parables – By Another Road

What You Had to Do: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 18, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Luke 16:1-13, the parable of the dishonest manager.

When I was in the 7th grade, my family and I found ourselves living in a trailer park out in California. The story as to why we ended up there is a long one for another time, but suffice to say that it was a new experience for all of us.

I did not come from a wealthy family by any means, but we always had enough to get by, and so it was eye-opening for me as a 12 or 13 year old to suddenly be surrounded by neighbors whose circumstances were decidedly more desperate.

Next door was Pearl, a woman in her 50s from Oklahoma, who peered out of her screen window all day long, puffing on cigarettes, offering a lively commentary on all the comings and goings she had seen.

There was Mike, who lived behind us; a gentle and quiet man who tended the flowers outside his trailer. He was on parole, having killed a man many years before in a drunken bar fight, doing his best to stay sober. There was a family whose name escapes me now, two parents and two adolescent kids and a dog, who had fallen on hard times and were living in a 12 foot motorhome, trying to figure out how to get enough money to move across the country to live with some relatives. One morning they were just gone, and while I have no idea what happened to them, I always hoped that they made it where they needed to go.

The park was rough. It wasn’t the type that you stay in on a deluxe RV vacation. There were cracks in the pavement and cracks in the trailers and cracks in the hearts of the people who lived there. It was a mixture of long-timers and those just staying for a little while until they could get their lives together. It was a colorful and complicated mix of personalities, thrown together by chance and by limited funds—people getting by as best they could, people doing what they had to do.

It’s been a long time since I moved away from that place, but those folks in the trailer park have been on my mind this week as I’ve been reflecting on our gospel text, a really challenging one in which Jesus offers a confusing parable about a dishonest manager and some perplexing teachings on the use of money.

We’re used to passages in Scripture that express some skepticism or even outright suspicion of money and those who place their faith in it. In this context, Jesus saying that one cannot serve God and money at the same time makes sense.

But the parable about the manager who lies and cheats his way into a secure position, and the fact that his shrewdness is praised by his employer and, it seems, by Jesus, too, runs counter to our expectations. Shouldn’t we condemn those who misuse money? And why on earth should we use “dishonest wealth” to make friends?

Now I’ll admit there are no simple answers—people have been wrestling with this passage forever. But as I said, while I was pondering the text this week, I kept thinking of my old neighbors in the trailer park—people who had almost no money, people who had made some bad choices here and there, people who barely made ends meet each month. People who, in their economic circumstances, were probably far more like the crowds listening to Jesus than I am now. And I wonder whether, in the parable of the shrewd manager, they would see a distasteful and offensive character, or if they would simply see a man on the brink, doing what he had to do to make it in this world?

Because I know that we talk a lot about spiritual and material poverty in the Christian tradtion, and how Jesus says “blessed are the poor” and how we ought to detach ourselves from worldly concerns.

And that’s all fine and good, but I think it’s only half of the story. Because it is very easy to talk about the evils of money when we ourselves have enough of it. It is very easy to extol the virtues of poverty when you have never actually been poor—when you have never wondered how you are going to feed your children or put a roof over your head or patch up the cracks that keep forming under your feet.

And so I wonder if this parable challenges some of us because we don’t really understand the stakes implicit within it. I wonder if maybe Pearl and Mike and the others in the trailer park would see something else in the shrewd manager that’s harder for me, with a steady income, to see: a flawed person, sure, but one who does what he must in order to survive. A person who might have a family of his own to take care of; a person who is willing to risk the wrath of his rich employer as long as it means that he won’t starve to death.

I wonder if part of the reason that I struggle with his decision, with his brazenness, is because my own back has never truly been against the wall? I wonder, if I were that desperate and determined to simply stay alive, whether the greatest mercy, the truest form of grace, would indeed be for someone to simply say, in the end, “Yes, I understand; you did what you had to do”?

