The best of times, the worst of times

The end times.

And, as it says in the scriptures, that the end times are the great and terrible day of the Lord.  How can something be both great and terrible? Simple, really, that great meaning large or immense, we mean it in the pejorative sense.

Simple enough, and everything we read about judgment day seems to suggest that it is darkness and not light, that it is bad news and will plague us with horrendous sights never before contemplated. The Bible tells us that judgment day is a time in which everyone is resurrected, and each one must give an account of his deeds.  The righteous will move towards heaven, and the unrighteous into eternal damnation and fire.

Working that part out helps the Old Testament reading to make sense, really.  For in the Old Testament reading, it tells us that the day of the Lord is as though a man was escaping from a Lion, and a bear met him.  Or if he entered into a house, and a snake bit him.  The colloquial expression for this is 'out of the frying pan, and into the fire,' and that's sort of what is promised on the last day. The last day, judgment day, in which everyone will escape the first death, where we will all be raised up on the last day, but then what happens to us? Some will avoid the first death, only to meet up with the second.  Some will be alive until the coming of our Lord, and will escape temporal death, but not the judgment that comes along with that return.

Our view of judgment day is skewed, as these things often are.  That is, we tend to think about judgment day as a time in which God will be there, and he will be accountable to us.  We will get to ask him why it is that he felt it was appropriate for our dog to die when we were seven, which made us real sad.  We feel as though it will be the right time for us to say to the Lord our God, the king of the universe 'how come I got split ends right before the big dance?'  In many ways, we think about judgment day in the same fashion as that footprints poem, you know the one.  And when I read that poem, I'm always struck by the audacity of the man in question to say to the living God, the fire and the whirlwind 'I'm gonna let you finish, but How come there was only one set of footprints when things got tough?'

That's not the judgment day that the scriptures describe.  They describe a day in which God himself will judge us, not the other way around.  And it's described not only as a great and terrible day, but as a sudden, immediate, terrifying time, in which you won't have time to repent, to get your life in order, to live properly.  The day of the Lord, just like our own individual deaths, will just happen.  Not necessarily any warning, so you have to be ready all the time.

And that brings us to the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.  The sophomoric virgins, if you follow me.  The ones who were wise prepared, they brought with them extra oil for their lamps, as they planned on joining the wedding procession to the feast site.  The foolish ones did not.  The foolish ones likely didn't know how long it was going to take for the wedding procession to get going, nor for the party to start, and besides, why should you bother getting your extra oil ready when you have other people, in the same boat, and they can prepare for you?  What's the point, after all?  So, the foolish virgins, when they heard that the bridegroom was coming, they got up, trimmed their lamps, and prepared to join in the procession.  And they said to the wise virgins 'we have no oil for our lamps.  Give us some of yours.'  The reply from the wise virgins makes perfect sense, too 'if we give you our oil, there won't be enough for anyone.  You should go to the dealers and buy some.'  Yes, yes they should.  But they should have done so much earlier.  By the time they go and get oil, and then come back, the door to the festival is shut, and as they knock, a voice can be heard from the inside 'I do not know you.'

Does that end bother you? It should, and it tends to bother most people.  Most folks don't look at what happened to the foolish virgins and say 'good end.  Git rekt.'  Most folks, when the foolish virgins get shut out, when they are not welcome, when they are barred entry into the feast, they say that this is a horribly unfair scenario.  That the groom should just open the door, and let them in as they pound desperately to be admitted.

Okay, but if you think that's a good idea, then I would ask you a simple question, which is to ask you who would you invite to your wedding? Would you invite friends, family, that sort of thing? Would you invite people who had a large part in making you into who you were, and who your intended spouse had become? Or would you just invite total strangers, start up the open bar, and let them have at it?  Almost nobody I have ever met has ever welcomed gatecrashers into their wedding reception.  Almost nobody I have ever met has been at their own wedding reception, have seen uninvited strangers show up, and have said 'gosh, the more the merrier.'  An invitation to a wedding doesn't tend to go to the best and brightest, it doesn't ususally go to the captains of industry and socialites.  Wedding invites tend to go to the people known and loved by the bride and groom, and their families.

If you find that moment where the virgins are pounding on the door, begging to be let in to be offensive, it it bothers you that the voice from the inside comes out and says 'I do not know you,' then I welcome you to think about the work of Christ to get to know people before the wedding feast begins.  For the book of Revelation, mandatory reading as we consider the end times, there's a passage that we shouldn't skip, especially if we're not overly in love with the idea that there might be unanswered knocking at doors.  There is a passage where Jesus talks of us, and says to us 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in, and we will eat together as friends.  Those who are victorious will sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat with my father on his throne.'  That all seems fine, to be sure. It seems fine, because this is the work of the bridegroom to meet the guests before the wedding.  You and I both know that admission to a wedding isn't based on being the best and the brightest, but based on being the people with whom you break bread, and eat with.  It's based on who you know, who you love, and being invited to share with the bride and groom in their happy occasion.  And this, well, it's a matter of some interest for us, because Jesus is standing at the door of each and every human heart, and knocking.  And the response that he tends to get seems to be the same as the response that he gives in the Gospel reading.

I do not know you.

