Constantine Being Tricky

Text: Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32

Three hundred years after the death of Jesus, the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity. Before that time Christians had been outlaws. After that time, Christianity became an authorized religion in the empire. Granting Christians authority to gather in worship made the institutional church possible. Some say that was good, some say not so good. Certainly without Constantine Christianity would have been very different, and we would likely not be sitting here today in this beautiful building, spending time in public worship, and singing grand hymns loudly.

It is said that Constantine refused to be baptized until he was on his deathbed. He put it off because he didn’t want to leave time between baptism and death. The more time he had, he figured, the more chances he had to commit more sins. He wanted his sins to be behind him, and he wanted to be absolved of as many of them as possible. He felt that if he repented at the last minute, he would be all set. If he repented at the last minute, he would greet his death sin-free. It didn’t really matter about his previous life. It didn’t matter what kind of person he had been or done. If he timed it right, he would be all set in the life to come. Did it work? Not for us to say.

Was Constantine right? Is this how God works? And can a life of evil be washed away by one good deed? Can a life of good be forever polluted by one evil deed? Is the last thing we do in our lives more important than all the rest we do? Or is the last thing just one of many in a big pot of good and evil deeds all stewed together, making only a little difference to the flavor?

In the reading today from Ezekiel, the prophet argues against a proverb. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” The Israelites have been taken into exile, and are looking for an explanation. How did this come to be that they have endured such suffering? Is it something they did, or something done by their people, their parents and parents before them? Whose fault is it? They quote the proverb because it tells them that they are victims of history. Their ancestor have eaten sour grapes, but they, the exiles, have to grit their teeth.

Ezekiel says: stop it! Stop quoting that proverb. God does not punish the children for the sins of the parents. In the section of this passage that we skipped, Ezekiel gives a long, impassioned argument, with examples.

It might seem in this reading that God works the way Constantine thinks God works. When the wicked turn good, they reap the rewards. When the good turn wicked, then endure the punishment. The Israelites, good and wicked alike, evidently call this unfair. Shouldn’t there be what one person called a “treasury of merit,” an account of good and wicked deeds? Shouldn’t all your good count for something? Shouldn’t all your evil be reckoned with?

But then who does the counting and who does the reckoning? Does each action automatically add to or subtract from the balance? Is this all mechanical, some eternal accounting system in God’s heaven or God’s brain? If it is, how can God get into our lives and bless us? Where is the slack, the crack, the sloppiness, the uncertainty that opens the way for God to act?

Ezekiel is on Israel’s case because the proverb, or the thinking that is behind it, leads to a kind of fatalism. If it is our parents’ fault, then there is nothing we can do to change things. If our future is determined by our past, then trajectory of our destiny is already calculated. It leads us either to despair—nothing I can do can make my life better. Or it leads to destruction—no goofy, dangerous thing I can do can make my life worse.

Ezekiel argues that what we, ourselves, do makes a difference. It makes a difference to God, and therefore it makes a difference to our lives. What we do affects God. God acts in response to our actions. What God does affects our lives. God’s blessings matter.

But it would be stretching things a bit if, realizing this, we decided we knew how to manipulate God. To control God by clever timing, to force God’s hand, as Constantine wanted to do. What Ezekiel asks for is repentance, not maneuvering.

Repentance means to turn in another direction. Not just to take some action which is out of character from time to time, but to become a new person. Repentance has little to do with apologies and firm declarations of purpose. Repentance means to be reborn, renewed, reconsidered.

Ezekiel is talking about our primary orientation, the direction in which our heart is drawn and to which we turn for guidance. This orientation is what you, parents and sponsors, have promised [this child just baptized] in his baptism—to aim his life in a particular direction, toward God.

Ezekiel is offering new hope to Israel, not a new scheme for redemption. If we have no desire to be different than we are, then these words of Ezekiel’s offer nothing to us at the moment.

But for those who feel that their lives are in a predictable and not so pleasant rut, for those who feel trapped, for those caught in disagreeable patterns, the prophet offers encouragement. I am pleased, says God through Ezekiel, when people get themselves a new heart and a new spirit. Not only is God changed by changes we make in our lives, God is not neutral about it. God is not apathetic about the choices we make and the lives we lead. God is prejudiced in our favor. God prefers blessings over curses, forgiveness over condemnation, abundance over scarcity. God has a preference for life.

The future is not today elongated out in time. And it is not the inevitable working out of our past. God has no interest, Ezekiel tell us, in our continuing despair or destruction. I have no pleasure in the suffering of anyone, says God. Turn, then, and live.