Because we—especially those of us who have more than enough—have to remember that when Jesus says “blessed are the poor,” he doesn’t mean poverty is a thing that God loves. He means that God sees and understands and cares especially about the struggle of the people who are just getting by. And God stands with them in that struggle. God challenges our tendencies to either ignore poverty or to spiritually glamorize it, so that, in either case, we don’t have to be troubled by what it is actually like to be poor.

And so when Jesus tells us to make friends by means of “dishonest wealth,” maybe he means to shock us a bit, to wake us up, especially those of us who have the luxury of disdaining money, of thinking of it as dirty and crass because we have never truly needed it. Maybe he would like us to understand that the true economy of grace is not ethereal; that the Kingdom of God is not too lofty to be concerned with hungry bellies and flat tires and leaky roofs. Maybe salvation starts with ensuring people have a place to sleep, that they don’t starve, and maybe their shrewdness is indeed something to be celebrated because it really just means that they wanted to live.

Maybe.

A few years ago, when I was back in California for seminary, I took a drive up to that trailer park. For whatever reason I just needed to see it one more time. As you might imagine, none of the people I remembered were there anymore, but the place pretty much looked the same: rough and timeworn and honest. There were still cracks in the pavement, and cracks in the trailers, and I suppose there are still some cracks in my heart, too.

But I am so grateful that I was there for a little while. I am grateful for Pearl and for Mike and for the others who linger at the edge of my memory. I am grateful, if only so that I might never forget that sometimes, for some of us, just getting by is its own blessedness. Sometimes in this life we are not expected to be saints, but simply to survive.

And sometimes, God sees you and loves you fiercely, because you did what you had to do.

I’ve Had Enough: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 11, 2020 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:1-14:

Once more Jesus spoke to the people in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”

…

Several weeks ago, a number of us came together for an online retreat here at Trinity, focusing on the parables of Jesus. We spent a couple of days studying and praying with these enigmatic depictions of the Kingdom that Jesus uses to teach and form his followers, including us.

One strategy that I shared during our retreat, which I personally find helpful when engaging with a parable that is especially strange or troubling, is to imagine who I might be in the story as I read it through, aligning my perspective with that character, seeing what insight arises for me. Then, I will pick another character, one I might not readily identify with, and put myself in that person’s shoes. I read the parable again from that perspective and see what new discoveries the Holy Spirit might offer.

Reading the parables in this way helps me break free from the assumption that there is only one way to understand a story, only one way to understand what the Kingdom of God is all about. As a spiritual discipline, it helps me build empathy for perspectives other than my own, and opens me up to the new word that God always seems to be offering us if we are willing to listen for it.

How badly we need a new word right now, at this moment in our world when the characterizations used in our public discourse feel especially brittle and caustic, like spiteful caricatures of a once-robust story.

How urgently we need a new paradigm, a new lens through which to perceive what citizenship in God’s Kingdom asks of us. How desperately we need to reconsider who we are in the unfolding narrative of our time.

Our gospel lesson today is a perfect example of this need. The most common approach to this morning’s parable is to imagine God as the vengeful king; in fact, nearly every commentary I came across this past week started with the assumption that this is the correct way to interpret Jesus’ words here. And if God is the king in this story, then it follows that those who reject God’s invitation and those who fail to adequately prepare themselves for God’s expectations will suffer at God’s hand and will be cast out into the darkness. The chosen few will enjoy the feast. End of story. Amen.

Many of us know this type of Christian narrative of election and condemnation from other seasons of our lives; many of us have felt its sting or have pushed up against its suffocating certainties.

But with all due respect to those who promote this dominant narrative, I, for one, have had enough of a theology of angry kings and burning cities and exclusive guest lists. I have had enough of Christian communities that use parables like this to judge and exclude under the guise of truth-telling. I have had enough of purity tests and moral posturing and spiritual violence masquerading as love. I have had enough.

That story is played out, and it doesn’t sound anything like the Jesus I know and love.

So, I would offer, it is time to stretch our imagination, time to recast this story.

What if God is not actually the king of this parable? What if God is not any of the people in this parable?