That's how people respond when Christ seeks to come and visit with them, to eat with them and drink with them, to grow in love and service and knowledge with them.  They respond by saying to him that they do not know him, that they refuse to open the door to him, refuse to let him in and grant him entrance.  At the point where we are discussing life and salvation, where we are talking about grace and sin, life and death, salvation and damnation, we look at the words of the groom, and are upset by them.  As the hands of the foolish virgins pound ever more insistently on the door, we feel as though the groom should just let them in, whether he knows them or not.  But if that is the case, then surely each and every single one of us ought to be unlocking the door to Christ as he knocks on the doors to our hearts.

The number one thing to know, to remember about how this whole salvation and damnation thing works is that the door, though locked between us and him, is only locked on our side.  Complaining about how Christ refuses to come to us, about how he refuses to allow us into paradise, is a lot like saying that you have been locked inside your house, or inside your car.  Surely, you can  understand that here, as Christ desperately wants to know you and wants you to know him, the door is locked, it is barred, but from your side.  If you want to know Christ, to be forgiven, to be given new life and invited into the wedding feast, then it would be best for you to unlock the door, and to not shut out the bridegroom, who wants to know you, that you may be welcome at his wedding feast as an honored guest, and not pounding at the door as a gatecrashing stranger, just there to enrich yourself.

But that could happen at any time, you know.  And as the church year draws to a close, our focus stays sharply on the idea that none of us know the day nor the hour. So best to welcome him past your threshold now, that you may know him before the procession starts.  You had better be prepared at all times, for you won't get a warning when he returns in glory.  Instead, you will have to see and encounter the living God face to face.  So be sober, be alert, and be ready for his coming.

Fidelis

Have you ever found a time when you've been in a rather disreputable bathroom, seen graffiti, and noticed that sometimes people write back and forth to one another?  This is the nuttiest thing I've seen in a long time, especially in an age of social media, where everyone has his or her own wall, can be poked at any opportunity, and where you can write on other people's walls all day.  This is the new age of things, but as long as there have been walls, real walls, people have been writing on them.

You may not know how true that is, but it is seriously, abundantly true.  For the history of humanity largely deals with what we have left on the walls of things.  Think, for a moment, of some of the most famous walls of all time, and I'm thinking in this moment of Lascaux.  The cave paintings in there are some of the oldest things that we have as far as human artistic endeavors.  People making things, people making art, people composing and constructing things that look like other things.  And that's almost as old as people themselves.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in thinking about All Saints' day, we think about what it is that those saints left behind.  And in thinking about All Saints' day, it's nice that we have the beatitudes to give us some comfort and direction.  The Beatitudes tell us that we are blessed, blessed by God, when we are in a variety of bad, dangerous, and unpleasant situations.  It's easy to be and feel blessed by God when everything is going well, when there are essentially no problems, but boy oh boy, it is much harder to be on point, to continue with things as though there were no problems, to feel the blessing of the almighty Lord on you when things aren't going all that well.  The Beatitudes serve to remind you of something crucial, which is that God is still there, he is loves and comforts you, even and especially when things aren't going your way, exactly.  I can't tell you how many times I've had the conversation with people where they will say after a catastrophe, after an event that has plagued them, after a death or a breakup 'where is God in all of this?  Where's your God now?'  Good question, I suppose, and it really has two answers - one, that he has been with you this entire time, and you really didn't stop to acknowledge him in the slightest, and two, the beatitudes are there to show you how God blesses you even in the midst of suffering.  I don't want to get all 'footprints in the sand' with you, but I do want you to know that the beatitudes are there for you to see and find comfort in the real suffering that exists in the real world.  There are blessings there for the Christian even in dark times.

And these days, in Canada, in the 21st century, how much are you really expecting to give up for your Christian faith? If you're like most of the rest of us, the answer is 'not much, really.'  For the cost of being a Christian is not that high.  You're not going to be put in stocks, nor burned at the stake.  You're not going to lose your job (probably), nor are you going to be crucified, beheaded, sawn asunder, sewn into wild animal skins, or anything of the kind.  Someone may call you a dummy, though, and that's pretty much it.  And what do we fear as current humans? We are so far removed from any possible threat of hunger or thirst, so far removed from any threat of cold or scorching heat, that we move through our lives with so little discomfort that our priorities have changed.  You don't fear violence or famine, because those things don't really exist for you, not in a real, tangible way, anyway.  But what you do fear is a loss of social standing.  You fear a drop in your likes, a social shunning that might happen.  And if you hold to Biblical views on things a social shunning will happen. This is inevitable, given that you are dealing with a fallen world with its own priorities.  And the fallen world that we live in is one in which we are constantly and perpetually dealing with the idea that our sins should be served and serviced.  And if you take a stand on anything, from a Christ-centered view of creation to an ethic that puts God and family first, then you will find yourself running afoul of the world that we are living in, and that will place you squarely in the camp of the last two verses of the beatitudes, that is where it says quite clearly 'Blessed are you when people reviles you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.'

For the average comfy Christian, that's going to be the only cost you're going to have to pay.  People are going to make fun of you. They're going to give you a hard time, they're going to give you the business.  They're going to think you're silly or outdated, and there is immense pressure to cave on that, just to fit in, to go along to get along, and to do the worst thing as an observant Christian, which is to conform Christ to men, and not men to Christ.  Being a Christian is going to cost you something, it is going to pinch, it is going to hurt, there's really no way around it.  The only way to avoid even this tiny cost would be to quit, or to make the Gospel say nothing.  Because the Gospel is always going to be counter-cultural, its message will always be counter-cultural, and the world will always try to shut it down. And this isn't new, in fact it is as old as the Christian faith itself.

