"Remember Rest" - Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9 & 12-20 and Saint Matthew 21:33-46

Probably few of you remember the date August 28, 2011 but something happened out in a far western suburb where Billy Graham no less went to college that spoke volumes about people’s priorities.

ESPN2 was going to begin their coverage of high school football for their fall programming line-up. There would be a complete slate of games on Saturday but at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning Wheaton Warrenville South High School was scheduled by the network to kick off its season against Glenbard West. What surprised me most was the non-reaction of almost everybody involved. First, while I thought I remembered the event, I had to hunt all over the internet to find an article to make sure that this really happened and it was not something I dreamed up. I finally found one on The Daily Herald site where I was surprised at how little reaction everyone gave to the event.

“This is nothing new for Wheaton churches,” said Rev. Don McLaughlin of St. Michael Catholic Church. “Our only expectation is that they attend Saturday evening or Sunday evening masses at a neighboring parish. There are plenty of opportunities to fulfill their obligations.” McLaughlin said it would be ideal if the leagues did not play on Sunday morning. However, that's unrealistic.

“The churches would prefer to see adjustments to the schedule to allow them to attend church services on Sunday morning,” he said. “But that is highly unlikely with the number of kids and teams that play in the park district leagues.”

[Allison Tirone, high school coordinator at First Presbyterian Church in Wheaton,] talked to other youth leaders at area churches about making a formal push to curtail Sunday sports. But most people told her that effort likely would be wasted.

“It feels strange to me, even in a town like Wheaton where there is a high percentage of active Christians, that nobody has done anything about it,” she said. “We are running into more and more coaches who are not relenting at all.” [Marco Santana, “High school football game clashes with Sunday churchgoers.” The Daily Herald. 26 August 2011.]

For a minute you’re going to wonder whether I am not a cross between at 2011 “Tea Party” conservative and a ‘60's “take to the streets in protest” radical but here’s an idea for all those Christian parents and their “student athletes (some of whom just may be stars!) – don’t play, don’t go, and most of all, don’t be a booster of the program with your cash. Keep your money firmly planted in your pocket and you’ll see how fast those unrelenting coaches relent.

It’s a almost quaint idea, I know, but other’s have bravely stood by their convictions. I wonder what the parents and their children would think if someone found an old copy of the movie Chariots of Fire.

Do you remember it? It was based on the true story of Eric Liddell, a Cambridge University student, born in China of Scottish missionary parents, who sees his running as a way of glorifying God before returning to China to work as a missionary. He tells his sister “I believe that God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

However, while boarding the boat to Paris for the Olympics, Liddell learns that the heat for his 100 meter race will be on a Sunday. He refuses to run – despite strong pressure from the Prince of Wales and the British Olympic committee – because his Christian convictions prevent him from running on the Sabbath. He runs instead in the 400 meter on Saturday and wins but I wonder how puzzled people would look at such a stand today. “Just run!” people told him them and would tell him now.

Or, Sandy Koufax, a devout Jew and arguably one of the greatest pitchers the game of baseball has ever known, who decided that he could not pitch in game one of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. In spite of enormous pressure from fans and the media Koufax was true to his convictions and did not pitch. “Just pitch.” people told him then and would tell him now in even more strident voices now.

Since it makes no difference to the team it doesn’t get much notice but White Sox broadcaster Steve Stone, also does not work the games, no matter how important they might be, when they fall on a Jewish high holiday.

“So what?” You might and probably are saying to yourself. But in front of us today are something called the Ten Commandments and if you think to yourself this is about the Sabbath one, you’re only half right. It is also about the first one. To put this directly if you choose football over church, football is your god. If you choose running over church, running is your god. If you choose baseball over church, baseball is your god. If you choose anything over church, it is your god. I wish I could sweeten this up a bit but I can’t because, and listen to me very carefully here, the Ten Commandments, are a gift, not a burden. Not only do they give us great guidelines for staying out of trouble and in some cases out of the clink they invite us to take some time out to consider things that are really important.

