February 26, 2023 Lent 1 Matthew 17:14-24

             It’s tax season.  It is said that the only two sure things are death and taxes.  You know the story of Jesus well enough to know that he does die by crucifixion.  And, from our gospel reading it looks like not even Jesus is immune from taxes.  The strange thing is that in the particular tax there it seems as if it is voluntary.  Some collectors of the temple tax come to Peter and ask, “Does your teacher not pay the temple tax?”  Does that mean that not paying the temple tax is an option?  Maybe Jesus was immune from taxes – but he pays them anyway.

            This particular temple tax is worth noting.  At the time of Jesus it was generally assumed that all loyal Jews would pay the two-drachma temple tax, precisely who should pay, how often, and how it was related to scripture was disputed.  How much a drachma was worth in those days is debatable.  Everyone agrees, though, that it is a small amount of money – less than a dollar.

            It originated with Nehemiah 10, where leaders of the Jewish population took it upon themselves to make a yearly donation to support the temple.  Later the Pharisees considered every male Jews throughout the world liable for a small annual fee, and they rooted it in Exodus 30.  The Sadducees thought it should be a voluntary gift and not an imposed tax, from which priests were exempt.  Historians of the era, Josephus and Philo say that Jews spread throughout the Roman empire also contributed to the temple.  The reclusive Qumran community, understood the tax to be a one time only contribution. 

            So, when Peter is asked if Jesus pays the tax it is an interesting question, and it could categorize Jesus into a particular sect of Judaism. 

            But we also have to remember that while Matthew writes about events that happened in the 30’s of the first century, he is actually writing from around the 80’s.  There was a different religious tax then.  You’ll remember that the Romans destroyed the temple in the year 70.  So, that would mean that for Matthew’s readers there’d be no more temple tax, right?  I mean, how can you pay to support what isn’t there?!?

            Well, the Romans weren’t so nice.  The Roman government had imposed a corresponding tax of two drachmas on all Jews for support of the temple to Jupiter in Rome.  Now we’re talking a matter of conscious.  Could you, a Jew; or could you, as a follower of Jesus, pay a tax to support a religion that was not your own?  That sort of thing doesn’t happen in the United States but it does happen in other countries.  How does it feel when your hard-earned money is used by the government in ways you find offensive?  In our case we live in a democracy.  But what if it was a country where you have no say at all?  I don’t like having my hard earned efforts taken to support something that is opposed to me, and then I don’t even have any say in the matter.

            Money is an interesting thing.  It is the fundamental way in which we live and convey value from one person to another.  If you have money you have power.  You can do things.  You can make things happen.  If you don’t have money then you have little power.

Money can be used foolishly.  Money can be used to exploit.  Money can let you get away with things.

Money can also equip you to help others.  It lets you make a positive difference in the world.    

Money can also be fundamental in helping us make value decisions.  If a car is damaged in an accident the insurance company will make a decision if the repairs will cost more than the car is worth.  There, money is a practical tool to determine if it’s a worthwhile investment of resources.

            Good or bad, practical or foolish, money is an interesting thing, especially when it comes to its relationship with faith.  Money helps us – you and me, humans – get things done.  But does God need our money?

            Could God not also get things done by other means?  Of course!  And that creates a very complicated thing for us.  Money is so central to our lives.  God invites us to use our resources and abilities for good, and yet God doesn’t actually need any of it at all.  There’s nothing we can buy, do, donate, or make that God can’t get done by some other means. 

            Does that mean we should just stop?  Should we stop using our money to help other people – perhaps stop giving to charities and church; or perhaps stop helping a parent or friend; or perhaps stop helping our children, even if they are very young.

            We live in this strange duality where so many depend on us and yet our money and efforts are simultaneously completely irrelevant! 

            Jesus says to pay the temple tax so as not to cause offense, even though the tax itself is nothing.  And the early Christians being forced to pay taxes to support the Roman temple to Jupiter should do so without a pang of conscious.

            With this bizarre contradiction we move a step back and look at the initial story in our gospel – the inability of the disciples to cure an epileptic, Jesus successfully curing the epileptic, the disciples asking why they couldn’t, Jesus says because they have little faith, and then says that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed they could move mountains.

            What?!?

            On the cover of the worship bulletin it says, “Jesus says that if you have faith the size of a mustard seed that you could move mountains!  Mustard seeds are tiny.  Does that mean that our faith is even smaller than that of a mustard seed?  That is good math but flawed theology.”

