All Are Saints

The scriptures referred to are 1 John 3:1-3.

At the end of just about every movie we see in a theater, I or my son will go to IMDB to see if there is an extra scene or two in the middle or at the end of the credits. If not, we leave, rather than wait for the endless list of names to run out. There is even a joke in The Great Muppet Caper, where Fozzie and Kermit notice the credits for various behind-the-scenes people appearing on the screen. “Nobody reads those names anyway, do they?” asks Fozzie. “Sure,” says Kermit. “They all have families.” But movies wouldn't exist without all those people who do makeup and costumes and lighting and special effects, as well as those who raise the insane amounts of money required to make films today. Yet most of us only know the names of the actors and maybe the director if, like Stephen Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock, they are known for making great films.

In a way, that is the problem with this Sunday in the church calendar. It's called All Saints Day, and we think it's just about those big name saints, like Peter, Paul, Mary the mother of Jesus, Francis of Assisi, and other especially holy people who have churches and hospitals named after them. But in the New Testament, all faithful Christians are called saints. In the original Greek the word is hagios, literally the holy ones. Holy means “different” in the sense of “set apart” for God's purposes. I don't use the communion chalice for drinking tea or Dr. Pepper because it has been set apart to be used when we as the body of Christ on earth come together to share the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. And we Christians who have answered God's call to follow his Son have also been set apart for his purposes: to show the good news of what God has done in Jesus and is doing with his Spirit in and with our lives.

Of course, we remember those who have responded to God's call in extraordinary ways, the way kids who play sports look up to and emulate exceptional athletes. And while not all of those kids will grow up to be superstars we hope that they continue to enjoy playing sports and that they do the best they can. Those who first came to be known as capital “S” saints were either followers of Jesus mentioned in the Bible or martyrs, people who died for their faith. Martyr, by the way, comes from the Greek word for “witness.” Not abandoning your faith when it becomes dangerous to show your allegiance to Jesus was a spectacular witness to how much you trust in him.

But as pagan chieftains and kings became Christians, and ordered their people to be baptized without adequate instruction in their new faith, saints began to be treated in much the same way as the pagan gods who were thought to have authority over certain areas of life. Thus a farmer might switch from praying to Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, to St. Isadore the Farmer, now patron saint of agriculture. One no longer prayed to the Greek goddess of childbirth, Ilithyia, but to the Virgin Mary, or her mother St. Anne, or St. Raymond Nonnatus who was delivered by emergency C-section which somehow made him an expert on difficult births. Got a toothache? Pray to St. Apollonia, a martyr who had her teeth knocked out or pulled out by an anti-Christian mob in the third century. She is the patron saint of dentists, dental hygienists and their patients. My favorite is St. Wilgefortis. A pagan king chose her as his bride. She prayed that God would save her from such a fate and preserve her virginity. So she miraculously grew a beard overnight! The king rejected her and her name got mangled over the years into St. Wigglesfoot the Unencumbered, patron saint of wives who wished to be free from their difficult husbands.

Unfortunately, this change from saints as spiritual exemplars to saints as heads of heavenly departments in charge of earthly matters turned the popular idea of God's kingdom into a bureaucracy where it was not what you knew but who you prayed to that got you what you wanted. This contradicts the Biblical admonition to bring all our petitions to God. (Philippians 4:6)

Eventually these capital “S” saints began to be seen as magical, so that anything they touched and especially parts of their bodies were regarded as being able to work miracles. This led to medieval churches and monasteries seeking to possess and display pieces of saints called relics which would attract pilgrims who sought cures and favors and left donations in gratitude. I once went to a church in Rome that claimed to have a bottle of the Virgin Mary's breast milk as well as Jesus' foreskin. I saw a cross that contained tiny vials of what supposedly was Jesus' blood. This made it a magical item.

And if there's one thing scripture clearly prohibits, it's magic. Magical thinking holds that by saying certain words, doing certain rituals and possessing certain magical items we can change reality. That's one reason the third of the ten commandments prohibits misusing God's name. (Exodus 20:7) God is not a genie. What the Bible teaches is that instead we are to go to our heavenly Father and ask him for what we think we need. He in his loving wisdom will decide whether to answer our prayers with a “Yes,” a “No,” a “Not yet,” or with something else that he has in mind for us, a different mission or path he wants us to follow instead. (Genesis 40:7-15, 20-23; 41:1, 9-14: Acts 16:6-10)

Sadly, these men and women who, in their earthly life, were devoted to God were now treated as semi-divine intermediaries for God. This is something these saints would have viewed with horror as a kind of idolatry.

Furthermore, the idea that all faithful Christians are saints dropped out of popular thought. Need something difficult done? Pray to a big name saint whose biography connects them, however tangentially, to that concern. It's easier than acting as a saint yourself and asking God to help you do it. Relying on a capital “S” saint can make you think of yourself as a passive recipient of a magical person's help rather than as someone called by God to participate in what he is doing in and through us.

It also makes us see ourselves as second class Christians. It reinforces the idea that it takes extraordinary people to do extraordinary things for God. This isn't helped by some of the fanciful stories that have grown up around certain saints that make them out to be extra-special from birth. For instance, the term Immaculate Conception does not refer to Jesus' conception but to Mary's. The story arose that Mary was conceived without the taint of original sin so that she could be the sinless vessel for God's Son. But there is nothing in scripture that even hints at this. We know nothing about the kind of person Mary was before the angel appeared to her and told her she will be the mother of the Messiah. Luke introduces her this way: “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, 'Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.'” (Luke 1:26-28) He doesn't say, “You're favored because you prayed so hard...” or “because you gave so much to the poor...” or “because you were born sinless, unlike every other human being in the history of the world...” He simply tells her that she is favored by God. The Greek word for “favor,” charis, is also the word translated as “grace.” You cannot earn God's grace; it is a gift. So God's favor towards Mary is his undeserved unreserved goodness towards her, as is his grace towards the rest of us. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

And it's not like Mary immediately accepts the idea that she will be the mother of God's Son. She asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” So the angel tells her what is going to happen without really explaining it in detail. Then he tells Mary that her post-menopausal relative Elizabeth is pregnant. He concludes with, “For nothing is impossible with God.” That and the news about Elizabeth convinces Mary.

Which leads to the most noteworthy thing that Mary does: she responds with, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” She puts her trust in God and his promise. She is an ordinary person who just consented to do something extraordinary for God. This wouldn't have happened if she had said “No.” God is love and love requires consent. As someone once said, “Without God, we cannot and without us, God will not.” The God who is love wants to work with us and through us.

Mary and Joseph being an ordinary people does not mean that God left the raising of his Son to chance. God equips those he calls. As it says in Hebrews, “May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” (Hebrews 13:20-21) This equipping is what Jesus is referring to when he said, “And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.” (John 14:13) He also said, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” (John 15:16) Jesus is not promising to give us anything we desire but whatever we need to serve God and bear fruit for him.

So whatever Jesus' parents needed to raise him, the Lord provided. We know they weren't rich because the offering they gave at the temple was the offering prescribed for the poor. (Luke 2:22-24; Leviticus 12:8) But they were able to give Jesus love and their living examples of trusting God, as we see when Joseph decides to go through with marrying his fiancée even though she is already pregnant or when they uproot their lives and flee to Egypt because of the threat to Jesus' life. (Matthew 1:19-25; 2:13-16)

We also know that Mary and Joseph were able to give Jesus a grounding in God's word, which he quotes constantly with a deep understanding of its meaning. We also need to be well-versed in the Bible. As Paul said, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Relying on God's Spirit and grounded in his word, we can do what God calls us to do. As it says in 2 Peter, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” (2 Peter 1:3-4) It is this participation in the divine nature that our passage from 1 John is referring to when it says, “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” When we accept Christ, we become children of God. But growing up into the full and unblemished image of God that we see in Jesus is a lifelong process. Yet when Jesus returns, “we will be like him.” We will at last be the people God always intended us to become, ordinary people called and made holy by God, sinners redeemed by Jesus who shares his divine nature with us so that we, and not just the superstars, are all saints.