But, observes Dr. Michael Lindvall of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York:

A lot of people see any moral regulation, the Ten Commandments included, as being an artificial structure designed to limit their choices and constrict their right to have a good time. Many people have it in their heads that moral rules were made up by repressed religious types to throw a wet blanket on everybody’s good times so that everybody else will be as dour and joyless as they are.

Some of this cultural antipathy to moral rules is just a knee-jerk reaction stimulated by the fact that none of us likes to be told what not to do, especially when we want to do it. [Michael L. Lindvall, “Thank God for Some Rules.” Sermon preached at the Brick Presbyterian Church of New York City. 5 October 2008.]

Except, it seems, by unrelenting coaches who can hold a hold an entire community’s faith life hostage to their wills.

When that happens we become like the tenants Jesus told us about in today’s parable who thought that the vineyard was theirs and nobody was going to tell them what to do with it. God comes and to put it quite directly, gets not just rejected but killed. It happens whenever God get’s put on a shelf somewhere next to other stuff to be taken down when you need a little help from the Almighty and put back when you don’t.

But the good news is God keeps coming. God never gives up. Shunted aside, pushed around, kicked under the carpet, and put in a closet, God keeps coming, until it becomes evident that this stone which keeps getting rejected needs to be the chief cornerstone of your life. What is amazing to me is that God still keeps coming, keeps trying, keeps working at saving you and me, even while we are busy engaging ourselves in other things.

And this is true now more than ever. You can take time out and rest in the Lord in more ways than I can mention.

No longer is the 11 o’clock hour on Sunday morning our high holy moment. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters are way ahead of us on this. There are Saturday evening services in most parishes. And, on any given Sunday you can worship somewhere in Chicago from 7:30 A.M. until 10:00 P.M. Yes, there is a church in my neighborhood that has a 9 P.M. mass – it’s in Polish but...

And, you can even sit down any hour of any day and quiet yourself, relax, and watch a sermon in your pajamas from this place on our website or, and this is most amazing, some of the great churches with some of the greatest preachers, in the country. But you have to do it. You have to say Christ is important enough to you to take some time out of your week to make a place for him.

You have to put what you are doing down, rest, and somehow, someway, draw close to him. What you’ll discover, when you do is that like Eric Liddell, Sandy Koufax, and all those who refused to let someone else tamper with their “rest in the Lord” is that Christ will again be your chief cornerstone and what he does, in even those few moments of rest, will be amazing in your eyes and heart. Amen.

©The Rev’d Dr. David C. Nelson
25 September 2011

"Turn, Then, and Live" - Saint Matthew 21:23-32

Every one of in this room this morning knows someone for whom “high drama” is a way of life. Let’s hope you are not that person. And, if you are, all I can say to you is, “stop it. You are driving your friends crazy. While you may never have high blood pressure, you are a carrier.”

If you are on the receiving end of one of these relationships, you know what I mean. A outing to the Lyric Opera requires more preparation than an excursion to the Australian outback. A simple drive somewhere carries with it more machinations then could be imagined. “Should we take your car or mine? You’re not going to take that route are you? It’s out of the way! Should I bring a jacket, just a sweater, what do you think? Are we going to be long?” By the time you’ve answered more questions than are asked at a Presidential press conference, you look at you watch and discover you’re running late and the only thing you want to do is yell, “Get in the car!”

What makes these kinds of encounters difficult is that you never seem to know where you stand. You have to process questions that you couldn’t have possibly thought of. You have to deal with matters that, frankly, do not matter.

That is why I have always loved the first son in today’s parable. When his dad asks him if it was his intention to work in the field he says, “No.” Not, “maybe.” Not, “I’m not sure.” He says, ‘No. Not happening. No way.” While the father may have been taken aback at least he knew where he stood. Number One Son is taking the day off. Period. End of story.

