The Cornerstone of the Kingdom

     I loved to ask my confirmation classes to put the Ten Commandments in order of their importance.  Not killing usually came in first, followed closely by not stealing.  Coveting generally came in last, with adultery somewhere in the middle.  Sometimes I would have to explain to them what "coveting" and "adultery" meant, though the second one always produced snickers.

     The purpose of all of this was to create a discussion about the Law, why we have it,  and what it means for all of us.

     The Ten Commandments was the first of God's attempts to set our creation right; to reproduce the purity that was lost when Adam and Eve listened to the serpent and acquired the ability to know about good and evil, an acquisition that has plagued us ever since.  God wanted to establish a set of principles that we could follow to make this world a better place; to return God's creation to the way that it was intended to be from the first.

     We love to enshrine the Ten Commandments in stone, to hang them up in court rooms and outside schools; to embroider them and create wall plaques with them prominent.  We all know the value of the commandments very well.  The problem is that we can't keep them.     

     When it became obvious to God that we couldn't keep the commandments, God sent us the prophets, who pointed out to us how we have failed to keep the law and be the people of God.  The Pharisees in Jesus' time believed that they kept the law perfectly and they despised those whom they believed didn't keep it very well.  They accused the disciples of Jesus of breaking the law when they cut grain on the Sabbath because of their need; and accused Jesus of breaking the law when he healed on that day, even though the healing brought great good to the people who needed it.

     Not honoring the commandments was one of the charges leveled against Jesus when he was arrested and brought before Herod and Pilate.  The parable that Jesus tells the Pharisees and the Chief Priests follows right on the heels of the story that he told them earlier in the Gospel about the two sons who both obeyed and disobeyed their father.  Both of these stories are aimed right at the religious leaders.

     The parable tells the story of the father who sent his servants to the tenants of the vineyard to receive the produce.  The tenants beat one of them and killed another, so the owner sent another group of servants to the tenants.  They did the same thing to the second group.  He then sent his son to the tenants, but the tenants conspire to throw the son out of the vineyard and kill him because he is the heir to the vineyard.

     Jesus asks his hearers, "now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what do you think he will do to those tenants?"  They answered Jesus, "he will put those tenants to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at harvest time"  Jesus then asked them if they had read in the scriptures, "how the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to people who produce the fruits of the Kingdom."


     The gospel goes on to say that the chief priests and the Pharisees heard those parables and realized that Jesus was talking about them.  They wanted to arrest him, but were afraid of the crowds, who thought that Jesus was a prophet.

     So there, in this parable, we have the whole story of how God tried to perfect his Kingdom:  first, we have the Law, the Ten Commandments.  When God knew that we couldn't keep them, the prophets were sent to remind us of our responsibility to our God.  When we didn't listen to the prophets, God sent Jesus, his Son, and as it says in the parable, we threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

     Now, what is God going to do to us?

     The wonder of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection is the incredible mercy of God to all of us who participated in that event.   We crucify Jesus just about every day of our lives in the way that we disobey God and his law.  Despite that, we have God's mercy before us as the enduring proof of God's eternal Love.

     Jesus forgave from the cross those who crucified him.  That in itself is astounding, but forgiveness is the cornerstone on which the Kingdom of God is built.

     I worked in Western Penitentiary for twenty-two years as a part time chaplain.  I had a man in my group who had killed a woman about ten years before I met him.  He had a life sentence without any possibility of ever getting out of prison.   He wouldn't talk about his crime in group, although the purpose of the group was to create enough trust to allow that to happen.

     One day, he got a letter from the parents of his victim.  They wanted to come to see him.  We talked about that letter in group and decided that it was important for him to honor their request.  When the day came for the visit, he went to the visiting room and found the father and the mother of his victim.

     "We have come to forgive you," said the father.  "Please know that this comes after years of anguish over the death of our daughter, but we need to bury her and get on with our lives.  Let me tell you how serious we are.  When you were being transferred from the county jail to the court house for your trial, I was on a roof down the street with a rifle.  I wanted to kill you.  But I couldn't do it, so we have come here to forgive you, and as much as it is possible to put this terrible thing to rest, and get on with our lives."