Free At Last

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 3:19-28 and John 8:31-36.

James Gunn, who made the Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel, is now one of the people in charge of making films for DC Comics, Marvel's rival. He has also made horror films. One of those was Brightburn, which was basically a darker take on a superhero. In it an adolescent boy discovers he has superpowers, very much like Superboy. But he uses it to stalk a girl he has a crush on and kill anyone who gets in his way. He also is getting a message from the spaceship in which he came to earth. It is “Take the world.” And let's face it: in real life anyone as powerful as Superman would likely become a monster and a tyrant. As Lord Acton said, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's rare for someone to have the power to do something and yet resist doing it.

Which probably is why in his reboot of the Superman franchise, Gunn had to figure out why Clark Kent is such a boy scout. In that film, when the message left for him by his Kryptonian parents is decoded by Lex Luthor, it is also for him to conquer the world, a message Clark did not hear before. So why is Superman so good? It is because of the parents who actually raised him, George and Martha Kent. They were good and kind and moral people who passed that on to him. According to the comics, he was raised as a Methodist. So he was raised to avoid harm, to do good and to serve society.

But what about the influence of his genes? Studies of identical twins seem to show that about 40% to 50% of our personality traits are inherited. The other 50 to 60% comes from the environment in which we were raised, like whether our parents were warm and responsive, or were abusive or neglectful. Yet we are still capable of change. Teenagers and even adults from 20 to 40 years old show this ability to change from the way they were raised. For example, two famous men came out of similar situations, but chose very different paths. Both were raised to think that their grandparents were their parents but later found out that the woman they thought was their sister was really their birth mother. One of those men was Ted Bundy, the serial killer; the other was actor and 3 time Oscar winner Jack Nicholson. Your past need not determine your future.

Neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to change, persists even into old age. Anna Moses didn't take up painting until she was in her late 70s and became a world-famous folk artist known as Grandma Moses. Julia Child published her first cookbook at 50. Nola Ochs enrolled in college at 95, becoming the world's oldest college graduate. Anthony Flew was a leading voice for atheism for 66 years until he changed his mind and admitted that there is a God. Every second of your life is a second chance at life.

God knows this. So he did not give up on his people, though they did not stay faithful to his covenant with them. They did not love him with their whole heart and they did not love their neighbors as themselves. He was especially displeased with their king who set the tone for the people of Judah. Addressing King Jehoiakim, he says, “Sure to be judged is the king who builds his palace using injustice and treats people unfairly while adding its upper rooms. He makes his countrymen work for him for nothing. He does not pay them for their labor. He says, 'I will build myself a large palace with spacious upper rooms.' He cuts windows in its walls, panels it with cedar, and paints its rooms red. Does it make you any more of a king that you outstrip everyone else in building with cedar? Just think about your father. He was content that he had food and drink. He did what was just and right. So things went well with him. He upheld the cause of the poor and needy. So things went well for Judah. The Lord says, 'That is a good example of what it means to know me.' But you are always thinking and looking for ways to increase your wealth by dishonest means. Your eyes and your heart are set on killing some innocent person and committing fraud and oppression.” (Jeremiah 22:13-16) People thought the king just automatically had God's blessing and they were taking the wrong lessons from his actions.

Yet God knows that his people can change. He says, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” It will be unlike the covenant he made with them when they left Egypt, the covenant they broke. He says, “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

Real change begins with a change of heart. And remember that in Biblical times, the heart was considered the center of both thought and will. So to repent, to change your life, you have to change how you think and how you decide to act. As someone said, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yet humans are so committed to staying the same that they resist change even when it is an obvious improvement. As a nurse, I have noticed that people rarely make major changes in their lifestyle until it becomes too painful not to change. A heart attack or a health scare will often convince a person to change their habits when family, friends and loved ones were unable to persuade them to do so. But I have also seen people refuse to change even then. I have seen people on continuous oxygen or who were getting breathing treatments choose to keep smoking.

Change starts with realizing you have a problem. But that alone isn't enough. When I was in a skid row ministry during college, we were taught that the first step in helping someone with a drinking problem was to get them to admit they were an alcoholic. So we were shocked when the homeless guys we met readily admitted to being alcoholics. But to them it meant, “I'm an alcoholic so I can't help myself.” All they wanted from us was money so they could buy some beer or wine. The word “addiction” comes from the Latin word used of someone who was so far in debt that they were legally bound or enslaved to the person they owed. Which is why Jesus says in our gospel that “everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin.”

Someone in AA once summarized the first 3 steps in that 12 step program this way: (1) I can't. (2) God can. (3) I'm gonna let him. And those are basically what Paul is talking about in Romans. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” he says in our passage. But merely knowing that we have violated God's moral law can't save us. It's like knowing that you have cancer. That knowledge alone won't cure you. It should spur you to go to a doctor and get help. I had a friend who had what looked like a mole the size of a silver dollar on her arm. All of us who worked with her asked if she had seen a doctor. She said she had. But that wasn't the truth. Because she was afraid of needles and doctors she didn't get it checked or biopsied. She tried picking it off by herself. It was melanoma: skin cancer. It metastasized to her brain. First it disabled her, as if she had had a stroke, and then, in just a month, it killed her. Had she gone to the doctor when she first noticed it growing, he could have saved her.

That's where faith comes in. We can't save ourselves but if we turn to God and trust him, he can save us from the moral and spiritual illnesses we call sins. Untreated these unhealthy thoughts, words and acts can spread to other parts of our life, make us worse off and eventually lead to spiritual death. So we need to trust God, the way someone with a mole that is getting larger, changing color or has irregular borders should trust a doctor to check it and treat it. Without that trust, without that faith in God's power and goodness, he cannot save a person, any more than a doctor, however skilled, can save someone who rejects his expertise and help. God is love and love requires consent.

This is Reformation Sunday. It commemorates the October day in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg his 95 theses, or ideas he wanted to debate concerning the Roman Catholic Church's practices. These came from what he had learned when teaching the Bible as a professor of moral theology at the local university. What triggered his response was that, to raise money, his bishop and the pope were selling indulgences, which bypassed the need to repent and change one's life in order to receive forgiveness. It would be like paying your doctor to issue a certificate saying you were healthy without you actually having to to stop smoking or drinking or overeating. Luther challenged this by saying the pope did not have such authority. Repentance wasn't an external system but an inner process. We are forgiven when we repent, turn to our loving God and trust in him alone. We cannot earn this; it is the free gift of our gracious God. That is why it is good news. Like it was to Luther who was a very conscientious monk, not because he loved God but because he feared and even hated him for requiring us to be perfect if we were to be accepted by him. When he realized this wasn't true and that he had gotten the wrong idea about God from what his church said and not from what the Bible said, it changed his life and his attitude towards God. He wanted others to know this good news.

And while doing good works cannot save us, God will, through the gift of his Spirit in our life, help us to gain the ability to do what is right. Through the Spirit, we experience daily renewal, spiritual growth and the ability to produce the good works God has prepared for us to do, like loving our neighbor. After the surgeons saved my life and put me back together, the physical therapists helped me learn how to use my repaired limbs to walk again. That was always the goal of the healthcare team. The goal of what Jesus did on the cross and what the Spirit does in our lives is to restore us to spiritual health so we can walk with God and be with him, the source of all good things.

