asked to work, said politely, "Father nothing would please me more than to go out in the field and work for you." Two hours later the polite, docile, obedient son is still lying on the sofa watching MTV.
Now think hard, Jesus says to the religious authorities. Which son do you think pleased the father more? The one who said no, but then went into action or the one who politely said yes but then did nothing?
Jesus then tells these religious leaders, "Don't you get it? You know God's way. You know the right words about God. You teach the right words every day. Can't you see the presence of God in my words and deeds? You think that your pleasant words delight the father. Yet, you fight me all the way. You play word games, and you won't consider that you, too, need to change.
Look around. Those who have cheated and lied and exploited others are being changed all around you and they, not you, are following me into the Kingdom of God."
The Christian faith, says Jesus, is more than knowing the right words. Being a Christian is more than an entertaining intellectual exercise. As the nineteenth-century theologian Soren Kierkegaard said, Jesus wants followers not admirers. Jesus wants followers more than admirers. His question to us is more than, "Do you agree?" He also asks, "Will you join us?"
There is no such being as a Christian in theory.
Jesus said, "I was hungry and you fed me." That's exalted teaching. I mean, who can argue with that progressive, kind-hearted, and generous teaching. I was hungry and you fed me. A while ago, in the New Republic , there was an article about the whole business of caring for those in need and the way it strikes us. The author quoted a fellow named Thomas Geoghegan. Geoghegan had volunteered to serve food at a soup kitchen in Chicago's west side--a soup kitchen run by nuns. Geoghegan had described the experience this way--"The smell in the room was overpowering. The t-shirts seemed pasted on the men with fourteen days of sweat. I would stink of cabbage and ammonia and sweat for days after I left. Waiting for the nuns to open the door, I almost gagged. I wondered how the men could even bear to eat. I expected, at the end of it all, to love the poor. To be filled with a warm glow. But I didn't feel any love for the men there. There was something hollow about the whole experience. I complained to my friend, the priest, and he said, 'You're not going down there for self-actualization.'" Geoghegan protests, "But I didn't feel any love for them." The priest replies, "So what! The church says nothing about that. Look, these nuns aren't liberals. They're conservatives, semi-cloistered, probably. They don't care about love in our modern interpersonal way. We go to the soup kitchens to be loved. The nuns go there to feed people. That's it. They go to give them something to eat."1 I can relate to that. We may volunteer to go to PADS and think we're going to come home feeling all warm and cozy inside about how righteous we are. We may not feel that way. But Jesus just said, "Feed my lambs." Feed my lambs. Are we admirers or followers?
Will we go out to the field or will we stay safely tucked away at home? Will we give all of ourselves to God even as God has given to us all we are and ever will be or will we hold back a critical measure?
Will you agree with me when I say that there are some things in this life that you just can't know except by doing them? You can't really know the dance just by hearing a lecture, even a good lecture , on dance. You must join the dance, feel the moves, let the rhythm move your body.
The Christian faith is just that way. You've seen books on "Major Christian Beliefs." You've had people ask you, "What do Christians like you believe?" The implication is that Christianity is mostly a matter of the head. Christianity is some sort of philosophy of life, a set of intellectual propositions.
Jesus was not a philosopher laying out a new system of disembodied beliefs. Jesus was a teacher whose life taught what he preached. We love and follow Jesus not simply because of what he said, but because of the way he lived, died and was resurrected. Jesus did not ask us to agree with him, but to follow him
Take another of Jesus' teachings. He said, "Anyone who would come after me must take up their cross and follow me." Clarence Jordan was a wonderful man who established the Koiniaia Farms, an across economics/spectrum religious community. Jordan was once given a tour of a new church by a pastor friend of his. The pastor took him through all the lovely and sparkling rooms of the new church, a grand and glorious place. Then they went out on the pristine, manicured grounds. The pastor pointed out the top of the steeple of the church, high up and he said, "See that cross up there. We illuminate it by spotlight at night. That cross cost $10,000." Clarence Jordan replied, "Is that so? I think you've been cheated. There was a time Christians got crosses for nothing."2
Yes, there was such a time. Take up your cross and follow me. When we hear that we think of the Mother Theresas and the Albert Schweitzers of the world. We think of the people that do big things--people that are up on big crosses. But you know, often our failure is not a failure to do the big things, it's a failure to do the little ones that prepare us for the big ones. Frederick Buechner wrote in his autobiography, Telling Secrets , of a time when he went to visit his mother in Manhattan. She had long looked forward to his visit, as he had. She had prepared a gourmet meal for him. They were going to have a lovely evening together. But just as they were about to sit down to eat, the phone rang. It was a friend of Buechner's. This friend had just learned that his family had been in a terrible accident. He was at the airport waiting for a plane to fly to be with his family. He called Buechner to see if he would come and sit with him at the airport. He was frightened. He was worried. He needed somebody to be with him. Well, the meal was getting cold and Buechner's mother was furious at his decision to leave her and this great meal she had prepared to go be with the friend. Buechner writes, "For a moment I was horrified to find myself thinking that maybe she was right. Then the next moment I saw more clearly than I ever had before that it is on just such outwardly trivial decisions as this --should I go or should I stay--that human souls are saved or lost."3 Little decisions about loving our neighbor or feeding the hungry. Little crosses that cost us not a lot and that seem sort of trivial, yet one-by-one-by-one amount to a lifetime.
Are we admirers or followers? One son said, "No, I won't go," and he later went. Another son said, "Yes, of course I will go." He went to church every Sunday, obviously. But he didn't go. Are we admirers or followers? You know this story hurts me. It gets under my skin. It challenges me. It challenges us. It would seem to be, maybe, a story that had no redemptive word--just challenge, just confrontation. Yet at the end, there is a word of grace. Jesus in explaining the story to his listeners, the religious leaders, said, "The tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you." Do you hear it? Ahead of you. Not instead of you. Ahead of you. They, saying "No" initially, heard the teaching of Jesus and believed. Then there is the brother who is like us who says "Yes" to God all the time. "Yes, Lord. Yes, I come to church. I'm pious." But we don't always love our neighbor or feed the hungry. There is this hope for us that we will yet go to the vineyard. For the great grace of our Lord Jesus Christ continues to call all the children over and over and over again to go to the vineyard, to follow him. Will we?
Dr. Carl L. Schenck 1. From Sara Mosley's article in the June 17, 1996 "The New Republic" 2. Quoted in "Lectionary Homiletics" September 8, 1996 3. Buechner, Frederick, Telling Secrets
Amen