As we celebrate All Saints' day, I would like to introduce you to a saint you may never have heard of.  Alexamenos. Have you heard of him? Perhaps, but perhaps not.  In either case, Alexamenos is an important guy, given that he is at the centre of the first, earliest depiction of Jesus of Nazareth.  Now, Alexamenos didn't draw this depiction, he didn't illustrate it, didn't call attention to it.  Instead, it's mocking him.  It's a drawing making fun of Alexamenos worshiping his god, that of Jesus Christ.

In case you can't read the writing, it says 'Alexamenos worships his God.'  What do we know about Alexamenos? Not much, save that he was obviously a Christian, and a Christian in a time where there was going to be large scale mockery for believing in a crucified and risen savior, here depicted as a donkey.  And this is probably the earliest depiction of Jesus in existence.  This is probably the earliest depiction of Jesus around, you know, and it's a crude, insulting one.  It's not nice, or fun, it doesn't praise or worship Jesus, heck, it isn't even neutral.  It's insulting and offensive, and what it shows you is that mockery of Christians has been around from the word go.  In fact, Jesus himself was mocked while he was on the cross, so I don't know why we think that would have changed ever. 

Now, we know that Alexamenos was insulted for his faith, we know that he was mocked and derided.  We know from the evidence left behind that someone, at some point, thought it would be fun to make sport of Alexamenos' faith, and to give him a hard time for what he believed.  And this person who etched this into a wall was likely hoping that Alexamenos would give up his faith, would surrender what he believed, and cave into pressure.  And if Alexamenos had done so, along with all his Christian contemporaries in the second century, then there is a great chance that there would be no Christian church at all in the 21st century.  For people living in the time of Alexamenos, shortly after the time of Jesus, they were functionally living in the last Christian generation, as we are today. Every single generation of Christians in the world has been living in the last Christian generation.  We have all be existing in the twilight of the faith, unless we should choose to pass it along, no matter what the cost might be.  There will be a cost, obviously, and for us, it is likely the cost of mocking, of derision, of a ribbing from friends, family, acquaintances, people who will give us a hard time for deigning to believe in something so hopelessly outdated as the Christian faith.  The world will stand against us in what we believe, for they wish not to believe it, and that's why we need the last little bit of the beatitudes, that promise us that we are blessed when people mock us, utter all kinds of falsehoods against us on account of our Christian faith.  Great is our reward in heaven, which makes sense.  The world will mock us and deride us, the world will oppose us.  In this life we will have trouble, as Jesus said, but take heart, for he has overcome the world.

The Christian faith is built, then, on the legacy of the saints, those who have come before us, lived and died, who have folded our hands in prayer and placed into those hands the holy scriptures.  The Christian faith is built up off of people who have passed the faith down to us, both in commands and in whispers, people who have prayed with us and for us, who have encouraged us and built us up.  People from the time of Alexamenos onward, who kept the faith in a crucified and risen Lord, slain for our sins, and refused to give it up.  For if you have ever wondered what Alexamenos might have answered to the person who mocked him and laughed at him, well we actually know.  For Alexamenos wrote something back.  Etched crudely into the wall in the same location is Alexamenos' response.  Two words only.

ALEXAMENOS FIDELIS.

Alexamenos is faithful.

People held fast to that faith in Christ, for thousands of years they did so because they knew that the treasure waiting for them was bigger than the world.  The world never had any time for the Gospel, not truly.  The world has always resisted the Gospel, which is why faithful men and women have always had to pay a price for following it.  It may have been manning the walls in Constantinople, or hiding in the catacombs of Paris.  It may have been walking along the sand bridge of Lindisfarne, or sapping mines at Vienna.  All these people, for all these hundreds of years have all lived and died in the faith, and have all breathed that same word 'fidelis.'  Faithful.  Faithful to their faithful God, who holds fast to his promises made, and is ever faithful to us.  Be faithful to the crucified and risen Lord.  Celebrate all the saints who led you to this state, known and unknown.  And breathe that faith to the next generation, fold their hands in prayer, read the scriptures to them, and encourage them in their faith, that they may say with Peter, Andrew, James and John, Mary and Martha, Lois and Eunice, Alexamenos and everyone from that point onward who has carried the faith of Jesus Christ.

Fidelis.

To read, to know

500 years ago, something happened, and the most important things always happen with someone nailing something to something. 

Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church ,and the reformation began.  And curiously enough, of course, Luther's nailing of the 95 theses to the door of the church were there to remind people of the fact that Jesus was nailed to the cross for their sins. And I say remind, but that's sort of inaccurate.  It was there to tell them.

For the people of the time of Luther, they had the Bible, the language of the church, the means through which Christ had promised to be seen and known, just out of reach.  They went to church, they heard the hymns, the readings, the liturgy, and the preaching, but it was just out of reach for them, for it was all in another language.  They couldn't quite get to it.  And so they would go week in and week out, and in doing so, would find that they didn't know any more about the church, about Jesus, than before they went it.  But this was the way of things, and if you wanted to know more about the faith, well you'd just have to go ahead and ask your local priest, and he'd tell you all about it.

