15 Pentecost, Proper 21, Year A
September 25, 2011
(Exodus 17:1-7, Matthew 21:23-32)
Can you imagine someone running into St. Aidan’s right now yelling insults about our worship and our faithfulness and trashing the place? Well, that’s pretty much where the story begins in our Gospel reading for this morning. It’s Monday of Holy Week. Just yesterday, Jesus stole a donkey to ride into Jerusalem in a parade of palm branches. When he got to the city, he headed straight for the Temple, the center of Jewish religious life, and started knocking over the tables of the money changers and chasing out the merchants. He called the Temple a “den of robbers.” Unsurprisingly, this did not win him many friends among the chief priests and proper religious people. This was an incredibly busy and important (not to mention profitable) time in the Temple – almost Passover! And there was Jesus, interrupting their work, turning their temple into chaos, insulting them.
And then Jesus had the nerve to come back the next morning, which is where we find ourselves in our story today. Here he is back in the Temple not 24 hours after this show of disrespect and wild behavior. And so the chief priests and the elders corner him immediately. They are not about to give Jesus free reign in their Temple again. And so they ask him, “Who do you think you are, doing these things?” (my translation) (Their authority, after all, had been given to them by God in the time of Moses and passed down for generations. They are the ones with rightful authority over the Temple and over the religious life and faith of the people. Who is this mentally unhinged upstart?)
And so Jesus responds to their question by asking them a couple questions of his own. First about where they think John the Baptist received his authority, and then about which of the two sons in his parable was doing their father’s will. Jesus is always doing that, answering questions with questions, confronting us with ourselves in his parables. Conversations with Jesus always seem a little bit dangerous. Nothing is ever simple or straightforward. You never know what you’re going to get, but it’s almost certainly something that can transform you if you let it. Something that can give you a whole new way of seeing the world and yourself, if you’re open to it.
Open, of course, was exactly what the chief priests and elders that Jesus confronted on this particular day were not. They were stubborn and angry and determined not to change. And willing to do just about anything to protect their status quo, to keep the current order intact. And so Jesus identifies them with the Yes man in his parable – the son who says the right thing, but doesn’t follow through. These religious leaders are saying the “right” things, believing the “right” things, but they aren’t living the way God wants them to live. They think they are, certainly, but they’ve gotten so attached to their own ideas about what God wants that they can’t see past that. They are so determined to keep God in the box they’ve created (the beautiful, gilt, jewel-adorned box) that they can’t recognize God acting right in front of them in the form of John the Baptist or Jesus.
And it’s easy to judge them because we already know the rest of the story. And because we can distance ourselves from their Temple that needed reforming and their convictions that were so misplaced and their world that needed turning upside down.
But this isn’t meant to be a parable against Judaism, although unfortunately, like other parts of the Gospel, it has been used that way. And it isn’t meant to be a parable just against that little band of people living in that little piece of time.
This is a parable that speaks to those of us – which surely must be most of us – who think of ourselves as being faithfully obedient to God but in practice are often deaf and blind to God’s activity in the world. Sometimes we forget that God isn’t something that happened long ago in old stories but something that is living and active and unfinished. What are we missing the way the religious leaders were that Jesus confronts in this story?
And this is a parable for those of us who mistake our own convictions for God’s voice. In our vestry meetings and in our new prayer and listening group that meets on Tuesdays we’ve made a practice of reading a set of listening guidelines. The one that has engendered the most discussion and difficulty is probably the one that says: “Hold your desires and opinions – even your convictions – lightly.” We are attached to our convictions – proud of them, even. Loosening our desperate grasp on them to make way for the possibility of something different is scary stuff.
And finally, this is a parable for those of us who are more comfortable in the safety of our certainty than in the unknowing of the new thing that God is offering us. We’ve wrapped Jesus up in the safe and benign box we’ve created for him (and very thoughtfully packaged, of course!). And to let him out means – who knows what will happen? Who knows what kind of transformation might begin?
I’m in the middle of something that’s been giving me a fresh experience of God lately. My family has been reading the Narnia series aloud together. I’m loving sharing these wonderful stories with my children, loving the memories that come back when I reach a familiar passage, loving the chance to read the entire series, which I’ve never done before. I took a class in college about C.S. Lewis and a few of his Christian fiction-writing contemporaries and studied the Christian metaphors in some of these books. And so I can’t read them without seeing that there, and can’t read it to my children without talking about it. (Hopefully I’m not ruining the story for them by destroying its subtlety!)