     My group member came back to us with his story.  Over the succeeding weeks, it became apparent that their forgiveness had changed his life.  He talked about his crime and got on with his life behind bars in a different, much less bitter way.  Forgiveness changed him and it changed that family, as it is supposed to do.  It really is the foundation on which the Kingdom of God is built.

     May God's blessing be upon you and may God's forgiveness become the cornerstone of your lives.

What is the mission of the Church?

     When Rosie and I were in Jordan a number of years ago, we visited Petra, a stone city in the south of the country.  We rode donkeys down a long trail through cliffs until we came to the carved tombs where the Nabataen pirates buried their dead.  Legend has it that these cliffs were the place where Moses struck the rock to provide water for the tribe of Hebrews who were on their way to the promised land who were both hungry and thirsty and who were blaming Moses for bringing them out of Egypt simply to perish in the desert.

     Legend is a chancy thing; who knows if this story is true as it stands, or if Petra was even the place where it all happened, but it was wonderful for us to be there and to think of the Hebrews preceding us there.

     There is a lot of experience in our collective past, experience that speaks of a closeness with God.  A closeness that we don't notice so often today.  We have become much more self sufficient and need God's help in less critical ways.

     Those who sleep in doorways or under our bridges who are without homes and jobs are still hungry and thirsty and need God's help in very specific ways.  They pray that their primary needs will be filled.  I think that is our task and our ministry in this terribly broken world.  To touch the poor and the outcast with the healing touch of God is the highest calling to which we can aspire.

     Often it is the outreach portion of the parish budget that feels the ax most quickly when we need to find balance.  We only have so much resource, we say and the electric bills are so high and we have all of this real estate that we have acquired, and outreach after all is discretionary spending, isn't it?

     That is certainly true as far as it goes, but the problem is that the outreach is the reason that we are here.  It is the reason for the electric bill and the real estate and indeed all that we have.  We are here to make a difference in God's world for God's people.  It is certainly clear enough in all of our scripture that the poor and the outcast are the primary object of God's concern.  Jesus held them up constantly as those whom he favored.  He chose his disciples from among the common people.  Some of them were fishermen, one at least a tax-collector, and all of them were simply people looking for something beyond themselves.  Jesus pointed to the needy as the object of his ministry and instructed all of us to pay attention to them.

     He healed, he taught and constantly urged his followers to pay attention to the people around them who were in need.  Like the Hebrews who were hungry and thirsty in the desert, Jesus' stories are instructive to us.  There is the one about the widow who puts her "mite" in the box while the religious leaders put in much more of their wealth.  He says that she has given all that she has, while the others put in a pittance.

     In Matthew 25, Jesus talks about the sheep and the goats.  The sheep are the ones who feed and clothe him when he needs it and care for him when he is sick or in prison.  The goats simply pass him by.  It is honestly very hard to understand why Christianity hasn't gotten the message in all of its more than two thousand years.

     When we were in England, we visited many, many cathedrals.  These were beautiful buildings that had the effect of increasing my faith.   The dedication of the workers at Salisbury in the eleventh century is astounding.  They built that place as an offering to God.  In Yorkshire, there is a place called Fountains Abbey, a place that was built about the same time by a group of monks who were caring for the poor in that area.  Eventually, the abbey fell to ruin, but it remains one of the most spiritual places that we visited on our trip.

     Down the road about two miles is Ripon Cathedral, a modern church trying to be a Christian center in a time when Christianity is becoming increasingly out of favor.  It occurred to me that the only difference between Ripon Cathedral and Fountains Abbey is that both are ruins, but one doesn't know it yet.

     In the twenty-first chapter of Matthew, the Pharisees ask Jesus by what authority he does his work.   Jesus asks them in turn if the baptism of John was inspired by heaven, or if it was of human origin.   Sensing a trap, the Pharisees tell Jesus that they don't know.  Jesus then tells them the story of the man who had two sons.  He told the first to go to work in the vineyard.  The son said that he wouldn't, but later changed his mind and went and worked.  The second son told him that we would go and work, but didn't do anything at all.  "Which of these did the will of the father", Jesus asked.  "The first", replied the Pharisees.



     That mission hasn't changed one bit in all of the years since.  We are still called to be the visible face of God in this world.   That mission involves not only our real estate and our electric bill, but primarily our outreach.  And God will bless richly what we do.

