March 5, 2017 1st
Sunday in Lent Matthew 17:9-27
If you grew up going to Sunday school
you may have learned songs like, “I am the church, you are the church, we are
the church together.” And little finger
poems like, “Here is the church. Here is
the steeple. Open the doors and see all
the people.”
I think we all know that the church is
not a building or an institution or a collection of traditions. The church is people. However, defining the church beyond that
starts to get tricky. Article 7 of the
Augsburg Confession, the theological constitution of the Lutheran Church,
defines the church as the assembly of believers among whom the Gospel is
preached in its purity and the sacraments are administered rightly.
That sounds like a good definition,
the kind of thing a smart and educated person would say when told to define the
church. Indeed the Augsburg Confession
was written by a university professor by the name of Philip Melanchthon. But that definition quickly runs into
problems. If the church is the assembly
of believers then how come there’s so many problems all the time? Why don’t people in the church get
along? Why can’t all Christians come to
a consensus about things like morals… and politics for that matter? And of course just remember back to the
Catholic priest scandals and you have to ask how come there’s so much that is
downright evil and wrong with the church?
Go a little bit farther to Article 8
of the Augsburg Confession and you find Philip Melanchthon writing, “Again,
although the Christian church, properly speaking, is nothing else than the
assembly of all believers and saints, yet because in this life many false
Christians, hypocrites, and even open sinners remain among the godly, the
sacraments are [effective] even if the priests who administer them are wicked
men…” So, for example, if you are
baptized by a pastor who later on gets kicked out for all sorts of horrible
behavior your baptism is still perfectly valid.
It turns out that defining the church
is hard to do. In our gospel reading
today we’re seeing the very beginnings of community being built around
Christ. You might remember from previous
chapters that Jesus has reached out to the Jewish religious establishment and
been rejected. It is as if Jesus was
reaching out to them to invite them to a new expression of their traditional
faith. But this was not to be. The only thing then is to create a new
community.
Two weeks ago we saw its
beginning. Jesus said to Peter that he
is the rock upon which the church will be built. We discovered pretty quickly that Peter is
not a very solid rock; but in time that will come. For now, things are still pretty shaky;
although they’re improving. The four
scenes we have in our gospel reading for today show that.
The first scene is the disciples
asking about Elijah. We see at the end
of that scene the disciples and learned that Jesus was talking about John the
Baptist.
The second scene is the curing of the
epileptic boy. Again the disciples are
asking a question. You’ll remember from
previous chapters that Jesus has given these disciples powers of healing and
casting out demons. Exactly how they had
that power may raise some questions in our minds, but to dwell on that is to
miss the main point here. Here the
problem is that they cannot take care of the problem of the epileptic. That sets the scene for Jesus to say, “…truly
I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this
mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be
impossible for you.’”
What little child hasn’t tried
that? I tell you, as someone who used to
work on roads and bridges it sure would make road construction easier if we
could do that!
Let me read to you something from
Eugene Boring in the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary:
“One should not infer from [this
passage] the guilt-inducing conclusion that when hoped-for miracles fail the
problem must be our lack of faith, and that if we had “enough” faith we would
be able to avert all tragedies and heal all afflictions. Neither can we infer from it that faith
itself is a power that accomplished miracles, for God is the one who acts, not
an attitude called “faith.” …this is not
a saying about the power of faith but about the power of God… And ‘faith’ is not a quality of the one
praying, but a relationship of practical trust with the one to whom prayer is
offered. We might be tempted to reason
that, if the smallest faith moves mountains and our achievements seem quite
ordinary, our faith must be smaller than the smallest – good math, but
pedestrian exegesis [in order words, bad logic]. Rather, this disruptive picture pushes at us
the gnawing reminder that as disciples we are agents of the church in which
Christ himself is ‘with us,’ which means God-with-us, and that with God nothing
is impossible, a guard against fitting God into our ideas of what is possible…”
(Volume 8, Pg. 369)
Said more simply, faith is a
relationship of trust in God who has power.
Faith itself is not power. This
is a basic lesson for the beginning Christian community to realize, and it is a
lesson for us as well. I think this is
the biggest teaching from our gospel today, and you may want to stop here and
mull it all over a bit, but I do want to touch on the other two scenes also.
In verses 22-23 Jesus is again
teaching the disciples that he will be betrayed into human hands and be killed,
and on the third day be raised. This
distresses the disciples, and they don’t get it yet, but it is a show of
progress. The first time Jesus brought
this up you’ll remember that Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke
him. Then in response Jesus rebuked
Peter saying, “Get behind me Satan, for you are setting your mind not on divine
things but on human things.”
So with baby steps and with plenty of
confusion and mistakes Christian community begins to take form. It has a long way to go as we’ll see in the
coming weeks. One of the biggest issues
for this community to deal with is how does it interact with the world around
it? Should Christ-followers reject the
world? Should they go off an live apart? It’s tax season and there are advertisements
everywhere offering help with your taxes.
Should the followers of Christ pay taxes?
Right now it might be nice if Jesus
had said to his disciples, “You are exempt from paying taxes,” but that’s not
what he said. In the fourth scene from
our gospel Jesus tells Peter to go fishing.
He will catch a fish with a coin in its mouth that they can use to pay
the temple tax.
At first we think, “Okay, we have to
pay taxes to the government.” But
there’s more to it. In Jesus’ day there
was a roaring debate over paying the temple tax. Who had to pay it and how often? The temple tax was essentially
voluntary. The Jewish leaders did not
have an Internal Revenue Service that would audit people’s finances and punish
them if they didn’t pay. You could
easily be a Jew and ever pay. Yet Jesus
says pay the temple tax – even though it is the temple system that is going to
arrest him and have him killed.
Jump forward a few decades to the time
of the writing of Matthew’s gospel. The
temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed.
There’s no longer a Jewish temple tax but the Romans are now taxing all
Jews for the support of the temple to Jupiter in Rome. Not surprisingly, paying a tax to support a
pagan god they don’t believe in didn’t go over to well with the Jews! And should these early Christians agree to
pay a religious tax to something against their faith?
Jesus’ answer: yes. Pay it.
In a few weeks we’ll get to Jesus’ famous words, “Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s and render unto God the things that are God’s.”
Along the same lines as the power of
faith, all human understandings of wealth and power and capability are
completely and totally irrelevant to God.
Pay the money to the pagan government.
Who cares?!? It does not diminish
God’s powers one bit. Ultimately the
disciples will discover what we should also discover. There is no power to faith. There is no real power in the Church. The power is God’s. The church and faith are founded on trust in
God’s power. May we all have such faith.
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