Annoying Grace

Text: Matthew 20:1-16
Other texts: Jonah 3:10-4:11

A blessing is a favorable outcome. When we ask for God’s blessing, we ask God to contribute to a favorable outcome. When we sit down to eat, we say a blessing (which is also called “grace,” and I’ll talk about that in a minute). Bless this food, we might say. Meaning make this food be good for us, keep us healthy, gives us energy for life. It doesn’t mean transform this food into superfood. When we ask for a blessing of some tangible thing, like a new house, we are asking that God make our time here good, that what goes on here be full of joy and not sorrow. Or bless this new endeavor, meaning make it go well, be prosperous, give pleasure to those involved.

When we do receive favorable outcomes, we say we are blessed. This church is blessed these days with lots of young children and new babies. I’ll talk about that in a minute, too.

Blessings are gifts from God. A blessing is a gift. That means you get it for free. You do not have to earn it. A blessing is not a reward for something. Not a reward for special service or for good deeds or for being a person of good character. Blessings are given by God freely and extravagantly. Thank God for that. You can do bad things, think bad thoughts, plan bad schemes, and still be blessed, still get a blessing.

It is annoying. At least it is annoying to the workers in the story we just heard in today’s Gospel reading. Some of the workers put in a full day’s hard work. Some of them put in a half day’s work. Some hardly worked at all. At the end of the day, the landowner pays everyone the same. Not the same per hour, the same total. It does not seem fair

It is clearly not fair. Fairness would be everyone gets paid according to his or her effort, or time spent, or grapes picked. The workers who work harder or better or longer deserve to get paid better. That’s what they think, and that’s what we think too.

The landowner says, reasonably, that each person had made a deal for a fixed amount of money. A deal’s a deal. That may be so, but arguing the legality of employment contracts is not what this parable teaches. What this parable teaches is that God is not fair. That what you deserve and what you get are unrelated.

God is generous. The complaint of the early workers is not that they got too little but that the others got too much. The first workers were the stars, the type-A workers, the ambitious ones. What they don’t like is that the later workers were made equal to them. They were treated the same. “You have made them equal to us,” they say. It is not right, they say. You have no right to pay the others what we got. You are too free with your blessings.

This giving of undeserved blessings is what the church calls grace. God’s grace is God’s blessings that we get just for being a person. A free gift. When we say “grace” at meals, we are thanking God for the gift of life and the food that makes it possible. The words in Greek—which is the language of the New Testament—the words in Greek for grace, for gift, for pleasure and joy, and for thanks all come from the same word.

This church is in the midst of lots of baptisms. Baptism is one of the two sacraments in most Protestant churches. The other sacrament is Holy Communion. A sacrament is not just something that is holy and spiritual and with which God is involved. Lots of things are holy and spiritual, and God is involved with most things in life. The official definition of a sacrament is something that has a physical element (like water in baptism and food in the Lord’s Supper), is something that Jesus said we should do (“go and baptize” he said, and “do this”—share this meal—he said), and it is a means of grace. This last phrase—means of grace—is church jargon.

Sacraments do not provide grace. This notion is central to Lutheran thinking. Sacraments are not something that people do to earn or merit God’s favor. A sacrament is not a transaction. People have God’s favor already. Baptism is not, therefore, a requirement to gain God’s favor, in this life or the next.

Sacraments are a vehicle for God’s blessings. In the sacraments we are made mindful of God’s gifts. The sacraments are like a spiritual UPS truck. They are “means” of grace as in “conveyance” of grace. They are especially good at delivering God’s grace, but they are not the only way. The sacraments themselves are a gift, a way—a means—for God to say: you and me? We’re cool.

In the sacraments God has promised to be especially available, so to speak. We conclude that to be true because Jesus told us we should observe these particular sacraments. Not because God requires it of us, but because we need them. Just as we need food or air. Without the sacraments we are not condemned, but we might go around hungry and short of breath.

Thinking that we can make God favor us by doing something that God likes is a way of hoping that we can persuade God to do what we want. It is a way of trying to control God. I’ll do this good thing that you want and then you, God, you’ll do this thing that I want. But first of all, it seems that God does not work like that. And second, what we want and what God wants do not always line up.

God favors justice. I’ll pay whatever is just, says the landowner. And when the workers complain, he says that he is being just. What the workers want is fair compensation, but fair compensation is not God’s interest here. God as often as not favors generosity. The workers are envious, which is the opposite—envy is the opposite of generosity. When God changes God’s mind, which happens from time to time in the Bible, the change is usually in favor of mercy. So Jonah in the first reading is annoyed with God because God has been generous to the Ninevites. I knew it! says Jonah. That’s why I didn’t want this job in the first place. I knew you were merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. God’s blessings can make us angry. But God chooses to give them anyway. You see with an evil eye, the reading says, what is good. “I want to do this,” God says.

Am I not allowed to be just? says the landowner. Is not God allowed to want mercy and justice? Am I not allowed to save the people of Nineveh? God asks Jonah.