Jesus never actually says who God is here—we have read that into the text ourselves, collectively, over generations. But one thing we do know, from the very shape of his own life and death and resurrection, is that Jesus has little interest in emulating earthly kings. He usually operates, in fact, as the antithesis of a typical king.

To cast God, then, as the petty tyrant of this parable might tell us more about our own understanding of power in this world than it does about the liberating power of God’s kingdom.

So here’s my new cast list, for your consideration.

Sometimes, we are the king in this story. We are this king every time we act out of our need for control, every time we manipulate others so that they will do what we want. We are this king when we start deciding who is and is not worthy of mercy, when we encouter people with whom we disagree and desire to annilhate them in our hearts, to cast them into the darkness beyond the limits of our compassion.

And sometimes, we are also the guests.

We can be those initial guests—the ones who don’t show up—whenver we decide that we have better things to do than giving our lives over to Christ. We are those guests when we become distracted, deceived by the illusion that we can create our own personal heaven rather than participating in the real heaven, the one that is only found in the mutuality between us and God and our neighbor.

And we can be those final guests, too—the hesitant, the unprepared, the speechless—and in them we see reflected our own moments of speechlessness, our own fear and confusion about what is expected of us, and we’re given a stark reminder that we need to get clear about who we are and why we are here; that this Christian life is not meant to be observed from the sidelines, but lived in fervent fullness.

And God. If not a king, then where is God in this recasting? That is quite simple:

God is the wedding feast itself.

God is the abundant table.

God is the bread and wine and the scent of roses.

God is the water trembling in the crystal bowl,

the color of ripe fruit,

the candlelight reaching out to illuminate your face.

God, always, forever, is the Eucharistic banquet, the promise of sustenance, available to anyone, to everyone—to the angry king and the frightened guest alike, to you and to me—if only we would lay down our arms and our anger and our apathy and gather together for the meal that has been prepared for us, the kingdom that has been prepared for us from the foundation of the world.

God is the feast. The feast of life.

So, whoever you are this morning, whoever you have been before, come. Let us sit down together, and rest, and eat.

Let us tell a new story.

For Such a Time as This: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 20, 2020 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Philippians 1:21-30 and Matthew 20:1-16.

I know it might feel like a lifetime ago in this ever-frantic news cycle, but just the other week my social media feeds were full of eerie, dark images from friends in the San Francisco Bay Area: a thick mantle of smoke from the voracious, deadly wildfires on the west coast had literally blocked out the sunlight. Office towers were illuminated at midday, and cars crept through the haze with headlights on, like ghosts floating through the thick, amber-tinted gloom that many described as “apocalyptic.”

And while these images were striking in their severity, this rampage of flame and smoke is not a novelty out west. In fact, as a seminary student in Berkeley a couple years ago, long before the coronavirus pandemic, I was already the owner of several N95 face masks, because the ash from the autumn wildfires would get so thick that our lungs would burn just walking a block or two to class.

I remember my friend and classmate, Alison, collecting masks and handing them out to the folks living on the streets in our neighborhood, who had to sleep every night under that blanket of toxic air. I remember keeping a bag packed in my dorm room with essential documents and mementos, just in case those sparks of fire began devouring the hills looming outside my window.

As a native Californian, I can tell you that these fires, in recent years, are worse than they ever have been. Their intensity and destrutiveness, exacerbated by climate change and unchecked population growth in fire zones, threatens the life and livelihood of millions of people in our country.

But, as with so many other urgent societal challenges of our time, the debate over what to do about this crisis has been overtaken by the fear and resentment that pervades our public discourse. The need to reckon with complex challenges devolves into false dichtomies and endless posturing. Meanwhile, the land continues to seethe and burn, and our brothers and sisters weep amid ashes both literal and figurative, in a season that indeed feels like an endlessly encroaching twilight.

So when they were talking about apocalyptic skies, my friends might have been engaging in a bit of anxious poeticism, but not by much—becasue we ARE living through an apocalypse, in the strictest sense of that word. Not necessarily the “end times” of popular imagination, but an apokalypsis—which in the Biblical Greek means a revelation, an uncovering of things not previously known. This period of crisis is revealing US, forcing us to face who we are and what we stand for.