Luther didn't want to start a new church but to reform it. And there have been other times when popes and monastic leaders worked to clean up corruption in the church and promote love of our neighbor, through the building of hospitals and providing charity for the poor. In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church banned abuses like the sale of indulgences. In the modern era, various denominations have had dialogues with each other about repairing church unity. In 1999, the Roman Catholic Church and the World Lutheran Federation agreed that our salvation is based on God's grace through faith in him, as Luther had said.

I think it's time for another reformation. We need to repent from seeking earthly power, the way the church did in the Middle Ages, when popes had armies and tried to make kings subject to them. When Satan offered him all the kingdoms of this world, Jesus refused them, yet some Christians have sought to possess political power even if it means compromising Jesus' values. (Matthew 4:8-10) We need to repent of our worship of money and our idolatry of earthly success. (Matthew 6:24; Luke 18:25) We need to repent our neglect of the poor and our oppression of foreigners in our land, whom God keeps telling us throughout the Bible not to mistreat. (Isaiah 1:17; Jeremiah 5:28-29; Leviticus 19:33-34)

We need to rethink our priorities and the way we look at these things. We need to admit our spiritual poverty and mourn our sinful actions. We need to ask God for forgiveness and to write on our hearts his commandments to love him and love others as we do ourselves. We need to renew our hunger and thirst for righteousness. We need to recommit ourselves to being humble, merciful, pure in heart and peacemakers. But we can only do this if we are free from our slavery to sin, to its spiritually unhealthy habits of body, mind and spirit. And we can only do that if we turn to Jesus and put our whole trust in his power, goodness and forgiveness. Because as Jesus says in today's gospel, “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Cyrus, Caesar, and Christ

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 45:1-7, Psalm 96:1-13 and Matthew 22:15-22.

Cyrus the Great was a Persian ruler who not only overthrew his grandfather and father but went on to conquer the Babylonian empire in October of 539 BC. The people greeted him as a liberator. One of the first things he did was issue an edict that let peoples conquered by the Babylonians return to their homelands. He also let them restore their places of worship. This included the Jews, who had gone into exile in Babylon in 586 BC. It's no wonder he is mentioned favorably in several places in the Old Testament, specifically in 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Daniel and Isaiah. In today's passage from Isaiah, God calls Cyrus his anointed. This is not because Cyrus worshiped the God of Israel. We know from the Cyrus Cylinder, which recorded this decree and was discovered in 1879, that he was devoted to the god Marduk. Cyrus was simply used by God to let his people return to Judea and rebuild their temple, just as Cyrus let other peoples go home and rebuild their pagan worship spaces. He didn't privilege one religious group over another.

Nevertheless, in this passage God is letting Cyrus know that he is in fact the only God. He is ultimately in control. “I form light and create darkness; I make peace and I create disaster; I the Lord do all these things.” (My translation) Think of God as a chess grandmaster. We are free to make whatever moves we choose but he always has a countermove and a strategy. In the end he will be victorious. We can either try to work against him or work with him.

And each of us has gifts and talents which we can use for him or against him. Some people have gifts that enable them to become leaders in government. Some have gifts that enable them to become religious leaders. And those are two different roles. Even in ancient Israel, there was the king and there was the priesthood. And there were the prophets as well. The king was expected to set the tone of reverence for God and care for God's people. But he was not a priest. He may on occasion prophesy. But he was not a prophet. (1 Samuel 10:9-13)

Remember that Israel having a king was not God's original plan. (1 Samuel 8) He permits Israel to have one but warns them of the dangers of giving one man so much power. God is his people's king, as it says in today's psalm. Any earthly ruler operates under God and is accountable to him. When David committed adultery with the wife of his soldier Uriah and then had her husband killed in battle to cover up Bathsheba's pregnancy, Nathan the prophet confronted the king about his sin. (2 Samuel 11 & 12) Confronting and correcting the king is part of the prophet's job. And David's sin has real consequences. He has problems in his family. Because he has shed so much blood, David cannot build God's temple. (1 Chronicles 28:3) Being a king, and even one after God's heart, does not give him carte blanche to act however he wants to. (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22) He is expected not only to enforce but also to personally obey God's laws. (Deuteronomy 17:18-20)

It was common for kings to be seen as God's representative on earth and many kings even declared themselves to be descendants of a god. Peoples in the eastern half of the Roman empire often worshiped the genius, or protective divine spirit, of the emperor. After the emperors died, they could be declared to be gods by a vote of the Roman Senate. Yet Caligula liked to dress up as one of the gods. The Senate did propose dedicating a temple to Nero as a living God. Domitian was called “master and god” in imperial documents. The temptation for a leader to see himself as a god is an old one.

Tiberius, the emperor during the time of Jesus, was a reluctant emperor and only allowed one temple to be dedicated to himself and the Senate in Smyrna. He was not deified after his death. It would have been his face on the coin shown to Jesus during the incident reported in today's gospel.

The setting of this controversy is important. Jesus is teaching in the temple. His critics are trying to trip him up and get him to say something that will get him into trouble. Their question about whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar is a trap. The taxes paid to the Romans who occupied what used to be an independent Jewish nation were not popular. Jesus would lose the crowd if he said paying them was lawful. If, however, he said it was not lawful to pay those taxes, he would be uttering treason in the eyes of the Romans. And the Antonia fortress, housing the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, overlooked the temple. Everyone was really interested in what Jesus would say.

Jesus knows this is a trap. He asks to see the coin with which the tax was paid. They bring him a denarius. And this shows that they were in fact hypocrites. They shouldn't have had this coin on them. The whole reason that moneychangers were allowed in the temple was because Roman coins had graven images on them. Tiberius' face was on one side of the coin and his mother Livia, portrayed as a goddess, was on the other. The inscription identified him as the “son of the divine Augustus” and the “chief priest.” They were idolatrous. In order to make donations to the temple or to pay the temple tax you had to change these coins for local shekels.

So they give him a coin that should not be on the temple grounds. Jesus looks at it and asks “Whose head is this and whose title?” Nobody repeats the blasphemous title but his critics simply say, “Caesar's.” So Jesus replies, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.”

It's not just a clever way to avoid their trap but a profound statement of our relationship to human government and to God's kingship. Caesar, through the Roman government, issues the coins. His image on them tells us to whom they ultimately belong. Also money relies on trust and thus makes a large economy possible. Money that is issued by a stable government and which keeps its value lets people trust their financial transactions. So Jesus is saying that government has a valid role in civilization. But human government is not the only thing that matters.

Money may have images of humans on it, but humans also bear an image. We are all created in the image of God. (Genesis 1:27) Just as the image of Caesar says that a coin has a value, so too the image of God in us says that humans have an inherent value. That's why God tells Noah that shedding the blood of humans is serious. (Genesis 9:6) It is a desecration of God's image and murder is symbolic deicide. Jesus reaffirms that connection between humans and God when he says that whatever we do to others, especially those who are hungry, thirsty, under-clothed, sick, imprisoned or resident aliens, we do to Jesus. (Matthew 25: 31-44) Jesus is God Incarnate and in him we see most clearly the unblemished image of God. (Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:15; John 14:9)

So Jesus is saying that money and other things can belong to human government but that people belong to God. As C.S. Lewis said, next to the elements of communion, the most holy physical thing you can encounter in this life is your fellow human being. And just as it is against the law to mutilate, cut, deface, disfigure or perforate money with the intent to destroy it, make it unfit to circulate or to commit fraud, it is against God's law to intentionally mutilate, injure or otherwise harm another human being to take them out of circulation.

Notice too that Jesus refers to the things that are Caesar's and to the things that are God's. The things of Caesar are the lawful instruments of government: taxes, political offices and functions, government agencies, the police, and the military. What, besides humans, are the things that belong to God? That would include the instruments that he uses: churches and church organizations, the freedom to gather and worship him, and the freedom to spread his word and do the good works to which he calls us.