These passages from Matthew’s gospel do not make sense easily.  But if you spend some time dwelling in them you can see what is going on.  We should not infer 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 that faith is somehow a power in and of itself that can do the supernatural.  It is God who acts, not an attitude called “faith”.

Faith as Jesus talks about it here is not a quantity at all; hence the tininess of a mustard seed.  It is instead a relationship of practical trust with the God to whom we pray. 

When it comes to the power of money, or the power of faith, or the power of prayer it isn’t about power at all.  It is about trust.

Let’s go back to whether the followers of Jesus should pay the tax to the temple to Jupiter.  Yes, pay it so as not to give offense.  But is it actually giving anything of real value?  No.  So don’t get fussed about it.

At the same time, God has equipped you with tremendous power and ability.  Your prayer, your abilities, your money, your time, your emotions are all quite capable – when they are applied to the world in an attitude of trust with God.

Said differently, it isn’t how much – not how much as measured in earthly standards – but the relationship of trust that it is applied with.

Your time, money, and other resources are only as powerful as your application of them in relationship with God.  With God anything is possible. 

Ask for God’s guidance in prayer first thing in the morning when you get up.  As God’s guidance in prayer when you plan out your calendar.  As God’s guidance in prayer when you put together your shopping list.  As God’s guidance when you’re giving someone advice, or making a medical decision, or figuring out a problem.  God’s guidance will be with you, even if you are having a hard time feeling it, and then you will always act in confidence.

 

February 19, 2023 Transfiguration Matthew 16:13-17:13

             I recently watched the Netflix movie Founder, which is about the birth and growth of the McDonald’s Corporation.  It is necessary to keep in mind that the movie simplifies things, and it interested in creating a villain and good guys, so I won’t credit it with much in the way of historical accuracy.  But the movie form does portray a dynamic all too common in the world.  Brothers Dick and Mac McDonald open a speedy service restaurant focusing on a simple menu of burgers, fries, and drinks.  Impressed by this concept, often-failed salesman, Ray Kroc offers to help the brothers expand the restaurant through franchising.  He struggles for a while and has limited success.  He becomes upset with the original brothers because they will not compromise on quality even though very small compromises could lead to much higher profits.  But Kroc is locked into his contract and so he must obey.

            Eventually, however, Kroc meets a man who has a clever property ownership scheme that will allow Kroc to see much greater profits from the franchises he is setting up without violating his contract.  His success quickly grows and in no time he has eclipsed the original brothers by the sheer magnitude of his wealth.  He starts to openly violate the original contract.  The original owners realize they cannot compete with the massive high-price legal team Kroc has assembled.

            And so, we see the original values of high quality food made from authentic ingredients, good employee care, and a certain wholesomeness to the whole operation get crushed by greed.

            A look at many of the industrial titans of our nation show the same thing.  Henry Ford was a scoundrel almost beyond compare.  Thomas Edison stole patents regularly.  Names like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt are all synonymous with greed that crushed integrity.  The fastest surest way to make a lot of money is by exploiting people.  If I make an ironic twist on a doxology: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.  That is the way of humanity.

            Of course Jesus does not teach that.  Jesus taught the opposite.  It is no surprise that many people who live by Jesus’ teachings get crushed in the process.  But following Jesus is more than just being righteous in the face of a greedy world.

The gospel reading stretches from Matthew 6:13 to 7:13.  It covers a lot of territory, but the beginning verses bring up themes that go through to the end.

Jesus is with his disciples and asks who do people say that he is.  The answer John the Baptist, or Elijah or one of the prophets.  Then Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?”  Peter gives the famous answer, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Yay Peter for that insight!  Yay Peter for the revealer of the Father’s truth!

But Peter doesn’t fly high for long, does he?

With his identity known to the disciples Jesus goes on to explain the way he will be the Son of living God.  He will die. He will not just die, but he will first suffer at the hands of the religious leaders.  This is too much for Peter.  Peter says a very logical thing, “God forbid it, Lord!”  It is as if Peter thinks Jesus has become demon possessed and he needs to perform an exorcism.  What nonsense is this that Jesus spouts?  How can the Son of God be killed?

Then Jesus turns the exorcism back on Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!  You are a stumbling block to me;”  And notice the punch line.  Jesus does not say you are setting your mind on evil things or Satanic things or greedy things.  Jesus plainly says, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but human things.”