Number Two Son is one of those crazy-makers. He says, “Sure dad, I’ll help!” And then he begins to have second thoughts. Maybe there is an invitation from his friends to go look at the fall colors? Maybe his allergies begin to act up? Maybe he was just going to lie down on the couch for a minute before work and that minute turned into a five hour nap. Who knows what happened, all we know is that the kid his dad was counting on, never showed.

We could easily turn Jesus’ parable into a “morality tale” on the importance of keeping your word. Of letting “your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no.’” as Jesus also said. And that is a very important thing. It is what your own personal authority is built on. Can people trust your word? That’s a pretty important thing and it is crucial to maintaining a relationship. If you are like a willow in the wind, changing direction at the slightest breeze, people are going to stop trusting you. They’ll stop asking you. Sometimes that might be a good thing because they won’t ask you to do things you didn’t want to do in the first place, but sometimes you’ll miss out because they won’t ask you to something that turns out to be spectacular. That is not entirely what Jesus parable is about. Put in context it is about something far greater.

The setting of today’s gospel is important. It occurs a couple of days after Palm Sunday. Jesus had not only ridden into the city in a populist spectacle and driven the money changers out of the temple but made the audacious claim that the temple, God’s house, should be a house of prayer for all people. Not just those who could pony up the money for sacrifice or two, God’s house should be open to everybody.

The authorities do what authority figures do best, they ask Jesus, what right he has to say such things because in their eyes he didn’t have any. He hadn’t been to the best theological schools, and instead of teaching the Torah, or we might say, theology, he told stories that were downright earthy. Worse than that he touched sick people and lepers, making himself unclean. He was seen in public with women, some of whom didn’t have the best reputations, and men who weren’t much better. Jesus didn’t have any authority in their eyes because he wasn’t of the right pedigree, running with the right crowds. He had no right, no right what-so-ever, to tell them how they should be running their temple. And you know what? In their eyes, they were right. Jesus was the son who looked like he was saying “no” to God. He had to be because they were the ones who were saying “Yes.” They were the ones keeping God’s laws, obeying God’s commandments, not associating with the wrong people. He couldn’t have any authority from God because, in their eyes, he ever seemed to be acting the way God wanted any of God’s followers to act.

Here is the key to understanding this parable and the key to understanding Jesus. There are those who say yes to God, even yes to Jesus, and when you look at their lives, you just can’t tell. They don’t reach out to others, they don’t help those less fortunate than they are, they are too busy building temples that may take your breath away but that serve only them. No outsider need apply. No outsider dare apply. They are like the second son.

But look at Jesus’ followers. The one who, then and now, were and are really following him. They are the ones who like that first son, took another look at their lives, another look at what they were doing, another look at what they have and said, “If I am going to be any use, I had better get to work.”

I had this revelation Friday night at Park View’s spaghetti dinner. A very nice, very kind, very wonderful woman, who I have known for years was telling me about the newly rebuilt church she belongs to and how when she saw it her breath was just taken away. I felt a little bad. Boy, I thought, is must be great to have a nice new building where everything is pristine and in its place.

But then you started showing up for the dinner. You and your children. Some of you, let me tell you quite frankly, would not be welcomed in that Taj Mahal of churches. Your skin is the wrong color, yes, still segregation still being practiced in church if not in law, in attitude. Your income may not match that of members who can afford BMW’s and the big homes. Our sexual orientation is not acceptable to this “straight” and narrow crowd. And the pun there is intended. And your kids certainly would not be allowed to run rampant in their newly appointed fellowship hall.

But remember this, the Taj Mahal is a tomb. It’s a mausoleum. You don’t have to go to India to see one. Check out Queen of Heaven in Hillside or All Saints’ mausoleums in Des Plaines. They are stunning! Marble floors, marble walls, lots of flowers, beautiful furniture and, most of all, quiet. Quiet, because all of the people in there are dead.