But people are people, and they do what they do, which is that they won't leave well enough alone.  They will add to things nonstop until the thing that they are adding to is sort of beyond ruined.  We don’t tend to leave well enough alone, and usually, even our best of intentions end up being somewhat disastrous, which is funny given how well intentioned we are.  And all we want things to do is to make sense, right? We just want things to make sense, to be current, to be, as it is called ‘good news for modern man.’  But there’s a wonderfully inherent problem with that, which is that modern man, he doesn’t stay modern.  He moves on.  And what seemed cutting edge five hundred years ago seems hopelessly quaint now.

The point I was trying to make on Reformation Sunday was that in older houses, where the toilet is blue, where the sink is pink, where the oven is harvest gold and the fridge is avocado, all those things that seem awfully old and dated, those were the neatest thing in the world when they came out.  Back then, you couldn’t get more modern, more up to date than these pastel fixtures, which, when the trend has passed, look very dated, because they look very much of their time.  They don’t look neat, they don’t look cool, they look locked in time.  And the church in Luther’s time had ended up in that very same sort of fix. They had updated things to keep pace with a certain type of world, then had stopped there.  Forever.

Latin used to make sense for the church.  Latin used to be the language of the world, the language that you could be sure that almost everyone had at least a passing familiarity with.  Most people could at minimum struggle by with it, getting enough out of it to attend worship, to read the scriptures in what is known as the vulgar tongue.  The vulgar tongue, which gives us the vulgate.  Biblia Sacra Vulgata, or the common Holy Bible.  It was the common nature of it that should have made it more useful, but if you imprison it in time, if you lock it down, then all of a sudden, when times change, when people no longer speak, read or write in Latin, the entire thing gets a little dulled down.

But wedded to the concept as they were, this decision to keep the scriptures locked into Latin then had another side effect, which meant that only the clergy really got to read the scriptures, and only the clergy got to interpret doctrine.  And all their doctrines that were counter-scriptural, well, the common people, the vulgar people, they would never know.  And all the decisions that seemed good on paper, yet were miles and miles away form the content of the actual paper, all those things were made to overshadow the truth of what the scriptures actually contained.

That’s why the words that we read on reformation Sunday are so important. When Jesus speaks to the Jews who had believed in him, he tells them ‘if you continue (abide) in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’  To continue, to abide in the word of Christ means that you are going to have to live in it, and it is going to be just like living in the house you’re living in right now. For what do you do in your house? You are on a constant diet of repair, of replacement, of effort with your home in order that you might make it into what you want it to be.  For you know, and I know, that if you are going to live in that home, if it is going to be a house that you are going to want to call a home, you are never done with it.  Far far from it. If you’re going to live in a space, you’re going to have to work on it basically forever, to keep it moving and to keep it going.  And usually, what you are going to end up doing is everything you can to make it more like it was intended to be.  And that usually means peeling things away.

Think of it this way. You know what it is like to move into a home and pull back the linoleum to find hardwood, right? Or to remove the shag to find tile? You know what it is like to remove wallpaper, sheets and sheets of it, to uncover the plaster and paint underneath it? This is what we are talking about here, and it is constant work.  For the reformation didn’t end 500 years ago you know.  The reformation didn’t wrap up back then, and then we’ve been living in the afterglow ever since.  No no, the reformation started then, and it continues to this day.  For this world that we are in still needs to live in that word, still needs to abide in that word, still needs to know the truth, and to be set free from our sins that we commit all the time.  The truth is the number one thing that we forget, of course, and it’s what we need to be reminded of all the time, constantly.  We need to be informed, instructed, and told what we need to keep on going back to. We need to live in that word, and we need to be reminded of it all the time.

In the time of Luther, they couldn’t read the Bible, because they didn’t speak that language.  But in our day, we don’t read it because we don’t feel like it.  We have lots to do, you know, even though we’ve never head more free time in human history than we do right now.  Of all the things we need to take seriously about the reformation, this is a big one. The word of God, the work of Christ, it only really works if we are immersed in it, if we know the truth, and the in knowing the truth, are set free.  The truth about what? About our sin, about the ways in which we have fallen short and continue to fall short.  About how we aren’t anywhere near as good as we want and expect other people to be.  About how we are people who are a long way away from getting things right.  And also the truth about Jesus Christ, the one who took on flesh, and because we refused to dwell in the word of God, he dwelt with us.  He dwelt with us in this world of sin, lived amongst us, and was nailed to the cross, and died to take sins away.  This is not news to you but you absolutely need to be reminded of it. In the same way as Luther didn’t come to make a new church, but to reform the one that was, so too does your faith need to be reformed, daily and weekly. 

How does that happen? You live in God’s word, you abide in it, you continue in it. Then you will know the truth.  About the world, about sin, about life and death. About Christ and his work.

And the truth will set you free.

Sports? On a Sunday?

Some time ago, one of our elders, in an elders' meeting, made the motion that we, as a congregation, should petition the mayor's office to tell him to cancel municipal sports on a Sunday morning. 

I was against the motion.

