15th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 21A

15th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 21
September 25, 2011
I want you to take a minute and imagine this scene. We are all sitting in here on an average Sunday, worshiping God in our usual custom, when a man enters Gulfport in a triumphant procession—a parade where crowds gather along the side of the roads and they proclaim him king as he comes into town. And then this man walks into our church and starts criticizing the ways that we make worship, conduct our business, help the poor, teach our children, and he starts tearing up the place, turning over tables, throwing prayer books and hymnals out of the backs of the pews and running people out of church. After he leaves, and we manage to recover ourselves, and we come back the next day to try to worship God, then he comes back. You can imagine that we would be somewhat wary and wanting to know why he is doing all of these things.
This is what has happened to the people in the temple in Jerusalem just prior to today’s gospel reading. Jesus has entered Jerusalem in a triumphant procession, with the people shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus then proceeds directly to the temple where he turns over the tables of the money changers and drives out all who are buying and selling in the temple, and then he proceeds to heal the sick in the middle of the temple. Then he leaves and goes to the outskirts of town to spend the night, and he comes back to the temple the next morning. That’s where our reading for today picks up. When he shows back up in the temple, the chief priests and the elders know he is dangerous, and they know they do not want to provoke a similar scene as the day before. So they ask Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” It’s a reasonable question. Perhaps we would ask, “Why are you doing this?” So Jesus, like a good rabbi, answers their questions with a question, and when they do not answer, he tells them a parable, and he concludes the parable by telling them (us) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the drug dealers and the petty larcenists are going into the kingdom of heaven before them (us).
In our Wednesday night class this past week, we talked about authority, about what is authoritative for us as Anglicans and Episcopalians, what is authority for us as the people of St.Peter’s by-the-Sea and as individuals. John Westerhoff writes in his little book—A People Called Episcopalians: A Brief Introduction to our Peculiar Way of Life—that authority is the source of our life of faith that is grounded in God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit; and he says that authority is essentially how we come to know the mind and the will of the triune God (6). Authority is how we come to know the mind and the will of God. So in our reading today, perhaps it might help us to look at the question the chief priests and elders ask Jesus as being—how do you know this that you are doing is a part of the mind and the will of God? And we see how Jesus answers that question.
So, how do we know the mind and the will of God? Paul has an interesting take on this in the portion of his letter to the Philippians that we read today. Paul is writing to the Philippians in this letter about a conflict that they are having between two women in the congregation—Euodia and Syntyche—and he is urging the two women and all of the people to “be of the same mind.” For Paul, this is what that “same mind” looks like: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…” Paul is teaching them that to be of the same mind as Christ Jesus, they must be humble, they must be empty of their own selfish desires and ambitions and be filled with concern for the other. That is what it means to have the same mind as Christ Jesus. He ends this section by writing, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Get yourself out of the way and allow God to work in you and through your work.
So Paul is saying that we know the mind of God through humility. We find our authority in humility. How does that work?
When the chief priests and the elders refuse to answer Jesus about where John the Baptist’s authority came from, he tells them a parable saying, “What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, ‘The first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…’”
What is the dynamic that is going on with the two sons to make the one answer no and then change his mind and go and the other answer yes but not follow through? I imagine that after the father comes to the first son, and he tells his father he won’t go work for him in the vineyard; the son goes back to whatever he is doing, but he can’t stop thinking about his father and his father’s request. He knows his father needs his help to bring in the harvest of the vineyard; he remembers all the love and the support and the goodness he receives from his father, and so he gets over himself and his own preoccupations; he lets go of whatever plans he had that would prevent him from working in the vineyard, and he changes his mind and goes to work. The second son tells the father he will go work, but maybe he gets busy. He’s caught up in the middle of a drama in his own household, he has a major crises he needs to tend to; he’s just gotten to the best part of this novel he’s reading and just can’t put it down. He doesn’t give any thought to the father and the father’s request of him after he answers yes, and he is so preoccupied with his own affairs.
We can only know the mind of God when we make room for God through humility and self-emptying. Humility and self-emptying can only occur when we are focusing on the needs of the other and on the priorities of God.
When writing about this concept of self-emptying in Philippians, theologian William Greenway writes, “One does not ‘self-empty’ by focusing upon oneself. One is emptied of self to the degree one is overcome by the needs, pains, hopes, and desires of others. When concern for others takes one utterly beyond self-interest, beyond obsession with achievements and self-obsessing guilt over failures, beyond self, then one receives the comfort of an Easter ‘yes’ so overwhelming, unconditional, undeniable, and absolute that it is experienced as unfailing and forever—a yes more potent and enduring than any imaginable no”(Feasting on the Word, Greenway,114).
Humility is not comfortable, nor is seeking the mind of God easy. In both, we come into contact with our own brokenness, with our own pain and suffering and with the pain and suffering of the whole world. It is not work for the faint of heart, but through it we will receive the yes of the resurrection.
In closing, I share with you the words from the end of the little book, Falling Upward: Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that get to the heart of this understanding of humility and God’s invitation to us to participate in the mind and the will of God. Rohr writes, “Pain is part of the deal. If you don’t walk into [growth and spiritual maturity and the kingdom of God], it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful. All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them” (Rohr 160).