One reason James Madison included the separation of church and state in the first amendment to our Constitution to keep religion from being an arm of the government, as it was in Britain and Europe at that time. Just like ancient kings and emperors claimed to be divine, governments love to say that their policies and laws are divinely approved. That makes it seem sinful to criticize or disagree with them. It allows them to paint their perceived enemies as enemies of God. That's why it is not only wrong but dangerous to claim that the US is a Christian nation and should be run only by Christians. Just which Christian denomination would that be? A mainstream one or one that has a lot of doctrines and practices that are specific to their version? What if some group like the Westboro Baptist Church took over the government? To prevent that, the first amendment of the Bill of Rights says the government cannot establish or prohibit a religion.

Jesus clearly limits the authority of human governments. And he did so at a time when nobody could elect their government leaders and nobody could tell the king or emperor that certain things were off limits to him. We live in a different situation these days. Yet there are those who wish to end democracy and do away with elections and have said so publicly. There are rich individuals who want to use their power to make the government do what they want, like cut their taxes, give them contracts and do away with any regulations that will hold them accountable. There are elected politicians who want to end the process which would allow anyone else to be elected.

A leader who had godlike power that no one else could limit was a feature of the world Jesus and the early church inhabited. When told to stop proclaiming the good news of Jesus, the apostles said to the authorities, “We must obey God and not men.” (Acts 5:27-29) I hope it doesn't come to that today.

Ultimately the imperial cult of the Roman empire could not shut up the church or stamp out the gospel. Christianity was an illegal religion for the first 300 years of its existence. In that time, it grew from a handful of people to 6 million, or 10% of the population of the empire. That was enough for Constantine to make it legal in 313 AD. I just wish that the emperor Theodosius 1 had not made it the official religion of the empire in the year 380. That wed the church, the bride of Christ, to the state. That made the things of God the things of Caesar as well. And it recast the things of Caesar as the things of God. Mixing these two not only dilutes the appeal of the gospel—think of all those beautiful empty churches in Europe that used to be state churches—but it also corrupts the church. When Caesar took over the authority of God, that was when it became acceptable to force people to convert rather than to persuade them. That was when it became acceptable to hate rather than love our enemies. That was when it became acceptable to injure, harm and even kill people in the name of Christ, thinking that the mere existence of non-Christians was somehow a dire threat to the church.

It makes you wonder if those who think that way really believe that God is in control. Do they really believe Jesus when he said that the gates of hell could not prevail against his church? (Matthew 16:18) Do they trust in the power of Christ or do they actually trust in the power of Caesar? Fortunately, in our day and age we can decide to keep the things that belong to God out of the hands of Caesar. 

Signs of Life

 The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 25:1-9, Philippians 4:1-9 and Matthew 22:1-14.

During my 40 years of nursing I have taken care of hundreds of patients. Most lived and got better, a few died. And after a while, you develop the ability to instantly, upon walking into a room, tell if a patient lying in bed is either sleeping or has passed away. I think it is the absolute stillness of a body that not only is no longer breathing but which is without any movement whatsoever. And I just learned that video can detect a heartbeat by picking up on tiny color changes in the face that occur when blood pulses under the skin. Supposedly it is so subtle that people can't see it but computers can, which helps them distinguish between deep fakes created by AI and videos of real people. However, I wonder if a nurse or a doctor can also sense it, albeit unconsciously.

Most deaths that I have witnessed, or come upon just after it happened, are peaceful. That and my own near fatal car crash, in which I passed out because of a collapsed lung and woke up later out of a coma, have left me unafraid of death. Mind you, there are certain ways I would not like to die. But death itself does not hold terror for me. If given a death sentence at my age, I would more likely experience regret over things I would never live to see, like my grand kids growing up, or ever seeing my great grandchildren. I am glad that my father got to see his great grandchild a month before his death.

And that is the real sting of death: losing loved ones. Death is the ultimate separation. If a friend or relative moves away, you can still see them, either through a visit or by video call. But once a person has died, that is the last time we will see and talk to them. I wonder if it's really hard for the relatives and friends of celebrities who've died to see pictures and movies of their loved ones everywhere. Robin Williams' daughter has asked that people stop making AI videos of him. Can you imagine how creepy that would be? And yet there are companies who are trying to sell people on the idea of having an AI version of a deceased person made that can, through audio and video sampling, interact with those they left behind. To me, that is the ultimate denial of the reality of death.

Yet the belief in a life after this one is a persistent feature of human psychology. More than 100,000 years ago, in the Qafzeh cave in lower Galilee, not far from Nazareth, humans were buried with grave goods, like tools, that seem to indicate belief in an afterlife. I think it is safe to say that we are the only animals who not only know that we will die but who also envision that death is not the absolute end of our existence.

In our reading from Isaiah, the prophet is praising God for all the wonderful things he does, like protecting them from their enemies and offering a refuge for the poor and needy. And then he moves on to an even bigger concern: death. After talking about a great feast that God will prepare for all peoples on Mt. Zion, he says God will destroy “the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the covering that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.”

This passage is interesting for 2 reasons. First, there is the connection of a banquet with death. Throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, Sheol is where all the dead go and it is a gloomy place of dust, decay and darkness. There is no praise and indeed no thought or speech. (Psalms 30:9; 94:17; Ecclesiastes 9:10) There is no rejoicing or banqueting. But here we see the Lord setting out a fine banquet that is to be shared with all people.

Secondly, at this banquet where people are feasting, God “will swallow up death forever.” And this is in contrast to an earlier passage in Isaiah where we are told of God's impending judgment on his people who take from the poor, oppress them and grind them down. (Isaiah 3:14-15) In response God says, “So Death will open up its throat, and open wide its mouth; Zion's dignitaries and masses will descend into it, including those who revel and celebrate within her.” (Isaiah 5:14) Those who were partying when they should have been helping the poor will be swallowed up by death. It is possible that Isaiah was calling up a picture of the Canaanite god Mot, who was the personification of death and swallowed up people when they died. But in today's passage, God reverses that. He swallows up death. The enemy of all peoples will be no more. And we are told, “Then the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces...” This is echoed in Revelation where we read, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things have ceased to exist.” (Revelation 21:4)

The God of the Bible is the God of life. He created life and everything that goes with it, like food and drink and joy. Death is the negation of all of that. It's like how a black hole sucks in everything around it and lets nothing out, not even light. God is the opposite. He is the source of all that is good. Which is why good things tend to be found together. For instance, where there is genuine love, you also find compassion, justice and mercy.

In our passage from Philippians, Paul tells us to focus our minds on a group of good things. We are to think about whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, anything that is excellent, and anything worthy of praise. These things go together, because they are signs of moral and spiritual health. Their opposites are also often found together: things that are false, dishonorable, unjust, sinful, disagreeable, not recommended, substandard and worthy of scorn. They are symptoms of things that are morally and spiritually unhealthy. Left untreated, they will eventually lead to death.

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus tells a parable about another banquet. The setup is that a king is giving a wedding feast for his son. We are told, “He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited...” In other words, these are people who have already received and accepted invitations. The king is now sending word that the food is ready. “My oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered.” This is a lavish feast. One fattened calf could feed a village. He doesn't want the food to spoil. But now the people who had previously accepted the invitations are too busy to come. This would be a grave insult, especially to a king. Still he sends out messengers to get people to come as they had agreed to. When some of the invitees actually mistreat and kill some of his slaves, they receive a punishment they should have expected. So then he sends his slaves out to invite anyone, good or bad, to the banquet. In the parallel passage in Luke, they are told to bring in “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.” (Luke 14:21) The king wants the wedding hall filled with anyone who accepts his invitation.