We judge others by our standards. But fortunately for us, God listens to us about as well as the landowner listened to the workers and as well as God listened to Jonah. They complain that God is unfair.

God is unfair. Where we would be envious, God is extravagant. God is free with blessings because God wants to bless us. We are favored just because we are. It is God’s grace.

A Way of Life

Text: Matthew 18:21-22 Other texts: Romans 14:10

Imagine.

Imagine a world in which people held grudges.

Imagine a world in which people extracted revenge for sins committed against them. Or against their friends, or even their ancestors. Imagine a world of blood feuds.

Imagine a world in which people executed others because of their sins. Imagine a world in which wars were fought over the sins of nations.

Imagine a world in which children were disinherited, or parents neglected, or brothers and sisters estranged because of sins of one sort or another. Imagine a world in which people were excommunicated, exiled, expunged for their sins.

It takes no imagination to imagine such a world.

“Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?” asks Paul. “Or why do you despise your brother or sister?” Withholding forgiveness is the way we work. We are addicted to unforgiveness. Mercilessness, we might have once called it. But that word, meaning without mercy, now has a flavor of viciousness. We withhold forgiveness not because we are mean and vicious—though it might make us do things that are mean and vicious. We withhold forgiveness because it seems to be sensible, normal, and understandable. It is a way of life. Retribution is in the air. To forgive others seems, at times, at the worst times, to be naive, pathetic, unrealistic.

Unforgiveness is an addiction. It is a learned behavior that makes us uncomfortable when it is withdrawn. As Jesus asks us to, asking us to forgive one another. It makes us anxious.

So when Peter asks, “how many times do I have to forgive?” we listen with him for the answer from Jesus. Seven seems like more than enough. Let’s not go overboard. To forgive someone seven crimes, seven injuries, seven insults, seven threats. If Peter is like us, maybe he thinks: Already, seven is too many.

Seeking to explain why churches are losing members these days, a theologian has said recently that people see Christianity as a system of beliefs rather than a way of life. They think that Christianity teaches what to think more than it teaches what to do.

It is true that what you think makes a difference, just as what you say makes a difference. Sticks and stones may break bones, but people usually don’t wield sticks and stones unless they have thought and spoken about bone breaking long before they picked up their weapons. Wars and genocides and executions happen after people have thought and spoken about them. Words don’t just describe what we do, they form us. So what we think and say as a result of hearing Jesus makes a difference.

And one of the things Jesus said was that to follow him was to live in a different way. Following Jesus is a way of life. I am the way, Jesus said. This is more than a metaphor. Jesus taught about the coming kingdom of God. This kingdom on earth will come when people do the things that Jesus said to do. Among other things, believing in Jesus means believing that if we do what he said to do, we trust that the world will become the world he said it would. And what he says here in Matthew is to forgive one another.

We are taught as children to forgive each other. If you bean your sister with your toy truck, or smash your brother’s Lego castle, your mom or dad teaches you: “Say you are sorry.” And when you do offer your apologies, no matter how reluctantly, your folks tell your brother or sister to accept them. This is a protocol for forgiveness. I’m sorry—it’s OK. Even if you are not, and even if it isn’t, this protocol works. It is possible for us to forgive, and we are taught to do so. And we believe that that is how God works.

Forgiveness saves the one forgiving as much as the one forgiven. Not forgiving others is deadly. We use the expression “hold a grudge.” As if you could just pass it on to someone else. Here, hold this grudge for me a moment. Wouldn’t that be great. But the grudge is ours. And as we gather more and more unforgiven sins, our grudges accumulate. Pretty soon, we are weighed down with them. Our resentments and hard feelings sit like stones in our pockets. Before long our pockets—our hearts—are full of stones, and we cannot run, cannot play, cannot dance, cannot laugh.

The word for forgiveness that Peter uses in his question means to let go, but even more it means to “shove away.” How many times must I let go of sins done me? It takes effort. They are hard to get rid of. How many times must I shove those sins away from me? asks Peter.

There is no limit. That is Jesus’ answer. Whether it is seventy-seven times or, as you could also translate it, seventy times seven (490 times), the number means infinity. There is never a time, says Jesus, when you can stop forgiving the sins done to you.

This is not just therapeutic advice. To do this is to act in a new way. To live this way is to adopt a new kind of life. If people were to live this way, it would be new kind of world. It would be a new kind of kingdom. The difficulty of letting go of other’s sins is exceeded by the pow er of the results.

Baptism [a child was baptized today] is a sacrament of forgiveness. It bestows, as you just heard, new life. Not because it is a magic spell or because it is some kind of divine cleansing agent. But because it is an initiation into a new world. A world in which forgiveness, not retribution, is the expectation. A world in which forgiveness is the standard. Imagine a world that was addicted to forgiveness.

Imagine that.