Now this doesn't mean that I think kids should be playing sports on Sunday instead of going to church, far from it. But I do understand how cause and effect work.  That is, when the decision got made to have sports on a Sunday morning, it was only because they knew people would go to said sports that they became scheduled at that time.  If the municipal sports leagues thought for one minute that nobody would go to the scheduled games because they'd all be at church, then nobody would schedule anything for Sunday morning.  But, as you may have deduced, people weren't showing up for church, so alternatives began to get scheduled, and not the other way around..  This means that for us as Christians, when we look at the world we live in, we have to seriously wrestle with our expectations, and understand that we have missed the order that things come in.  Most of us think that we ought to cancel sports, close shops and businesses, and make sure that there are no other viable options on Sunday morning.  Because the things keeping people from going to church have always been, and will always be, that there are other options that are just too pressing and too important to pass up.

Well, uh, not quite.

The point that I was trying to make on Sunday, which I sincerely hope was picked up on, was that double-booking is both a smaller problem and a bigger problem than we think it is.  Smaller in that there aren't real issues keeping people from going to church, but bigger in that people will always be double-booked, perpetually and forever.  You yourself are double booked twenty four hours a day. 

You and I, and everyone else, we understand that we have a few hours in the day where we have options as to what to do.  We have choices to be made as to what we want to see, what we want to have happen, and what we want to get done.  And when we do this, at every moment there are going to be things vying for our attention.  All sorts of things.  The illustration that I used on Sunday was to pretend that you are tasked with cleaning the bathroom, or emptying the catbox when you get home.  When you get home, and you're standing in the bathroom, you think to yourself that there are possibly other jobs that you could or should be doing.  All of a sudden, any other job, any other responsibility, will seem like a better job to do.  Sorry, dear, I meant to get to the bathroom, but I noticed that dishes needed to be loaded into the dishwasher, that kind of thing.  If you understand this issue on a micro scale, then you'll be able to understand this issue on a macro scale too.  You'll be able to comprehend why it is that people don't head to church on Sunday morning, and why getting rid of alternate plans won't really help.  It won't help because people aren't avoiding the church because their other options are so unskippable, but rather they're avoiding church because, in their estimation, almost anything else would be more pleasurable.

If we cancel absolutely  everything on Sunday mornings, stores closed, businesses shuttered, no sports, kill the radio, kill TV signals, slow down cell service, throttle the internet, people still wouldn't show up if they already aren't.  They would find something else to do.

You can't compete with the pillow, folks.  You can't compete with the pillow, with walking the dog, with cleaning the house, if someone doesn't want to go to something, if they're looking for excuses not to go, then they will 100% find an excuse.  No trouble at all .

So where does that put us?  Well, the Gospel reading from Sunday tells us a lot about that.  For Jesus, being fully God and fully man, he understands what people are all about.  He understands what people are doing, what motivates them, and all that.  And in the parable from Sunday, he tells us what it is that would keep people from the feast the king has scheduled.  What was it that kept them from arriving at the feast?  Well, not too much, to be quite honest.  That is, they paid no attention, went off to their farms, and to their businesses.  They went about their day-to-day, not caring too much about the message that came in, primarily because they had zero interest in going.  Don't care, not going.  It's dull, it's boring, I don't want to dress up, I don't want to buy a gift, these aren't even my friends, all that.  And if you're the king, and you want these people to go, then you're not going to get very far by closing everything else down.  They're not going because they're not interested, not because their day-to-day activities are so fascinating.  That's not the issue.  The issue is that they just don't care.

So, what to do, your highness?  You can't cancel everything.  You've sent the invites, and people aren't interested, so what to do?  Well, this is the predicament that we are in in the modern church . We have invited everyone, we have made ready the space for them, we are preparing them to meet their king and Lord, and they aren't interested.  The pillow is more captivating than the church service where they prepare to meet the Lord their God.  So what to do?  Not cancel sports on Sunday so they have no choice, but rather eventually to have sports on Sunday canceled because no kids are showing up.  That's different, and it's a different take on the issue, on the problem.  You can cancel whatever you want, and people would still sleep in.  What you need to get people thinking is that church is so worth going to that they'd hate to sleep through it.

How is this miracle to be accomplished?  Well, we have to get across the idea that this party is definitely worth going to.  It isn't what you think it is, it's not the boring stuffy affair you're expecting, where everyone who is there hates the event, and cant' wait to leave.  No, it's not that at all.  For in the church, you will hear the most important, most exciting story ever told.  You will hear about the presence of God almighty who took on flesh and dwelt among us, the story of God who decided that because we weren't going to come to him, he was going to come to us.  And when he did, he cut through all the nonsense with which we insulate ourselves, and said to us