Now think back to Friday night. Our fellowship hall is not going to win any awards from the people at Architectural Digest. In fact, this church and school barely holds itself together physically with spit, chewing gum, and bailing wire. And I don’t even want to think about our finances! But last Friday night, and every day during the week, this place was and is alive. Friday the place was packed with adults having a great time and children running this way and that having the time of their lives.

I thought to myself. If I had a choice between serving a church that was breathtaking but whose goal was to keep everything “white, bright, and polite” or a church that was, to put it mildly, well-worn but alive with a rainbow of people, I’d take the rainbow. Given the choice between tomb or tumult, I’ll take the tumult because it is there that Christ lives.

Christ’s authority came not because he was above the fray but in the fray. His authority came because he was willing to enter into life and live it fully. He authority came in welcoming those whom others would not. And finally his authority came because he broke open carefully constructed tombs and brought life. If you see the Taj Mahal, to put it directly, Christ ain’t there because it’s a tomb. But where ever you experience life at it’s fullest and most sweet, there Christ is.

He’s with those of you who have been placed at the back of the line with the tax-collectors and the sinners. He’s with all of you who have had the experience of turning to Christ and finding life. He is with all of you who have found in Christ a new heart and a new spirit. He is with all of you who have ever found yourself cast out, welcoming you with a warm embrace. And most importantly, he is with those of you who, at first said, “No” but then thought a little, stewed a little, even fussed and fumed a little, but who then accepted what Christ had to offer.

You are the ones who are doing the will of your heavenly Father. You are the ones who really know the love and life Christ offers and you are the ones who will march proudly with Jesus into the kingdom of God, right there with the rest of us sinners, who have turned to Christ heard him say “yes” to us and really mean it. Amen.

25 September 2011

"Remembrance and Reconciliation" - Saint Matthew 18:21-35

Today we will begin a week of remembrance for a day nobody over the age of ten will ever forget. A day that dawned with blue skies almost from coast to coast. A perfect day for flying that turned into one of the darkest days in our collective memory as a nation.

There is no use reviewing the events of September 11. The news media will do that for us – re-searing images into our brains that have left a scar on us all. That’s is one of the difficulties of living in an era of instant communication where everybody who has a cell phone is armed with a camera for capturing almost every possible moment from the mundane to the unforgettable. Those who heard about the attacks on Pearl Harbor could only imagine the horror, we saw it live. And we will never forget it.

One year later Father Sakowicz and I planned a service of remembrance at Saint Mary of the Woods. It was extremely well attended but one funeral director friend of mine gave me a little static when he heard about our plans. “I don’t think I’m ready to be reconciled to what happened yet.” He was a fire fighter too and I understood his position completely. I reminded him of the subtle difference between reconciliation and remembrance. We were going to ask people to stop and remember what happened. Both Father Sakowicz and I knew that remembering would be easy but that reconciliation, if it came at all, would be a long way down the road.

Some things take time. And the problem with today’s gospel is that for centuries preachers have been corrupting Jesus’ words and telling us that if someone hurts you, you should forgive them, and you both will be the better for it. After all, isn’t that what Jesus said? Well, yes and no. He told us that we should be forgiving and then told us a parable that has a very unforgiving ending.

Peter gets us started off on the right foot with an answer to his own question that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Seven times is a lot of forgiveness. It’s a whole lot more than we have been taught to dish out. “An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.” “Once burned, a lesson learned.” “Never give one person two chances.” “Don’t get mad, get even.” That is pretty much how our society views things so Peter was way ahead of the curve when he came up with the pretty high number of seven. But Jesus ups the anti and says, in perhaps the worse translation in the history of scripture, “No, seventy-seven times.” What Jesus really said was, “No I tell you but rather seventy times seven times.” Actually, since all of us can do this math, we know that this turns out to be 490 times.
The problem with coming up with any kind of number, be it one, seven, seventy-seven, or 490, is that it invites us to still keep score. That is the problem with the forgiven servant he always thinks he can settle the score. Jesus must have drew some laughs with his first outlandish statement. Almost like a joke. A guy owes his boss the equivalent of the national debt and he thinks some way he can score enough bucks to pay it off. But his boss tells him, “Forget it. It’s only money. You, your wife and kids can go on their way.” Cue the laughter.