In Matthew's version, the king “noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe.” When he asks the man how he got in without proper attire, the man doesn't answer. And we think, “That's weird. The king has invited people from the streets. How could this man have gotten a wedding robe at such short notice?” But the king would know this and since it would be an insult to appear with dirty work clothes, some commentators posit that the king provided wedding garments for the guests. For this man then to refuse the garment provided would be an insult. And he knows this because he can't even come up with an excuse. So he is ejected from the wedding banquet.

Garments often represent righteousness in the New Testament. (Galatians 3:27; Revelation 7:13-14) In Revelation, the bride of the Lamb of God, that is, the church, makes herself ready. We read, “Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear. (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God's holy people.)” (Revelation 19:8) Since the fine linen was given, the righteous deeds were also given by God acting through his people. And we do see folks who supposedly accept God's invitation to enter his kingdom but who do not avail themselves of the righteousness he provides through Jesus. That healing of our sinful self comes through his Spirit, whom we receive when we accept Jesus, especially at baptism. As Peter says at Pentecost, “Repent, and each one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38) Having the Spirit is an essential part of following Jesus. Paul says “You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. Now if someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to him.” (Romans 8:9) Even for those who have the Spirit, it is possible to not respond to the Spirit because Paul also admonishes us not to quench or extinguish the Spirit. (1 Thessalonians 5:19) And the vital signs that we are in the Spirit and that the Spirit is in us is that we produce the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

This parable is about accepting or refusing God's invitation to become part of his kingdom. The people who previously said they would come didn't. So God extends his invitation to everyone. Some who say they accept it refuse to do what goes along with accepting Jesus. Once a man who claimed he was a Christian actually told me that to say he should change his lifestyle and turn from his sins was legalistic because we are saved through faith and not by works. True, but in that same passage he was quoting Paul says, “For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works so that no one can boast. For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand so we may do them.” (Ephesians 2:8-10) We are not saved by works but we are saved for them. When I had my accident, I wasn't made better by walking; I was made better by trusting the surgeon to cut me open and put me back together. But he did that so that I could walk. If, as I've seen patients with hip or knee replacements do, I refused to do my physical therapy, I wouldn't walk again and the surgeon would have fixed my legs for nothing. Being able to walk was a sign of my recovery, that I was getting better, that I was reclaiming my life.

God is the source of life and of all good things. And Jesus illustrates this by depicting the kingdom of God as a banquet with lots of good food. It is a joyous celebration of the wedding of Jesus, the Lamb of God, and his bride, the church. And as we see in Isaiah, it is also a celebration of the end of death. God's eternal life will swallow up death. God will live with us and wipe away all our tears. Death need not spell our permanent separation from God or our loved ones. We need only to accept God's invitation, gratefully receive the righteousness given us by Jesus, and let his Spirit work through us to make us better people, people who are not out of place at his banquet, who can't wait to celebrate being with God and enjoying all the good things he has in store for us.

It's the Law

The scriptures referred to are Exodus 10:1-4, 7-9,12-20 and Matthew 21:33-46.

In the Hippocratic oath that doctors take, there is the statement, “First, do no harm.” The oath nurses take, named in honor of Florence Nightingale, has a similar but lengthier statement that we will abstain from “whatever is deleterious and mischievous, and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug.” It's kind of obvious that we in the healing arts should not do anything that causes harm. It's a good basic rule for morality and ethics as well. For instance, while the Golden Rule is pretty much universal, it is most often stated negatively; that is, don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to yourself. That is the low bar that we expect everyone to understand and live by. If you can't help someone, at least don't make things worse for them.

It may sound odd, but the Ten Commandments we have read in today's passage from Exodus could be seen as the least you can do morally. Just don't do these things that either harm other people or that harm your relationship with God. All but 2 of them are negative: don't worship other gods, don't make idols, don't misuse God's name, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie about your neighbor, don't crave what belongs to your neighbor. The commandment about the Sabbath is both positive and negative: keep the Sabbath holy which means don't work on that day. The commandment about parents is purely positive and the only one that comes with a promise: honor your father and mother so that you will live a long time in the land God is giving you.

Though they are mostly negative, there are positive principles behind them. William Barclay said, “The whole of the Ten Commandments are based on two great principles. They are based on reverence, reverence for God, for God's name, for God's day, for the parents God has given us. They are based on respect, respect for a man's life, for his possessions, for his personality, for his good name, for oneself.” This last one is because if you do right by God and by other people you can respect yourself as a good person.

Another way to look at them is that there are 5 principles underlying the ten. They are about recognizing and respecting the existence of others, ie, God and humans. They are about being faithful in your relationships with God and other people. They are about preserving your personal integrity. They are about preserving the integrity of society and its institutions. And they are about acknowledging and honoring the rights of others.

And you may diagram the commandments as a cross. The vertical axis is about our relationships with our creators, God and our parents, and the horizontal axis is about our relationships with our peers, the other humans we live and interact with. And we can see this in how Jesus summarized the commandments. When asked which of the 613 commandments found in the Torah, the 5 books of Moses, was the greatest, Jesus answered with not one but two. “'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40) The first commandment he quotes comes from Deuteronomy 6:5 and is part of the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith which is recited by observant Jews daily and in the synagogue service every Sabbath. The second commandment is from Leviticus 19:18, a chapter that restates most of the Ten Commandments and also expands what they mean in practical ways.

C.S. Lewis compared the 3 parts of morality to an orchestra. He said personal morality is like the need to take care of your own instrument. That's why before a performance you hear the musicians making sure their instruments are working properly and are in tune. Social morality is like the way you need to harmonize with the other musicians and their instruments, keeping the right beat, coming in at the right time and not playing when it's not your part. Religious morality is like how everyone should be following the conductor and playing the same piece of music he is conducting. If he's conducting Beethoven's Ninth, you don't want to be playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” So too as Christians we want to make sure that we are in good shape morally, that we are doing our part in our community and that we are all on the same page in doing the right thing.

And you can't get away with skipping any one of the 3 parts of morality. Self-discipline is important but by itself it's not enough. After all, Hitler didn't drink or smoke or eat meat. That didn't make him a good moral example. For that matter, the Nazis put a high value on working together harmoniously and having respect for authority. But the authority they obeyed and the goal for which they were working were evil. They did not see all human beings as equal and created in the image of God. Some people were vermin, they said. So they not only persecuted and killed Jews but also Slavic people, black people, the Roma (who used to be called Gypsies), mentally and physically disabled men, women and children, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, political opponents, prisoners of war, and Christian clergy who spoke out against what they were doing. And since all of that obviously went against what the Bible says, they edited God's word in order to maintain the fiction that Nazism and Christianity could somehow go together. Sadly, a lot of churchgoers were fine with that.

The reason we need to have moral laws spelled out is because you can find a lot of people who will go along with the Nazis and other groups that say that some people are inherently inferior to others and do not deserve the same rights. But laws cannot make people do what is right, anymore than the food pyramid can make people eat right or road signs can make people observe the speed limit. Teaching people what is right and wrong may be necessary for society but it is not sufficient to make people good. One of the recurrent themes of the Old Testament is that while God gave his people his law, they kept ignoring it and doing whatever they wanted. They worshiped other gods and denied the poor, the needy, the widows, orphans and resident aliens their rights. (Malachi 3:5) And because they turned away from God and his just laws, he turned away from them.