'I know and I understand who you are, and what you're all about.  I know that you're only just barely getting away with it, you know.  I know and understand that you're always on a razor's edge, only just getting by, only just escaping with your dignity intact.  I know that if your friends, if your family knew what you really think, if they knew what you were really all about, they'd drop you like a rock.  And you know that every time someone is revealed as being a deviant, being off centre, if they are ever found out to have gone against the narrative, or being strange or odd, then they will be destroyed by the machine.  So you think you're the only one, the only one wearing a mask and getting by, while it's all turmoil and lies underneath.  You think everyone else has it all together, and you're the only one desperately living a lie, one conversation away from being found out.  But I, Jesus tell you that everyone else is living the same lie you are.  There is none righteous, no not one.  Nobody is keeping it together as well as they appear to be.  Nobody has it figured out, nobody's got it cased.  They're all as messed up and confused as you.  So what you need to know is that I am here to give you meaning and purpose.  All those things that you don't like that you did, I'll take that away.  All the things you wish you had done, I will take the guilt upon myself, and nail it to my own palms.  I can give you peace that the world cannot give, for the peace the world gives is very temporary indeed.  It is lies, and it is deceit.  But my peace is eternal, it is permanent, it surpasses all understanding.  For a moment in time, for an hour, for a spell, you will not have to lie, and you will come away strong and powerful, you will come away blessed and forgiven, washed clean and anointed with the spirit.  You will be given purpose, direction, a plan and a future.'

This is the party we are invited to.  It might be worth sending an RSVP, and maybe not sleeping through.

Work it

The best parables always say more about the reader than they do about the cast of characters in them, which is the point.  There's a bit in Monty Python's Life of Brian where Brian is trying to blend in with the manic street preachers, and begins to tell a parable of his own just to get the Roman guards to overlook him, and not notice that he was on the run from them.  As he starts to tell his parable, the people who are listening ask him for the names of the people in the parable,  and Brian says 'it doesn't matter!'  They don't take it too well, and ask for the names again, to which Brian responds 'Simon and Adrian.'  The crowd shouts back 'He's making it up as he goes along!'

Yeah, the names of the people in the parable don't really matter, because the parable isn't about those people, it's about you.  That's why it's vague.  These both aren't real people, but they are also absolutely real people, because they are you and me.  They're both everyone and no-one all at the same time.  And the parable about laborers in the vineyard is absolutely no exception.  Think for a moment about that parable, about those who were hired by the owner of the vineyard, and what they agreed to.  The first of the day were called into service and promised a denarius, that is, a day's wage for doing a day's work.  But the harvest was plentiful, and the workers were few as they tend to be, so the vineyard owner recruited more people to go out to work in the vineyard.  At the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hour.  And everyone agreed that what they were being paid was fair.

When quitting time came around, everyone lined up to get what they had contracted for.  The last guys to arrive, the ones who had only worked for one hour, each got a denarius, or a full day's wage for their work.  When those who had worked all day saw this, they got all excited, got all worked up, got all thrilled, and thought to themselves about all the money they were going to make.  After all, if someone gets a full day's pay for an hour's work, then how many days will you get paid for for an actual full day's work?  That's a heck of a question, and they were no doubt rubbing their hands together in anticipation.  And when the time came for the pay to be given to those who had gotten there first, they were paid.

One Denarius.

Now, that's exactly what they had contracted for, it was what they had agreed to, it was what they had said was fair, and it was what they were given, right on the money.  That sounds good, right?  Well, in this case, fair seems unfair, or to be more accurate, the unfairness that we saw last week seems really unfair now, to the point that those who had been there all day, working all day, were upset that they had earned the same denarius as those who had just arrived.  And so, they complained.

Their complaints, though well understood and duly noted, unfortunately run aground at one particular point.  They run aground on the virtue and understanding that they did actually get more than the late arrivals of one particular thing, and no, it wasn't the money.  It was the work.  They got to work for more time.

On the surface, that seems bad, right?  Wow, what a thrill, they had to work eight times as long for the same wage?  That seems bad.  But that only seems bad if you understand work as something to be avoided under pretty much all circumstances.  If you see work as something to be steered around, avoided, to be thrown beneath the bus of your own sloth and gluttony, then work is the thing you do to get the money.  But hopefully, you have found yourself in a situation, in an understanding, where the work you do is worth doing, and worth doing well.  If it's not, if you're essentially like a surly teenager just putting in the hours doing the absolute minimum to not get fired and cashing your paycheque at the end of the week then who's the sucker?

When we were younger, we all wanted an easy job.  A job where we could surf the internet all day and do as little as possible while still being paid.  it sounded great, right?  Show up for eight hours, and then go home, and when you get home, you.....surf the internet some more? After a year of this, give or take, something bizarre happened to most of us, where we sorted out that the job we had, if we were going to spend eight hours a day at it anyway, that job was going to have to be something that was worth doing, because no amount of money is worth you throwing your life away eight hours at a time for your most productive years.  And then you realize that the work you do has great potential in it, to do amazing, worthwhile things that will imbue those hours with meaning, that they might not be wasted, but might be productive.  And no, this isn't a story where I tell you to do what you love and the money will follow, because that's not really true.  Ain't nobody paying me for playing with slot cars, I tell you that.  Except when I bring them to youth group.  Then they do.  But beyond that, it's not a matter of doing what you love and the money will follow necessarily, and those who say that are in a really cushy, really easy position where if everyone had their sort of job, the economy would collapse.

For most everyone, you have a job that you have to work at, and you can't afford to just quit and take off backpacking through Europe for a couple of summers.  It's a job that you can stand, but likely not one that you like that much.  So you have some choices with the work that you do.  You can either mope through it, and survive each day, looking forward to the money only, or you can work through each day as an opportunity to partially define yourself through the output and the work that you do, to do it well, and to realize that you are able to do a job worth doing instead of sitting on the couch watching the price is right.