Then, cue the horror as this same guy goes out and grabs a friend who owes him about “a-buck-and-a-quarter” wrestles him to the ground and when he can’t come up with it in a split second has his debtor thrown into the clink. It was not a pretty sight and I think what Jesus is asking us to do here is contrast the beauty of someone who forgives sins with the absolute ugliness of someone who doesn’t. Forgiveness is a beautiful thing, retribution is not. Forgiveness inspires us to be better people, retribution does not.

I have been reading a lot of stories this week about how those who lost loved ones in the unmerited attacks of 9|11 have coped with their grief. Some have started charities, some have entered into community work, some have started support groups. The scars are still there and they are deep but people press on.

Two person who really pressed on were Phyllis Rodriguez and Aicha el-Wafi. Rodrigu ez’s son, Greg, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. el-Wafi’s son is Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring with the 19 hijackers of plotting the attacks. After a period of time, his mother requested a meeting with the victims, to say how horrified she too was by her son’s actions and to seek forgiveness. Rodriguez said, “The day I met Aicha was the day that changed my life because it changed my direction emotionally. Meeting Aicha gave me strength and took away my anger and bitterness. It brought out the generosity in me and I felt better for it.”

I want us all to be very careful here. Forgiveness does not mean making excuses. Forgiveness does not mean that there are no consequences for behavior that is unbelievably cruel. We didn’t let Moussaoui go free and give him flying lessons. Like the servant who had been so cruel in Jesus’ parable we locked him up and threw away the key. His mother understands that as does Ms. Rodriguez but they are both facing their hurts and dealing with the consequences.

Forgiveness contains the underlying affirmation that one person refuses to be destroyed by the unkindness of another. It says, “I refuse to treat you like you treated me. What is best for you is that you need to face up to what you have done. It may mean that you are held accountable. It may mean you need to change. But in all of that I am a Christian, a member a forgiven community, and so I will pray for the desire to want what is best for you. I am going to give you to God and let God sort things out while I try, as best I can, to get on with my life.”

That is what the steward should have done. He should have accepted the king’s forgiveness and gotten on with his life but he didn’t and so ruined everything. The king didn’t do it to him, the guy who owed him the pittance didn’t do it to him, he did it to himself. His un-forgiveness, like the un-relenting hatred of Moussaoui and his godless gang of thugs acting on behalf of a god no right-minded person would ever follow, got them consigned to a living hell or an eternal hell of their own making.

The human spirit can only handle so much. It can handle as much joy, gratitude, love, forgiveness as you want to put into it. I have never heard anyone say, “That’s it. That is more joy than I can handle. That is more love than I could ever want.” But that same human spirit can fill up quickly with anger, hate and resentment. And when resentment grows and grows it pushes out all the love, joy, and gratitude that once was there until there is nothing but hate and, in the hijackers case, a wanton disregard for innocent human lives.

President Bush remembered how on the day he first visited the rubble that once was the World Trade Center “there was a palpable blood a kind of blood lust. You go get them.” But then he said that “eventually September 11 will be just another day on the calender. It will be like Pearl Harbor day and when that happens the terrorists will know that they can never win because they never understood us. They didn’t understand that we are a compassionate, kind, but courageous people.”

A people who by the power of God’s love and the Holy Spirit can not only carry forth and soldier on but forgive and be free. We’re getting there and with God’s help both sides will make it all the way. All the way to a life of freedom offered in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

©The Rev’d Dr. David C. Nelson
4 September 2011