But he never gave up on them. That's the part of Jesus' parable in today's Gospel that we often overlook. The owner of the vineyard keeps sending his slaves to the tenants to collect what is owed him, even after previous slaves were beaten and killed. Still he remains patient with the tenants, offering them many opportunities to do what is right. And despite the fact that they don't, the landowner nevertheless decides to send his son, hoping they will respect him. When their fate befalls them, they cannot say that he was unfair.

This is that rare parable that is a complete allegory where everything stands for someone. The landowner is God, the tenants are the religious leaders, the son is Jesus and the vineyard is Israel. Jesus was probably thinking of chapter 5 of Isaiah. Isaiah says, “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.” He tells how the owner of the vineyard prepared it with loving care and yet it yields bad grapes. So he stops taking care of it and lets it become “overgrown with briers and thorns.” This passage ends by saying, “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard cries of distress.” (Isaiah 5:1-7) Trying to reproduce the wordplay of the original Hebrew, the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh translation renders this last part “And He hoped for justice, but behold, injustice; for equity, but behold, iniquity!”

Jesus' parable reminds us of his lament over the city where God's temple stood. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” (Luke 13:34-35)

A society that tolerates and even condones bloodshed and injustice cannot be surprised when bloodshed and injustice increase. As Paul says, a person will reap what he sows. (Galatians 6:7) If we plant the seeds of disdain for others and indifference to their suffering, we will see those things spread like weeds and choke off the good things we wish to enjoy for ourselves. If we sow the seeds of reverence for a just and loving God and respect for all people and their rights, we will see the fruits of a good and fair society.

As we said, however, just having these laws and commandments will not automatically make people good and fair. After all, we have seen so-called Christians turn a blind eye to the principles underlying God's laws and a deaf ear to Christ's commandments to love God and other people, just as we have seen our own countrymen routinely ignore the principles of equality and justice enshrined in our constitution.

We've all heard of how superficial observance of the letter of the law can violate the spirit of the law. In Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite who pass by the man beaten and left for dead could justify their inaction by appealing to the Jewish version of the Golden Rule, that is, to not treat people the way you would not like to be treated. They didn't beat him further or rob him. The Samaritan, however, acts according to Jesus' positive version. He treated the man the way he as a fellow human being would want to be treated. The man needed first aid and help, which the Samaritan goes out of this way to provide. Similarly religious leaders felt Jesus was violating the letter of the Sabbath prohibition on working when he healed people on that day. Jesus pointed out that his critics would not hesitate to rescue one of their animals if they fell in a hole, even on the Sabbath, (Matthew 12:11-12) Jesus also pointed out that he was doing good, which God's law was never meant to prohibit. (Mark 3:4) “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” Jesus said. (Mark 2:27) Laws are meant to make life better for people; when a strict observance of the law is harming people or letting them be harmed, that goes against the spirit of the law.

And we cannot fulfill God's law without the proper spirit; in this case, the literal Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit filled and enabled Jesus to do his mission. (Luke 4:14, 18-19) In the same way, Jesus promised the Spirit to his followers. On the night before he was arrested and executed, he said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another Helper to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him or knows him. But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:15-17)

The Spirit enables us to keep God's laws. As God says to his people in the book of Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you; I will take the initiative and you will obey my statutes and carefully observe my regulations.” (Ezekiel 36:26-27)

After my accident and my surgeries, I needed to learn to walk again. It's harder than you think because you normally do it without thinking. I needed physical therapists to help me learn how to walk, how to transfer from my wheelchair to my bed or to the toilet. Their goal was to train me to the point where I would no longer need to think about these techniques because they would become a part of me. And they were there for me as I learned to stand and to walk. One had a gait belt around my waist, to make sure I didn't fall. Another pushed my wheelchair behind me in case I suddenly lost strength and needed to sit down. They were my support as I learned and did what was required for me to get better.

Think of the Spirit as our physical therapist, teaching and helping us walk with God. The Spirit teaches us, reminding us what Jesus, the living Word of God, has taught us. The Spirit leads us to the truth. (John 16:13-15) The Spirit also gives us encouragement and support. In fact the Greek word Jesus uses in John's Gospel, parakletos, means helper, counselor, advocate and encourager. That's why different translations use different words for the Spirit in this passage. No one English word encompasses all the Spirit does for us.

Good rules and good laws are good for us. Like all good things, they can be misused. And bad laws can allow or even call for people to be harmed, such as the laws the Nazis passed or the Runaway Slave Act passed before our Civil War that required people to turn in runaway slaves, contrary to what the Bible says. (Deuteronomy 23:15-16) That is why we need to be sensitive to the Spirit of God, the Spirit who filled and enabled Jesus. As Paul said, “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment, namely, 'You must love your neighbor as yourself.'” (Galatians 5:14) In the same chapter he says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23) If we live the law of love, and produce the fruit of the Spirit, we know that we are truly following Jesus.

Choices and Changes

The scriptures referred to are Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32, Philippians 2:1-13 and Matthew 21:23-32.

In his book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow explains why AI is being pushed on us and why the companies creating it overhype what it can actually do. It's because investors pour much more money into companies that appear to be growing than boring mature companies with steady but unexciting returns. So the claim that AI is inevitable and will replace most jobs is just a sales pitch. Still Doctorow admits that AI can do some tasks faster or more efficiently than humans. It can do some things as well as humans. For instance, he says, it could easily predict his wife's reaction to just about anything as well as he could. Because people repeat themselves. It could analyze all her reactions, notice patterns and be able to use probability to make predictions. Unless she said something like “I want a divorce.” Because AI can't predict what has never happened before. It's trained on the accumulated data that presently exists. What AI offers is basically a compilation or a summary or a mashup of what is already out there. Doctorow says it's basically a glorified search engine, the embodiment of all the comment sections on the internet. Even the scary things it does, like hack other companies, lie and make up things when it doesn't know, are simply AI imitating what it's learned that humans do. Because machines can't generate original thoughts.

It is true that in general if you know what people have consistently done in the past, you can reasonably predict what they will do in the future. Reasonably but not reliably. Think political polls. If you could know what people would do with absolute certainty, psychology would be a hard science like physics. Nothing people did would ever surprise us. But they can. Because people can change their minds. If they couldn't, advertising would be useless. No one would ever change their brand of car or toothpaste or their political party. People would never change their religion. Social scientists know that even when they can predict what large groups of people will do, they can't predict what any one individual within a group will do. And that person might come up with an original idea that will persuade others to change their minds and change society.

For decades people have debated whether our personalities and behaviors are determined by nature or nurture. Studies show that the personalities of identical twins differ by as much as 30 to 60%. A major DNA study by the UK Biobank shows that specific genetic markers only account for between 13 and 16% of differences. Other differences come from a person's environment and life events, including things like friendships. The point is that we are not machines who do everything because we are programmed by our DNA or even by our upbringing. We can change.

Which is the reason, I hope, that we are all here. If people can't change then a key idea in Christianity is nonsense. Jesus' message, according to Mark, was “The time has come...The kingdom of God is near. Repent, and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) The Greek word translated “repent” literally means “to think differently afterwards.” And Jesus got people to rethink what a Messiah was like. Jesus was not a king, at least not the kind they were used to. He was not a warrior, though some probably thought he would eventually become one. He was not a priest, another of the popular ideas of what the Messiah would be. What he turned out to be was a healer, a preacher and a teacher. Jesus changed people's sick bodies into healthy ones and he also changed their minds by changing the way they saw God and our relationship with him.

It was popularly thought that there were two kinds of people: the righteous and the sinners. Jews like the Pharisees, who scrupulously observed the Jewish laws, both the ones written in the Torah and the oral laws rabbis derived from them, were considered righteous. Jews who weren't observant, or those who collected taxes for the Romans, or who were prostitutes or criminals, and sometimes even those who were disabled, like the man born blind, were considered sinners. Yet there were zealous Pharisees who thought that if they could get all Jews to obey the Torah perfectly for just one day, the Messiah would come. But that requires repentance. And it's hard to persuade people to repent if you avoid interacting with those you see as sinners in order to preserve your ritual purity, as religious leaders of that time did. Eating and sharing table fellowship with sinners, as Jesus did, implied friendship and was seen as endorsing their lifestyle.