You know, if you're going to be working all day anyway.

And this brings us full circle back to the parable again, and the idea, the notion that the first men who arrived to work that day got to do more work than those who got there later.  No, not had to work, but got to work.  That is, they were allowed and welcomed to do more work than their tardy counterparts.  This point is cemented later on where it says that the men who were found later on were found standing idle, not going anywhere or doing anything of note. So they were recruited into the service in the vineyard.  They all got the denarius, but some of the workers weren't standing out in the marketplace all day.  They were working.  They were changing the land and having it change them.  They were defining that day through effort, through struggle, through achievement, and through work and through output.  For you need to know something about the beginning of everything, as well as the end.  From the beginning of creation, work was something that humans were supposed to do, were created to do.  They were made to work, they were designed for it, and placed in a space where they could do good, meaningful work.  Work wasn't a punishment for sin, work tied to survival was.  By the end of the scriptures, even in paradise, after the end of everything else, there is still the tree of life, still a garden, and still crops for people to bring in, though the curse of work to earn is gone.  And that's what we need to understand, which is that the work isn't tied to the denarius.  For us, as Christians, given the work that Christ has done on our behalf, the earning is done, it is accomplished, it is finished.  We don't get any more pay based on how long we've been working out in the field, and I hope last week's sermon really served to get that across.  It's not about the denarius, it's about the work itself.  It's not that you have to work longer for the same pay, you get to work longer.

We are a people who are desperate for meaning in our lives, and we are living in a world in which we are constantly told to define ourselves by our consumption; our starbucks orders, our furniture, the car we drive and the clothes we wear.  We are people who are less made up by the balance in our bank accounts, and more composed of the accumulation of things that we have .  That's what we have been told to define ourselves by, brands and logos.  But we all know that deep down, we are defined

by work . As redeemed people of Christ, we are defined by his work for us on the cross, and now that the denarius is earned, we get to also define ourselves by the work that we do in his field and in his kingdom.  For God wants us to do quite a few things.  He has in mind for us to accomplish certain things in his vineyard, he wants us love our neighbors as ourselves, to give to those who ask, to protect the orphans and widows in their distress, to stand for righteousness and faith and charity even and especially when it hurts.  He wants us to forsake sorcery and fornication, to flee immorality, and to be at work in his kingdom.  And he knows something important about us, which is to understand that this work is not punishment, for us as Christian people, as humans striving for meaning in a corporate world governed by purchase and brands, we are offered an identity not defined by what we are sold, but by what we do, output not consumption.  And when you look at the work that Christ would have you do, you'll understand something else, which is that observing his laws and commandments, repenting where you have gone wrong, and rejoicing in what you have done right, your every day is imbued with meaning, with purpose and direction.  You're not lost in a corporate morass, you're not fumbling in the darkness, you're guided by the light of Christ and being encouraged by his grace.  It's not there to punish you, or tie you to earnings through your output, rather to encourage you to embrace the work, to hold fast to the challenge, and to realize that the work itself is the blessing.

That's why Jesus wants you to be at work, because it's good for you.  Not so you'll earn more, for everyone receives the same reward through faith in Christ.  The work itself, properly considered in the meaning and blessing it can give, itself is the reward.  This parable is about those workers, of course, but it is also about you. 

Fair

I present to you a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that I remember fondly from my own childhood.  It spoke to me a great deal when I was younger, and hopefully you'll appreciate it now.

As you get older, as you have kids of your own, the strip of Calvin and Hobbes has a way of switching over.  It worked when you were a child, enjoying the many exploits, real and imaginary, of Calvin and his tiger, but when you grow up, when you have kids of your own, you tend to find a new layer in the mix.  You tend to enjoy the interactions and the personalities of Calvin's parents.

Now, that's a treat.  It's fun to watch that happen, to see something from your childhood become new and interesting, to find a new appeal in it, and the strip above is something that ages really well.  That is, as a kid you identify heavily with Calvin, with his desire to have things be fair, and to come to the conclusion that things are unfair, and yet stacked against you.  However, as a parent, the answer of the world not being fair isn't dismissive, or trite, it's actually massively important.  I'll explain.

Calvin, as the strip will show you, lives the life of an average child.  He has a treehouse, plays outside, gets into mischief, has friends, goes to school, has a tiger whose company he enjoys greatly, that kind of thing.   Here are some things he doesn't have.

-A Job.
-Responsibilities
-Bills to pay
-A family to feed
-Anything to do beyond just what he feels like.


I understand that from his perspective, Calvin feels as though things are phenomenally unfair, but things actually aren't fair, but it's in the other direction.  Growing up, when we were told to help out with one chore in a while, that kind of thing, and it always seems horribly unfair, that sort of thing. . What we didn't realize was that it was amazingly, spectacularly unfair, but unfair in our favor.  Doing the dishes is a pretty small price to pay in return for every single need being met in our entire lives.  We were living an existence of super abundance every day that there was, but we still found time to insist that things were unfair because we were expected to help out every once in a while. And had we been thinking about it, had Calvin been thinking about it, we would have realized that the very last thing in the world that we would want is for things to actually be fair.