But the experience has been more challenging than I expected. We’ve just finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I’m realizing how pale and one-dimensional my vision of Jesus looks compared to the vivid and complex portrayal of Aslan. And how limp and unadventurous my faith is compared to that of those four children.
Sometimes to see and be near Aslan is frightening and terrible. When Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy first meet Aslan, they catch a glimpse of his golden mane and his great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes and they find they can’t look at him and go all trembly. And when Aslan opens his mouth to roar, his face becomes so terrible that they did not dare to look at it.
And at times, being with Aslan is intimate and beautiful. At one point, he invites the girls to lay their hands on his mane – “something they would never have dared to do without his permission, but what they had longed to do ever since they first saw him.”
Sometimes, to be with Aslan is playful and joyous. After he rises from the dead, Aslan and the girls have a fabulous game of chase: “It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind.”
At other times to be with Aslan is mournful and painful. When he is heading resolutely to meet his death, “he looked somehow different from the Aslan they knew. His tail and his head hung low and he walked slowly as if he were very, very tired.”
Aslan is unpredictable and complex and wonderful and terrible all at the same time. As C.S. Lewis reminds us through his narrator, “People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time.” A very helpful reminder in our journeys of faith.
Another piece of Narnia that is making me rethink my experience of God is the way Aslan is present, and absent, in times and ways that the characters don’t expect. Sometimes Aslan steps in to save or reassure a character, and sometimes he holds off so that they can grow in some way. Like when he tells the other creatures to stay back so that Peter can fight the witch’s wolf on his own. Mr. Beaver even warns the children at the end of book, Aslan “will be coming and going. One day you’ll see him and another you won’t…. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”
The Jesus in our gospel this morning isn’t a tame lion. And neither is the Jesus who is acting in our world, seeking us to live out our faith and not just claim it. It’s a giant, life-sized adventure that’s ours for the taking. What’s waiting for us just inside the wardrobe?
September 25, 2011
(Exodus 17:1-7, Matthew 21:23-32)
Can you imagine someone running into St. Aidan’s right now yelling insults about our worship and our faithfulness and trashing the place? Well, that’s pretty much where the story begins in our Gospel reading for this morning. It’s Monday of Holy Week. Just yesterday, Jesus stole a donkey to ride into Jerusalem in a parade of palm branches. When he got to the city, he headed straight for the Temple, the center of Jewish religious life, and started knocking over the tables of the money changers and chasing out the merchants. He called the Temple a “den of robbers.” Unsurprisingly, this did not win him many friends among the chief priests and proper religious people. This was an incredibly busy and important (not to mention profitable) time in the Temple – almost Passover! And there was Jesus, interrupting their work, turning their temple into chaos, insulting them.
And then Jesus had the nerve to come back the next morning, which is where we find ourselves in our story today. Here he is back in the Temple not 24 hours after this show of disrespect and wild behavior. And so the chief priests and the elders corner him immediately. They are not about to give Jesus free reign in their Temple again. And so they ask him, “Who do you think you are, doing these things?” (my translation) (Their authority, after all, had been given to them by God in the time of Moses and passed down for generations. They are the ones with rightful authority over the Temple and over the religious life and faith of the people. Who is this mentally unhinged upstart?)
And so Jesus responds to their question by asking them a couple questions of his own. First about where they think John the Baptist received his authority, and then about which of the two sons in his parable was doing their father’s will. Jesus is always doing that, answering questions with questions, confronting us with ourselves in his parables. Conversations with Jesus always seem a little bit dangerous. Nothing is ever simple or straightforward. You never know what you’re going to get, but it’s almost certainly something that can transform you if you let it. Something that can give you a whole new way of seeing the world and yourself, if you’re open to it.