Forgiveness and 9/11

     When I hear that powerful story of the crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews, with Moses stretching out his staff to part the waters, I think of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, and I smile to myself because it is such a wonderful image; standing above it all with his arm straight out, his beard giving him a gruff appearance, and his stentorian voice leaving no doubt that he will save his people.  Computers today would make that scene even more realistic, but what they did in that movie was enough.  It almost became  a caricature, but it certainly stuck in our minds.  I almost felt sorry for the Egyptian soldiers who were drowned in the sea, but in the biblical economy, the lives of oppressors don't have much traction, especially in the Old Testament.  God is always smiting Philistines, Edomites and others who have created havoc in the lives of those whom God loves.  Those are people we have a hard time forgiving for anything that they did.

     We are in the process of commemorating the tenth anniversary of the events of September 11, 200l, 9/11 as it has become so vividly known to all of us.  On that day airliners smashed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and into a field in Shanksville, PA, killing over three thousand people.

     I'll never forget where I was on that day and neither will most of us.  I was returning from taking the dog for a walk.  The television set was on and the first plane had just hit the North Tower.  In that brief interval, we thought that it had been some kind of terrible accident.  In moments, the second plane hit and then there was no doubt at all about what had happened.  This was something infinitely larger.  Then the third and fourth planes crashed and we knew that there had been a monstrous attack.  None of us will ever forget that day and the feelings that mounted up inside us.  As the days went on, these became feelings of grief and anger and also gratitude for the first responders and the New York firefighters and police who gave of themselves without question.

     But for our anger, we wanted revenge.  That is what took us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and fueled what we so blithely call the "war on terror", as if terror is an enemy that can somehow be defeated by our military.  Our reaction to this terrible day has changed all of us and has changed our country.  We have lashed out at Muslims and become paranoid about air travel and immigration.  We turned on each other and have created sometimes ridiculous scrutiny of persons entering buildings or boarding aircraft.  All of this seemed perfectly understandable, we have been under threat and our government has been trying to keep us all safe, even if in the process, it has created considerable inconvenience for us all.  How else could we have responded?  It was a horrible day for everyone.   The stories of people falling from the buildings, the charred bodies, the sifting dust all over everything.  We have carried those feelings with us every day for these past ten years, and we have hated with a passion those who created those events.

     I think that our passion has erupted in the terrible disagreements that we have had in our political system over so many things in recent times.  If we can't quite forgive the perpetrators of 9/11, can't we find a way to forgive one another?  That is what I believe lies at the heart of our problem.

     I was disturbed at the recent Republican debate when moderator Brian Williams asked Governor Rick Perry of Texas about the 234 executions in his state, that the audience erupted in spontaneous applause at the question.  Applause not for the confrontation, but for the executions!  What is the matter with us?  Have we become so callous that the deaths of so many people can be met with applause?

     Jesus has a parable for us in the eighteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel.  I am somewhat startled to see in this parable that those who don't forgive others are destined for the same fate as the Egyptian soldiers in the Red Sea.  Peter asks Jesus a question:  "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how many times should I forgive, as many as seven times?"  Jesus replies to him: "Not seven times, Peter, but seventy times seven!" An exaggeration that simply means infinity.  He tells them a story about a servant who was forgiven an enormous debt by his master who then goes out and refuses to forgive a small debt by a fellow servant.  The master hears of this and throws the first servant into prison to be tortured until he pays the whole of his debt to him.  Jesus goes on to tell his disciples that is how we will all be treated unless we learn to forgive one another.   That is a particularly difficult parable for all of us, especially in light of our feelings about 9/11.  What we are taught by this is God's absolute priority for forgiveness.  Not only does God forgive us for what we do and what we are, but he expects us also to forgive each other.  As we say in our confession, "we have not forgiven others as we have been forgiven, we are truly sorry and we humbly repent."  But forgiveness isn't easy, it is one of the hardest things that we do in our lives.  Forgiveness is most times the last thing that we want to do.

     But the truth of forgiveness is that it isn't for the person whom we forgive.  It for us.   We are the reason that we need so desperately to forgive.  If our lives are to be more free, more clear, we need to put aside those things that so terribly divide us, not only between nations and cultures, but between each other.  That is only way that we can help our God to build his Kingdom.