Repentance is a theme we find over and over in the prophets. God tells Ezekiel, “...when the wicked turn away from the wickedness they have committed and do what is lawful and right, they shall save their life. Because they considered and turned away from all the transgressions they had committed, they shall surely live; they shall not die.” (Ezekiel 18:27-28) God says people can change. And by the way, the Hebrew word for “turn away” or “turn back” can also be translated “repent.” Because turning your life around, turning away from sin and turning to God is at the heart of repentance.

The fact that we can change our minds and turn from what is morally and spiritually harmful to what is morally and spiritually healthy is a big reason for hope. While it is difficult to change your bad habits, it is not impossible. Not even when it comes to something like addiction. 31 million people, 9.1% of American adults, have had various addictions and yet have managed to beat them. The odds do differ with each particular substance. About 35 to 36% of people treated for alcoholism manage to remain sober. Smoking is harder with 8 to 9% managing to quit for good. Still that means people do manage to kick these habits. First, you have to decide that you are going to be one of those people who beats the odds. And then you need to seek help. Because overall 40 to 60% of people treated for a substance abuse disorder achieve long-term sobriety. And after 5 years, the likelihood of a relapse falls to 15% or less. For those who seek treatment, recovery looks more like the rule rather than the exception.

But nobody simply drifts into changing long established ways of doing things. You have to make a decision. And then you have to act on it. In Jesus' parable, the two brothers say different things when their father asks them to work in their vineyard. One refuses but later changes his mind and does what his father asked him to do. The other says he will but doesn't actually do it. Jesus is addressing his critics, the chief priests and elders of the people. They talk the talk but do not walk the walk. They proclaim their love for God and for their neighbor with their lips but they don't show it with their lives. As Jesus says elsewhere, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.” (Matthew 23:23) In the parallel passage in Luke, he also mentions “the love of God.” (Luke 11:42) These are the things Jesus says are more important. And yet even today we have so-called Christians who elevate certain religious practices, like saying “Merry Christmas” and wearing crosses, while they simultaneously ignore matters of justice or showing mercy or demonstrating faithfulness to Christian principles or reflecting the love of God towards others. It astounds me that people can quote John 3:16 which says that “God so loved the world” while showing no love for a large percentage of the people of the world.

In our passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians, he also advocates a change of mind. He tells Christians to “do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interest of others.” If all of us were to do that, everybody's interests would be taken care of. However, this means everyone needs to “be of the same mind.” And that mind is the one “that was in Christ Jesus.” Paul then quotes what we think was an early Christian hymn about Jesus, “who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on the cross.” I like J.B. Phillips translation which says that Jesus, “who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his privileges as God's equal, but stripped himself of every advantage by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born a man. And, plainly seen as a human being, he humbled himself by living a life of utter obedience, to the point of death, and the death he died was that of a common criminal.”

Paul's point is that our change of mind is not merely from doing wrong to doing right but to being like Jesus, who gave up everything he had going for him as God in order to become one of us, acting as a humble slave, not to his own interests, but to what was in our best interest: our salvation. As Jesus himself said, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45)

Unfortunately, the church has often changed its mindset to that of the world, using its metrics to decide what successfully carrying out its mission should look like. We determine how well a church is doing by measuring its budget and its membership and its average attendance. When megachurch pastors write books on how to grow a church, they become bestsellers in the Christian market. I'm not saying those things are unimportant but more important is a church's impact on its community and on individuals. After all, Jesus never preached in a megachurch or a stadium. The biggest city he ever visited was Jerusalem, which had an estimated population of 20,000 to 50,000 people, or somewhere around the population of Key West, or at its upper limits, with the populations of Marathon and Key Largo thrown in. Paul says that the risen Jesus appeared to over 500 followers. (1 Corinthians 15:6) They would fill a mid-sized church today. But Jesus' impact on the world was huge. There are Christians in nearly every country on earth, including ones where they have to meet secretly. More books have been written about Jesus than any other individual in human history. And as historian Tom Holland has shown, Christianity has changed the values we think society should hold, like the inherent worth of every individual and the moral obligation of the powerful to help those who are vulnerable, sick or poor. It's even influenced secular movements which seek to spread and realize those values in the world.

As I said, the ability of humans to change their minds, values and actions gives us hope. We are not merely computers made of meat or robots made of muscles and bones. We can transcend our heritable personality traits. We can break away from the environments in which we were raised. We are more than just clever animals who must prioritize our personal survival over larger, fiercer predators. Instead, we can use our God-given gifts to make the world better for all, serving others as Christ does.

But change can work both ways. There are those who wish the world would change back into one where might makes right, where the rich and powerful get more and more and where sympathy and resources are not to be wasted on the less fortunate. They wish to restore the type of empire that had people like Jesus crucified. They want a world where kings and emperors are worshiped as gods. And they are hard at work making that happen.

N.T. Wright has said that churches should act as small working models of the kingdom of God. We should demonstrate that humility is better than delusions of grandeur, that serving others is better than demanding to be served, and that love is better than either hatred or indifference. We should show in our lives that all people have inherent worth because they were created in God's image and because Jesus died to save them. And we can only do this if we don't merely say we will do these things but actually go out into the vineyard and put them into practice. And we must do so even when the odds seem to be against us. Because as Paul said, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31) After all, we are followers of one who was killed in the most horrible way by the most powerful empire in the world at that time. Yet not even death could stop him. That empire is gone; his message, the good news of God acting in Christ and in us, endures. Will we let the empty promises and hype of those with temporary earthly powers cause us to turn away from following Jesus? Or will we use our God-given ability to change lead us to choose and implement what is better for us, for the world and for the glory of the God who is love?

Being Like God

The scriptures referred to are Jonah 3:10-4:11, Psalm 145:1-8, and Matthew 20:1-16.

In case you are not clear on whether a character in a movie or TV show is a good guy or a bad guy, the big clue is whether he declares he is a god or that when his plan is accomplished he will be like a god. That's the villain. And he doesn't mean godlike in a moral sense but that he will have power over nature or reality, and especially over other people. He rarely means he wants the power to heal others, unless, like in the HBO series Lanterns, it's to obligate others to do what he wants. He never means he wants to be like the God of the Bible, who is described in the Psalms as "gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." (Psalm 145:8) Humans want to control other things and other people, not their own thoughts, words and actions.

The very first temptation in the Bible is to attain godlike power. The first humans violate the only rule in paradise because they want to "be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5) Because knowledge is power. And aside from the fact that this temptation reveals doubts about God's goodness and trustworthiness, it also shows humans to be susceptible to egotism. Because in the first chapter of Genesis, we are told that human beings, both male and female, are made in God's image. (Genesis 1:27) So to want to be even more godlike is greedy. And impatient. God pronounced everything he created as very good, including the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The existence of a way to gain such knowledge without firsthand experience of evil must be there for a good purpose. I think God was acting as a wise parent does when telling small children not to touch the stove. The stove is not evil but they are not ready to use it safely and responsibly. The first humans were not ready to learn that God's good gifts could also be used to destroy creation and harm each other. And based on the history of the world ever since, we still aren't.