Not who we THINK we are. Not who we assume OTHERS to be. But who we actually are, when the rubber meets the road, when times get tough, when we can no longer hide our fears and flaws behind the pleasantly numbing qualities of prosperity and power. When the type of love espoused by Jesus, in all of its raw urgency, is all we have to rely upon and guide us.

If we glean anything from the letter of St. Paul today, who realizes that for him the greater good is to stay and engage in the “fruitful labor” of this troubled world, we must come to understand that sitting this one out, that waiting for the ethereal promise of better days, is not part of our Christian vocation. This is the time for us to stop posturing, to put aside our resentments and regrets about what might have been or should have been, and start getting real about doing God’s work. The needs are great. The hour is coming and is now here.

In today’s gospel, we hear from Jesus that the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner hiring workers for his vineyard. And while we often focus, rightly, on how this parable illustrates God’s almost-scandalous generosity, it also has something important to tell us about simply showing up and laboring in the first place.

Consider those workers who are lingering in the marketplace near the end of the day. We don’t know why they waited so long without being hired. But to the landowner, it doesn’t really matter. He is willing to take them. Because however late the hour, the laborers did show up. They stepped out in the public square and presented themselves as willing hearts, willing contributors to the harvest, even with only an hour or two of daylight left. Even when it might seem that any chance to make a difference has passed them by.

I think of all the times that I have been late to show up for the truly important people and pursuits in my life. I surely had all kinds of reasons, some better than others. Sometimes because I thought I had better things to do, other times because I was distracted, or scared, or angry, or I just didn’t know where to begin. Maybe you’ve had those experiences too, where you feel like you’ve missed the boat, missed the call, missed the opportunity to do something meaningful.

But what we learn in this parable—something God really, really needs us to learn right now—is that it is NEVER too late to start doing the work we have been called to do. Whether we start in the dawn of our life, or at midday, or at dusk, God will always come find us, will always offer us a place in the vineyard, and most importantly, will always show us that even the smallest thing we do has value in the Divine economy.

So what is the labor that you can contribute, here and now? What is the work of your hands, the work of your heart, that you might offer in this perilous season? There is not one among us who cannot take part, no matter our age, health, or circumstances.

Daily prayer for the needs of the world is a great place to start. Supporting the life and work of your parish, of course, is of vital importance for so many of us. Extending a hand of friendship and compassion out into the lives of our neighbors, especially those in need. Speaking truth to power in the great prophetic tradition of our faith. Caring for God’s imperiled creation.

There are so many ways to labor fruitfully, and there is no one solution to all that we face, but neither is there any excuse to exempt ourselves from showing up some way, somehow. As the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” And so each of us has to take that step, whatever it is for us.

God is waiting for us to say yes, like our Blessed Mother Mary, to say yes to something bigger than ourselves, inviting us into the joyful, necessary labor for which we were made. We cannot let our fear, or frustration, or bewilderment impede us from jumping in and offering what we can. Those who came before us, those who struggled valiantly to make this world a kinder, fairer place, deserve at least that much.

So I pray that the smoke will clear from the skies out west. I pray that the smoke will clear from this pandemic, and from this election season, and from any number of other challenges we are facing. But alongside God’s grace and providence, we have a crucial part to play in the healing of this age. And we can’t wait til there are clear, sunny skies to jump in and get to work. We do not have the luxury of waiting. Our land continues to burn, and so our hearts must burn in response.

Brothers and sisters, there is no one else on earth that can do the thing you were created to do. There is no one else that can contribute what you were born to contribute.

No matter the hour of life in which you find yourself, this is the hour you are called. I know things feel hard, and scary, and exhausting, but remember: we were born, we were named as God’s beloved, we were baptized into Christ’s death and life for such a time as this. So, take a deep breath; give thanks for those who have labored before us; imagine those who will come after us; and then, here and now, let us go into the vineyard together.