Losing God, Losing Others

Text: Matthew 18:15-20
Other text: Ezekiel 33:7-11

It is not surprising that Ezekiel’s audience was discouraged and disillusioned. Their identity as a people and as a nation—the people and nation of Israel—was eroding. Who they were depended on a notion of God who had given them a land that was theirs to keep, a dynasty of powerful kings who would always rule, and a special spot in God’s heart. Yet now the land was occupied, and the kings and the other leaders captured and in exile. And as for God’s heart? Maybe God was fickle. The people, for their part, were losing heart.

Ezekiel the prophet was called to preach to the Israelites in exile and in the time of the destruction of the Temple, God’s house, in Jerusalem. He preached to a population that was overwhelmed by loss. They had lost their homes, they had lost their land, they had lost their power, and they had lost friends and family. More important to Ezekiel, though, is that they had begun to lose their sense of God—of their identity as a people blessed by God, of their conviction of God’s power, of their obligations under the covenant with God.

Ezekiel was called to both warn and console the exiles. He warns them that they had turned to idols. That is, they had lost sight of God because their eyes had begun to wander to perhaps more attractive partners. They were unable to hear God because their ears were seduced by catchier tunes. Israel, once the maverick and feisty nomads-turned-nation had become established, corrupt, and proud of its own accomplishments. Its hands were sore from patting itself on the back.

As a result, its people ended up in Babylon, far from home and hearth. Not because God’s heart had hardened regarding Israel. God wept for Israel. God had not punished Israel for violating God’s law and covenant. Instead, God’s law had been a force for Israel’s freedom. Israel’s agreement with God gave life. Israel’s deadly exile came about because the people had thrown away what made them good and strong.

It is odd that God, creator of the universe, should be so easy to lose. Not that we just misplace God, forgetting where to look—though sometimes that is how it feels when we need God most. But that, like the exiles, our eyes and ears get untuned somehow, and God’s words to us are less distinct. Sometimes they are covered by the cacophony of other sounds, the busy-ness of other sights of the world. And other times it seems as if we have lost the ability to hear in our native tongue.

Other losses follow (or maybe the other losses come first). Things that at times—in the history of the world and in the history of our own lives—things that seem so present become vague or fantastic or foolish or as a child might think. The power of prayer to change the world. The action of miracles. The strength and interest of the divine to protect the world and its creatures, and us, against evil. Hope in a new world. And especially the power and necessity of forgiveness.

The chapter in Matthew from which we just heard is all about forgiveness. Forgiveness is, I sometimes think, the hardest of all God’s gifts to accept. And therefore the first we discard. Or at least put at the back of the closet. Yet it is at the center of our theology and at the center of the teachings of Jesus. Forgiveness goes two ways. It is the joy of Christianity, that we are forgiven, not stuck in some evil rut. And it is the shock of Christianity, that we are called to forgive others, even the evil ones. For Jesus, the foundation of the kingdom of God is forgiving and being forgiven. But it is so hard to do that we cannot do it unless God is right there with us.

The passage in Matthew is in one sense about discipline. A person does something bad. It hurts you or people you love and hang around with. The backstory here is that your first impulse is to strike back. Or, more politely, to tell the person to take a hike. Get lost, go find some other folks to bother.

But Jesus says no. Not the thing to do. You should go through these steps. First you talk to the person one on one. (Not so easy, as you may have experienced in your own life.) Then if that does not work, you go with a couple of buddies. Then with the whole church. Then, finally, you treat the person as if he or she was a gentile or a tax collector. Which sounds pretty bad until you remember that eating and talking with gentiles and tax collectors is just what Jesus liked to do best.

These verses in Matthew on the one hand might tell us that we have to work really hard at reconciliation, going through all these convoluted steps. Or on the other hand—the hand I prefer, they might tell us that it should be really hard to lose someone. It takes many steps to let someone go.

God has a preference for forgiveness. If just a couple of you ask for anything, it will be done, Jesus promises. This promise is not the blank check it seems to be. It is a promise made in the context of reconciliation. If just a few of you folks want to get together and reconcile themselves and others, then I’ll go for it, says God. I’ll be there with them, those few folks, says Jesus.

Near the end of the book of Ezekiel, the part from which we read, Ezekiel comforts Israel with the promise of a new world. A restored kingdom. Throughout his ministry, Jesus energizes his followers with the promise of the coming of God’s kingdom, a world restored. The foundation of Christianity depends on the notion of a God who acts to renew the world. God is not fickle. God is stubborn, patient, and persistent. As far away as God sometimes seems, God is never lost.

And the foundation of the community of Christians, meaning the church, is forgiveness. The church is a place in which people can be seeds of forgiveness in a world which is juiced on guilt and blame. A church is a place to which any person may come hoping for acceptance and a place in which people here offer it. Even two or three, gathered in the name of Jesus.