The purpose of the Bible is to bring us closer to God, both spiritually and morally. It also gives us examples of people doing good and doing evil. And often they are the same people. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Peter, Paul and everyone else in the Bible, except Jesus, are morally flawed. God nevertheless works through them, though their misdeeds do have consequences. Jacob's sons mimic his deceitfulness when they make it look as if his favorite son Joseph is dead. Moses is not permitted to enter the promised land. David's adultery causes problems in his family and dynasty, and he is forbidden to build God's temple because he is a man of war. The Bible does not whitewash history or give us idealized portraits of the heroes of the faith.

Not only do we see that God is more righteous than human beings, but he is more forgiving. In the book of Jonah, it is the prophet, not God, who wants to see the capital of the ruthless Assyrian empire destroyed. When the people there repent, Jonah is bitter. Then God withers a bush that was giving Jonah shade to make a point. Jonah did not make the bush and yet he got attached to it. But God created the people in question. He says to the prophet, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?" God is concerned with all his creatures, including people of other nations and species other than ours.

In our Gospel, Jesus reveals another side of God's goodness. Often religious people are interested in God giving everyone what they deserve. But they don't like it if they feel that others are getting what they don't deserve. And I wish this meant that they are only upset when certain people get more trouble than they seem to deserve. But some people are outraged if they see others get more good fortune than they feel those folks merit. It reminds me of the experiment in which Capuchin monkeys were rewarded for doing certain tasks. They would get a rock which they could turn in for food. At first they all got cucumber slices. But when the researchers gave one monkey a juicy grape, the monkey in the next cage was no longer happy with his cucumber slice. He would not eat it. He would throw it back at the researcher. He would screech and bang against the cage. He might even go on strike and refuse to do the task for which he got rewarded. But he didn't get less than usual; he was incensed that the other monkey got more.

In Jesus' parable, the people hired at the end of the day do not get more than those who worked longer. They simply get the same pay, a denarius, the standard daily wage in those days. And though the people hired earlier had agreed to that, they now felt they should be paid more. The landowner is not cheating them; he is merely being generous by paying everyone the same.

My wife and I recently rewatched the movie 9 to 5, Dolly Parton's movie debut. 46 years later, it's still funny and more importantly, it's still relevant. Sorry to spoil a film nearly half a century old, but the plot involves 3 women who need to sideline their terrible boss for about 6 weeks. In the process, they realize that almost no one wants to meet with him anyway and that they can run the department just fine without him. In fact, they make improvements to the workplace. As the boss's secretary, Dolly can write memos and forge his signature. So first they let everyone keep personal items on their desk. Then they introduce flex time, job sharing, daycare for the workers' children, a rehabilitation program for workers with alcohol problems and equal pay for men and women. When their boss returns swearing vengeance, he is surprised to find that the CEO is happy with the changes because worker productivity has greatly increased. The CEO has just one problem: they need to get rid of the equal pay for women. As with the day laborers in Jesus' parable, he thinks that paying everyone the same is simply going too far.

Some people think Paul invented the idea of salvation by grace. But while Jesus doesn't use that phrase, we see it in his teachings. What is grace? As someone put it, justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting all you deserve when you do wrong. Grace is getting what you could never deserve. It is God's undeserved, unreserved goodness towards us. It is seen in this parable where people get, not what they have earned, but what they need to live. It is seen in Jesus' response to his disciples' flabbergasted reaction to him saying the rich have no advantage in entering the kingdom of God. He compares them to a camel trying to squeeze through the eye of a sewing needle. When his disciples ask, "Then who can be saved?" he says, "What is impossible for mere humans is possible for God." (Luke 18:25-27) We all, rich or poor, need God's grace to enter his kingdom. Nobody can earn it.

God's grace is seen in Jesus' life. He didn't ask if the people who came to him deserved to be healed. All they needed to do was trust in his power and goodness and he healed them. He didn't weed out the undeserving from the thousands who were hungry. He fed them all. He didn't debate whether this world of greedy, rage-filled, envious, lustful, lazy, gluttonous, and arrogant people deserved to be saved. Instead, he went to the cross for them. As Paul says, "God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

It says something about us that when we talk about somebody "playing God" we always mean that they are abusing their authority to decide the fate of others. We mean they are deciding who gets treated well and who gets treated badly. Often, we mean that the person is deciding who lives and who dies. But we never say that someone who forgives or is gracious is "playing God." We never mean that someone who is playing God is acting like Jesus. Yet Jesus is God Incarnate. If you want to know what God is really like, look at Jesus.

And people should be able to look at Christians and see what folks following in Jesus' footsteps are like. To the extent that they don't see Jesus in our words and actions shows how much we have failed to be the body of Christ, the ongoing embodiment of the Spirit of God who filled Jesus. If people want to see the condemnation of sinful folk, there are plenty of other religious groups who will oblige. There are also lots of nonreligious people who will be glad to pass verdicts on the lifestyles, social and political positions of others. When Jesus said not to pass judgment on others, he was addressing a common problem. We love to hold other people up to high standards which we do not always live up to. We usually judge ourselves on what we intended to do, letting ourselves off the hook when the results of our actions make things worse. But we judge others on what they actually did or didn't accomplish. Their intentions don't come into our verdict on them. Part of loving our neighbor as we do ourselves is cutting them the same slack we give ourselves when what we do falls short of God's standards. Jesus warns us that God will hold us to the standards we use for others, so we need to err on the side of mercy. (Matthew 7:1-5)

We live in a world where the powerful say you should move fast and break things. They see the status quo as something that should always be broken. But they also end up breaking things that may just have needed to be reformed. And they break the lives of people who depend on those things to live. Right now we are seeing how even imperfect systems were helping the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the resident alien, people the treatment of whom Jesus said would be the basis on which nations would be judged. (Matthew 25:31-46) Instead a chainsaw was taken to them by insanely rich people who valued saving money more than saving people. And a chainsaw is not gracious or merciful or forgiving. Christians, however, should be. God is.

Genesis 3 tells us how humans decided to ignore God's rule because they thought they knew how the world should be run better than he. And we can see how that worked out. But right from the beginning God was merciful. He initially said that on the day they broke that rule they would die. And while the spiritual sickness did indeed set in and their relationship with God and nature began to decline, God didn't let them die that day. He was merciful. He was gracious. He made them better protection against the elements than they could cobble together themselves. And God started the long process of bringing good things out of the bad stuff we did and have continued to do. And he did this knowing that one day he would have to take upon himself the brunt of what we have done to ourselves and each other. In Jesus, he took on the consequences of our arrogance and violence and disregard for the suffering of others. The God of life made himself vulnerable to death. Then he underwent death. And after three days, he defeated it.

Why did he do this? Because God is love. (1 John 4:8) And when facing that which threatened the object of his love, God offered himself instead. Love makes sacrifices for those it loves. Jesus put himself between us and the death and destruction we have unleashed on his creation. He gave his life that we might live. As Paul put it, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

And that's another way in which those who want to be like God don't really mean that. They do not desire to display self-sacrificial love for others. During my years as a psychiatric nurse and as a chaplain, I have met people who claimed to be God or Jesus. They wished to be acknowledged as such and to get special treatment. They wanted people to listen to their pronouncements. None of them ever expressed a willingness to live a self-sacrificial life. That is not the godlike quality that people wish to emulate or demonstrate.

It's hardly breaking news that the world is full of people who are egotistical and selfish, who would never sacrifice the slightest thing in their life to make life better for other people. Instead they want others to sacrifice their happiness or well-being or life to make things better for them. And they use whatever power they have to make that a reality. The world needs a counterbalance. It needs Jesus. And it needs people who are willing to follow him, to be merciful and forgiving, “gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” That is what it truly means to be godly, to be Christlike. That is what we see in the sacrifice Jesus made when he went to the cross for us. And that is the cross we are to pick up and carry daily: our self-sacrificial love for the world of people whom God created in his image and whom Jesus died to save.