Open, of course, was exactly what the chief priests and elders that Jesus confronted on this particular day were not. They were stubborn and angry and determined not to change. And willing to do just about anything to protect their status quo, to keep the current order intact. And so Jesus identifies them with the Yes man in his parable – the son who says the right thing, but doesn’t follow through. These religious leaders are saying the “right” things, believing the “right” things, but they aren’t living the way God wants them to live. They think they are, certainly, but they’ve gotten so attached to their own ideas about what God wants that they can’t see past that. They are so determined to keep God in the box they’ve created (the beautiful, gilt, jewel-adorned box) that they can’t recognize God acting right in front of them in the form of John the Baptist or Jesus.
And it’s easy to judge them because we already know the rest of the story. And because we can distance ourselves from their Temple that needed reforming and their convictions that were so misplaced and their world that needed turning upside down.
But this isn’t meant to be a parable against Judaism, although unfortunately, like other parts of the Gospel, it has been used that way. And it isn’t meant to be a parable just against that little band of people living in that little piece of time.
This is a parable that speaks to those of us – which surely must be most of us – who think of ourselves as being faithfully obedient to God but in practice are often deaf and blind to God’s activity in the world. Sometimes we forget that God isn’t something that happened long ago in old stories but something that is living and active and unfinished. What are we missing the way the religious leaders were that Jesus confronts in this story?
And this is a parable for those of us who mistake our own convictions for God’s voice. In our vestry meetings and in our new prayer and listening group that meets on Tuesdays we’ve made a practice of reading a set of listening guidelines. The one that has engendered the most discussion and difficulty is probably the one that says: “Hold your desires and opinions – even your convictions – lightly.” We are attached to our convictions – proud of them, even. Loosening our desperate grasp on them to make way for the possibility of something different is scary stuff.
And finally, this is a parable for those of us who are more comfortable in the safety of our certainty than in the unknowing of the new thing that God is offering us. We’ve wrapped Jesus up in the safe and benign box we’ve created for him (and very thoughtfully packaged, of course!). And to let him out means – who knows what will happen? Who knows what kind of transformation might begin?
I’m in the middle of something that’s been giving me a fresh experience of God lately. My family has been reading the Narnia series aloud together. I’m loving sharing these wonderful stories with my children, loving the memories that come back when I reach a familiar passage, loving the chance to read the entire series, which I’ve never done before. I took a class in college about C.S. Lewis and a few of his Christian fiction-writing contemporaries and studied the Christian metaphors in some of these books. And so I can’t read them without seeing that there, and can’t read it to my children without talking about it. (Hopefully I’m not ruining the story for them by destroying its subtlety!)
But the experience has been more challenging than I expected. We’ve just finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I’m realizing how pale and one-dimensional my vision of Jesus looks compared to the vivid and complex portrayal of Aslan. And how limp and unadventurous my faith is compared to that of those four children.
Sometimes to see and be near Aslan is frightening and terrible. When Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy first meet Aslan, they catch a glimpse of his golden mane and his great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes and they find they can’t look at him and go all trembly. And when Aslan opens his mouth to roar, his face becomes so terrible that they did not dare to look at it.
And at times, being with Aslan is intimate and beautiful. At one point, he invites the girls to lay their hands on his mane – “something they would never have dared to do without his permission, but what they had longed to do ever since they first saw him.”
Sometimes, to be with Aslan is playful and joyous. After he rises from the dead, Aslan and the girls have a fabulous game of chase: “It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind.”
At other times to be with Aslan is mournful and painful. When he is heading resolutely to meet his death, “he looked somehow different from the Aslan they knew. His tail and his head hung low and he walked slowly as if he were very, very tired.”
Aslan is unpredictable and complex and wonderful and terrible all at the same time. As C.S. Lewis reminds us through his narrator, “People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time.” A very helpful reminder in our journeys of faith.
Another piece of Narnia that is making me rethink my experience of God is the way Aslan is present, and absent, in times and ways that the characters don’t expect. Sometimes Aslan steps in to save or reassure a character, and sometimes he holds off so that they can grow in some way. Like when he tells the other creatures to stay back so that Peter can fight the witch’s wolf on his own. Mr. Beaver even warns the children at the end of book, Aslan “will be coming and going. One day you’ll see him and another you won’t…. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”
The Jesus in our gospel this morning isn’t a tame lion. And neither is the Jesus who is acting in our world, seeking us to live out our faith and not just claim it. It’s a giant, life-sized adventure that’s ours for the taking. What’s waiting for us just inside the wardrobe?
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