This brings us to the Gospel reading from Sunday.  The reading in which Peter asks Jesus a sensible question, 'Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive him.  Up to seven times?'  That question on its surface is actually, even for us humans, possibly overstating the case.  That is, if someone sins against you, and you forgive them, are you supposed to forgive them more than once?  From a worldly perspective, we would say no.  We would say that forgiving them more than once is a sucker's game, it's for mugs only.  Why would you want to forgive someone who keeps on going back to you and keeps on messing up.  Surely, after once, you can sort of cut that person off, and deal with them as a sinner and a tax collector.  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.  Fool me seven times, we're off the rails now.

 

We all remember that bit from George W Bush, and though he's largely considered to be a figure of fun now, his line about not being fooled again sort of has some perspective when it comes to this Gospel reading.  Surely, Jesus doesn't expect us to be suckers, does he? He doesn't expect us to do things that would be bad or difficult for us, does he?  Because the people we don't forgive, those people don't deserve forgiveness, right?  

Well, I have some bad news for you, fellow Christian.  I have some bad news for you as fellow Christians who are going to have to hear something from the scriptures that you don't want to hear.  You're going to have to hear the following words.

Forgive us our trespasses 

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

That's from the Lord's prayer you know.  Straight from the horses' mouth.   And in the Lord's prayer, Christ makes it clear to us that we need to forgive one another if we expect to be forgiven.  Of course, our usual understand of prayer is that it is a list of things that we expect God to do for us, but there is a separate aspect from prayer, and that is that you will find in it things that you expect God to change about you.  To soften your heart.  To conform you to his will, and to make you more likely, and more eager to forgive.  And lest we skip over that vital couplet in the Lord's prayer, think on this.  The next two verses in the Gospel of Matthew after the Lord's prayer are as follows

If you forgive others who sin against you, your Heavenly Father

will forgive you.  But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father

will not forgive your sins.

Gee, how nice.  We look at that passage, and we realize that in the Christian faith, forgiveness is not optional.  Peter thought it would be simple enough to say seven times of forgiveness, but Jesus ratchets it up to seventy times seven.  And are you counting?  Likely you're not.  That number is so large it might as well be ten thousand talents, a number so big as to be impossibly, laughably huge.  And you, as a Christian, are expected to go to all the effort of forgiving the same person who wrongs you seventy times seven times?  Really?  That's not fair.

Trust me, the last thing in the universe you want is fair.  Oh sure, you may kick and scream and beg that the situation was fair, but you don't want that.  You have no desire for fair.  What you want is the situation you have, in which things are unfair, but they are unfair in your favor.  Think of the debts in the Gospel reading, the debts the way they are listed have the servant owing ten thousand talents. Ten thousand talents is around seven billion dollars in today's money, which is a chunk of change.  I know the servant said that he would pay it all back, but how on earth was he going to do that if he was staring down seven billion dollars.  None of us will ever see that much money in our entire lives, it is impossible to even contemplate.  The pit that this servant had dug for himself was so big that he was never going to get out of it.  There was no way he was ever going to work hard enough, try hard enough, get another job to pay it all back.  It would be impossible, laughable in the highest order. That was what the first servant owed.  He owed an astronomical amount, so high as to be impossible.  And what was he owed?  A hundred days wages.  Now, the amount that he was owed, rather than the one he was owing, it's still big, don't get me wrong.  It's still an amount that should be paid back.  It's still an amount that someone would be right in demanding, of course, if he hadn't just been forgiven a debt that would have crippled his own family for generations.  Given that that's the case, the first servant, who had been forgiven an amount so big nobody can really imagine it, should have forgiven the small amount he was owed from his fellow servant.  But he did not.  He wanted things to be fair.  It would unfair for his fellow servant not to pay him back.  If things were fair, however, and he could throw his fellow servant in jail until the debt be repaid, then it stands to reason that that would be what would happen to him as well except for much longer, since the debt is much larger.

You see, that's how it goes.  We want things to be fair, but that's not what we really mean.  We want things to be unfair in our favor.  We want to collect what is owed to us, but to have our own debts canceled.  We want our sins to be forgiven by God, but we want to hold against others what they have done to us.  We say that it's not about what we want, it's about what's fair, but it really, really isn't.  For if things were fair, if everyone got paid what they owed, if the system worked the way we say we wanted it to work, we'd be in a hole so deep we would never get out of it.  If you take seriously not just way the Bible tells you to behave, but also how you think other people should behave, then you'll realize that you're seriously behind where you should be, and getting further behind all the time.  Essentially, every day that goes by you're doing more wrong than right, you're withdrawing from an account that gets closer and closer to overdrawn every day that there is, because you're making more withdrawls than deposits.  It's getting out of control, which is why fair isn't what you want.  

What you want is Jesus.

In the cross of Christ, you see the most unfair thing in all of creation, the godly dying for the ungodly, the righteous for the unrighteous.  You see Jesus Christ, true God and true man, dying for the sins of the whole world, yours included.  You see the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, the lamb of God who took on flesh, dwelt among us, and died for our salvation.  This is what it means to be a Christian person, which is to have a massive debt wiped clean, paid for in blood by the only person who could possibly afford to pay it. It's unfair for sure, completely, ludicrously unfair that that debt should be absorbed by another person.

But it's not about fair, you know.  It's about grace.  And Grace is what God provides, because the last thing in all of creation that you want is fair.