We see the unsettling truth that the human point of view is not a neutral point of view, but actually an evil point of view.  Perhaps we could look at the greed of the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and say their ways were evil.  We could then stay in our own little realm of wholesome human righteousness.  But Jesus’ response takes it a step further.

The best way that I know how to get at that is to make a contrast between Christianity and Islam, for that is the way to get at the whole scandalous truth of Christianity.  I do not say the “scandalous truth of Christianity” lightly.  When Jesus tells Peter he is a, “stumbling block” he uses the Greek word “skandalon” (skandalon), from which you can easily tell comes our English word scandal.

We have to remember that our faith is a scandal to our intelligence, to our sense of logic and reason.

I’ve used the contrast between Christianity and Islam before.  I do so carefully because I do not want to portray Islam in a negative light.  It is just the most succinct way to do it.

Jesus plays a significant role in the Qur’an.  He is considered to be a major prophet – a major revealer of the truth of God.  Islam can celebrate Jesus.  However, where it diverges is that it rejects the idea of Jesus being crucified.  While Islam accepts the idea of the death and martyrdom of faithful followers, it cannot accept the idea of one of the prophets being killed.  No, the prophets, God’s messengers, will receive divine protection from earthly killing.  That does not mean the prophets will have an easy life.  To the contrary.  They will probably have a very difficult life.  But the prophets will not be killed in the line of doing God’s work.  They will die naturally.  They will certainly not be rejected and executed by the religious leadership.

The cross is a scandal.  All of human logic would say that God protects the faithful.  God would not let them be killed.  Yet we make the cross the central symbol of our faith.  Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

That is not the same as living a dignified life of righteousness.  A dignified life of righteousness lets you live with your hands clean and your public integrity in tack.  A dignified life of righteousness lets you set yourself up as an example of virtue for others to emulate.  You walk with pride.  You look at other needy people and, even in your humility, you still see yourself as being above them.

The crucifixion of Jesus saw him shamefully hanging in public surrounded by other criminals being executed.  There’s no pride in that.

Yet Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  These verses must be handled carefully.  It is not about self-hate or self-denial.  Self-hate and self-denial just lead to emptiness.  Just giving up things will not make you a follower of Jesus.  It will just make you empty.  It is an orientation of life that is not focused on self at all, but it is living in the confidence that the future is truly and fully in God’s hands.  You focus there, not on yourself, not on human objects or status or honor.  It is just a focus on God.

It is to believe that God has acted decisively and ultimately in Jesus.  People make a mistake if they think Jesus’ words are some sort of good advice on how to live.  That’s pretty foolish if you think about it is the way Jesus lived that got him killed!

Let’s end with this final thought.  Living the way I just described is pretty hard.  I’m sure there are days when you feel strong and capable and able to overcome every challenge.  And there are days when you feel God’s presence strongly at work in you.  (Of course you can deny yourself and take up your cross and follow Jesus!)  But there are surely also days when it doesn’t feel like that at all.  It may be many days, months, seasons, years of life even.

Learn from Peter’s example.  One minute he is praised for his faith.  The next he is being likened to Satan.  He sees the amazing transfiguration on the mountaintop and he denies Jesus three times over when Jesus is arrested.  Yet he is a faith-filled disciple.  So know that the times of failure and weakness and questioning are all a part of it.  That should be no surprise.  It is not a smooth easy path of glory.  It is a journey with ups and downs, but know that God is indeed with us always.

February 5, 2023 Wisdom and Innocence Matthew 11:20-30

We’re going to make an intellectual dive; at least to start. We’re going to come out through our gospel reading, and hopefully some practical applications for life, but we’re going to start at a far different place.

We’re going to start with feminine images for God.

For decades I’ve felt a push from some scholars to consider the Holy Spirit to be feminine. At its best, it is an attempt to draw our understanding of God to be something more than exclusively masculine. I agree completely that we fundamentally misunderstand God if we picture God as only male. The problem is that using the Trinity to do that simply creates a mess. The Trinity is described as: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Well, it is of course tough to make the case of Father as feminine. It is similarly tough to make the case of Son as feminine. The Holy Spirit seems like the perfect place. The justification for doing so is that the word for spirit in Greek is a feminine word. Greek words have gender.

The most obvious problems to this are that you’ve made a very weak argument at best. Also, that you’ve ignored the Gospel of John, which distinctly refers to the Spirit as “He”. And finally (and perhaps most disastrous) you’ve made a fundamental mistake of interpretation that Christians easily make without knowing it.

