September 25, 2011

Proper 21: Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

We all like to be insiders, to be one of the in crowd, to be popular, or at least able to fit in.  Many desire it, but never feel like they’ve quite arrived.  The adoptee, perhaps, or the immigrant; the disabled or the disfigured; the racially different, and certainly the gay or lesbian person, can all feel the cold wind of exclusion—even the pretender who’s outed wearing a knock-off polo shirt, according to the style code of our more affluent suburbs, with their compulsory laid-back chic.  If we find ourselves on the outer, one natural reaction is to find a ‘new inner’ to which we can belong.  The prostitutes and tax collectors mentioned in today’s gospel were social pariahs, but they no doubt flocked together with plenty of gossipy contempt to spread around them about the respectable people who excluded them.

Then along comes someone different, like John the Baptist, or Jesus himself.  The religious authorities couldn’t quite categorize John the Baptist –he’d had the prophetic cachet, but he was critical not just of sinners but of everyone, including them and the religious system that had advanced them.  So they weren’t able to give Jesus a straight answer about John the Baptist.  They fudged it—he wasn’t quite their sort of chap, but then the crowd they had to contend with had gone out after him.  As for John the Baptist himself, he hadn’t cared—he knew that he was God’s by grace and by calling, and the rest didn’t matter.  Jesus was different too: an outsider from nowhere special, a bachelor like John, a wandering preacher and healer, a bit of a wild man straight out of the Old Testament like John, who marched to his own drummer.  The system didn’t do well with Jesus either, or with the earliest Church—a state of affairs we see reflected in the Gospels wherever the religious leaders give Jesus a hard time.  This echoes the hard time that first generation Christians were receiving in the synagogue.

Neither John the Baptist nor Jesus were interested in playing to the crowd or courting favor, but of course neither were they angry young men who gravitated to irritating causes and made nuisances of themselves.  The trouble they made was far more substantial and quite indiscriminate.  As Hans Kung once put it, Jesus was too religious for the crowds and too impious for the religious leaders, too political for the Romans and not political enough for the Zealots.  But he wasn’t a crank, or a weirdo part of one.  Like John the Baptist, his identity came from the God of Israel’s covenant, and his bearings from the Old Testament.

Looking back to our Exodus passage today, the rock which Moses struck in the desert, and the water which flowed from it, became symbols of Christ in the New Testament—Christ makes present the God who nurtured and cajoled and guided Israel through the desert and, like his Heavenly Father, Jesus will not give up on Israel despite its grumbling and disobedience and missing the point.  The psalmist today insists on repeating this past faithfulness of God to the next generation, telling the story of how God cared for the people even when they were resentful and unresponsive in the desert.  So too John the Baptist and Jesus ministered God’s confronting patience to their generation, giving them chance after chance to get the point.  And of course there was resistance.  John the Baptist was not cut out to be one of Herod’s courtiers—he failed his job interview quite spectacularly.  Likewise, Jesus was not likely to be invited to the Scribe School and given a scholarship.  He had seen through the religion of the Temple and was going to tear it down and rebuild it, beyond sacrifice and programmatic exclusion.  This brings us to the heart of today’s Gospel.

The Temple stood at the heart of a sacrificial cult sustaining national identity.  Like the rest of human religiousness it preserved a story, a set of prohibitions and rituals for maintaining order and unity, identity and worth, and there were always going to be some who were in and some who were out.  All religion is like this.  But our God is not like this.  The God of the Old Testament, from whom we hear in Exodus today, chose the friendship of slaves and riff-raff in Egypt, and made a nation of them, protecting them from themselves by the law, imaginatively challenging them by prophets, and stretching them with divine wisdom.

But as with religions everywhere, the gift became the possession, the grace became the pedigree, and God’s precious law became the doorway bouncer guarding the door to religious insidership.  The religious leaders of Jesus’ time were no different from others in a sociologically similar position, whether in a tribe, a society, a nation, an empire—or in a Church.  They policed the boundary, making sure that the right sorts of people were properly honored, while the punters were kept in their place.  But then along came John and staged his major religious events well away from the Temple, yet at one of Israel’s old sacred spots, inviting the great and the small, the insiders and the outsiders, to a common repentance and a new kind of insidership.  Likewise, Jesus with today’s parable of two sons challenged the insider/outsider dynamic.  The son with his eye on saying and doing the right thing is not the one who steps up, but the slacker who later thinks better of it.  Here is yet another of Jesus provocative parabolic challenges, unsparingly naming the sense of religious entitlement that actually stands far from God’s heart and God’s will, while declaring acceptable anyone who opens their heart to God and seeks forgiveness.

The tax collectors and the prostitutes provide a shocking illustration.  I’ve scarcely ever got away unscathed whenever I’ve mentioned sex or money from the pulpit, yet Jesus shamelessly confronts the guardians of religious insidership with these most flagrant examples of religious outsidership, and declares the tables to be turned.  Jesus is saying that the rules of human insidership are not God’s rules.  God’s rules are more in keeping with the inclusiveness of Israel’s covenant, and with the burning heart for souls that we see in John the Baptist and, indeed, in Jesus’ own suffering solidarity with all the unloved victims and outsiders of history—only matched, of course, by his love and forgiveness directed at all the insiders who finally expelled and silenced him: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

How could Jesus manage to say this to his persecutors, by the way?  Because he knows how these systems work.  He knows that they run us more than we run them.  He knows that our need to belong can make scoundrels of the best of us, and that religious insidership is one way that human beings hide their fear and their frailty.  Jesus prefers to undercut the whole business, and create an inside with no outside, a commonwealth with no borders, a temple with no sacrifices deemed necessary, a city not made with hands: no typical human edifice of belonging and self-assurance, then, but God’s own kingdom of love, of second chances (and third ones).  And full of unlikely friends, too, of awkward people who we’re learning to like.

Friends, this is the Church of which you and I are a part.  It is a Church that has never been perfect, that never seems to get it entirely right, but its existence is a necessary sign to the world and to us that God likes human company, that God is profligate in welcoming us and is helping us to get along.  Anglicanism is of course a basket case in terms of getting along nowadays, but God seems not to be finished with us, sending us saints like Rowan Williams and Katherine Jefferts-Schori to show us what is still possible.

Paul reminds us of the issue here in our epistle today with the famous Christ hymn of Philippians 2, in which Christ’s own loving intention from eternity is at last extended to us, and with this humble handing over of himself reaches even to our worst fears and self-deceptions when he goes to the cross.  The boundaries of Temple and empire, of religion and society, close against him, and he becomes the ultimate outsider.  But then God raises him up, and gives him that name above every name—God turns every table, bursts open every prison of pain and exclusion, picks every pocket of its defensively hoarded loot and gives us something better instead.  And all of this is told to us by Paul for the sake of the Church, which yet again seems to be doing the religious things and missing God’s point.  The Philippians are being gently, firmly, and, by the looks of it, episcopally pulled into line here, with Jesus’ example meant to undo their anxious big-noting of themselves, their exclusiveness, and their self-justification at the expense of receiving their justification from God by grace through faith.  Friends, let there be no mistake: Church is not an add-on to Christianity, it is not optional software that comes with the Christian operating system.  Rather, our life together in the Church is a necessary environment for learning the gospel, for coming to share God’s heart, for celebrating God’s creation, and for becoming insiders to God’s story.  All of which means unlearning all the games of human insidership.  Amen.