The idea of the Holy Trinity does not exist in the Bible. It is a doctrine that began to form in the early church. It was complex and controversial. So in the 4th century, when Christianity became legal, the Council of Nicaea did, among other things, work to hash out the complexity. The result is the Nicene Creed.

Now don’t get me wrong. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the Nicene Creed. However, it is easy for us to put the cart before the horse. It is perfectly possible to read the Bible and logically come to the doctrine of the Trinity we find in the Nicene Creed. But you’ve put the cart before the horse when you’ve decided to use the Nicene Creed as a lens to see the Bible. The result is at best a stretch. At worst it is total garbage.

When you try to make the Holy Spirit feminine you are doing things backwards. The Bible has a highly developed masculine understanding of God. And, it also has an equally highly developed feminine understanding of God. But if you keep reading it through Nicaea, you’ll never see it.

Underneath our gospel reading for today is a very rich feminine understanding of God. We easily miss it. That’s mostly because Jesus refers to God as Father. But the biblical authors don’t make a crisp male/female distinction in God. It is we who read that into it. It’s also because it is not direct. Jesus’ words there are based on ancient Jewish wisdom literature. And to the ancient Jews, Wisdom, or Woman Wisdom, was the feminine expression of the Divine. We saw that in the first reading from Proverbs 8.

Woman Wisdom/Divine Wisdom, not human cleverness called “wise” as Jesus criticizes in what he says in verse 25, is the revealer of God’s hidden truths. Here these words from the book of Sirach, which is ancient Jewish wisdom literature that Jesus references but isn’t in Protestant Bibles:

Sirach 51:23-30

23 Draw near to me, you who are uneducated,
and lodge in the house of instruction.
24 Why do you say you are lacking in these things,
and why do you endure such great thirst?
25 I opened my mouth and said,
Acquire wisdom for yourselves without money.


26 Put your neck under her yoke,
and let your souls receive instruction;
it is to be found close by.


27 See with your own eyes that I have labored but little
and found for myself much serenity.
28 Hear but a little of my instruction,
and through me you will acquire silver and gold.


29 May your soul rejoice in God’s mercy,
and may you never be ashamed to praise him.
30 Do your work in good time,
and in his own time God will give you your reward.



Do you see where Jesus is getting it when he says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

Here Jesus is the revealer of God’s hidden truths. Actually more than that, he is the Divine Wisdom.

When we allow this ancient feminine understanding of God to speak with its full voice in this gospel reading, we start to understand its words for us today.

We start to be stunned by this passage from Matthew because all of those who should recognize the revelation of God taking place in their midst fail to get it.

Last week we read that John the Baptist, who had baptized Jesus, who knew his own unworthiness, and had heard the heavenly voice did not get it. Also those who had their own games to play and found that neither John nor Jesus met their own criteria of what God should be like, didn’t get it.

In our gospel reading today Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, where Jesus had lived and worked didn’t get it.

The scholars and the wise, who could explain much but missed the revelation in their midst didn’t get it.

Those who did get it were the “babies,” the unpretentious “little ones” who made no claims, but could be given the gift of revelation, which comes from God alone.

When we talk about receiving God as a child we aren’t wrong to say that it is to receive God with childish innocence. Nor are we wrong to say that it is to receive God with childish dependence. But we aren’t grasping the whole picture if we don’t include that to receive God as a child means that we receive it as a simple gift.

Do you come to understand God, do you come to have faith in God, through: logic, reason, education, philosophy, and other human tools? You can certainly use all of those things to develop a more rich grasp of God. But none of those things will create faith or point you towards God.

To receive God as a child means that we receive it as a simple gift.

That is an easy simple concept. And it plays out across our entire lives.

When you receive something as a simple gift that you did not earn it doesn’t allow for pride, or arrogance, or haughtiness, or rudeness. (You may note I’m pulling on 1 Corinthians 13 there.) It creates humility, an authentic -and ironically- deeply powerful meekness, and creates a serenity of purpose within yourself. That is the kingdom of God at work within you. That is what Jesus brings. That is Wisdom.

Let the world play its games of pretense and wealth, its shallow games of looks and entertainment, its lies of fulfillment and purpose.

Instead, we discover in Jesus the invitation to learn and become a disciple. We discover a life orientation towards God’s kingdom. We realize that while the yoke is easy and the burden is light, we do not feel content to sit back and do nothing. No, we feel “response-able” in the world around us. And we give thanks and praise to God for the gift that leads to it all!