Pentecost 17, Year A (2020)

Proper 21 ::  Ezekiel 18: 1–4, 25–32 / Psalm 25: 1–8 / Philippians 2: 1–13 / Matthew 21: 23–32

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, September 27, 2020.

 

 “GOD’S TRUTH, FOUND IN UNEXPECTED PLACES”

(Homily text: Matthew 21: 23-32)

God’s truth and God’s acting in human affairs often surprise us. Perhaps the reason that God seems to take delight in reminding us that His truth isn’t always found in the places we expect it to be found is to remind us that – for all the gifts we human beings possess, for all of our mental abilities and our capacity to imagine and create – for all of that, we are, in God’s estimation at least, in need of reminding that we don’t know it all.

Put another way, we could say that there’s a downside to being created in the image and likeness of God. There’s a downside to being endowed with God’s gifts of reason, memory and skill, for we human beings can begin to think that, because we know a thing or two, we think we know it all.

Put yet another way, we could say that God seems to take delight in turning our normal expectations upside down.

With that description of the human condition, we are ready to take a look at today’s appointed Gospel text.

Jesus has come into the temple precincts in Jerusalem. He has made His triumphal entry into the city at the beginning of Holy Week. Among the challenges He will pose to those in power in the city during this week is in His overturning of the moneychangers’ tables. A bit later on, He is approached by the chief priests and the elders of the people, who ask Him, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”

Implicit in their question is a subtext, it seems to me. Perhaps the thinking of the chief priests and the elders might go something like this: “You’re a part of the working class, and you are from the town of Nazareth. (Remember the comment that we find in John’s Gospel account about Nazareth: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46) Moreover, we haven’t seen you here in Jerusalem studying with our most well-known rabbis. So where did you get your training from? You’re obviously not qualified to be a teacher, a rabbi, and you don’t belong to the ruling class (like we are) here in Jerusalem.”

Jesus’ response is masterful. The first response takes the form of a question about the origin (the authority) of John the Baptist’s work: Jesus asks if John’s work was from heaven (God), or from human origin. The chief priests and the elders are trapped, for if they say that John’s work came from heaven (God), then the question naturally arises: Why didn’t they believe in (and follow) John’s ministry? On the other hand, due to their fear of the crowd, who held that John was a prophet, they can’t say that John’s ministry was of human origin, for that would denigrate John’s authority and work.

The Lord’s second response takes the form of the Parable of the Two Sons, which digs at the heart of the chief priests and elders’ pride and their exaggerated sense of their own importance in God’s scheme of things.

The question posed by the Lord at the conclusion of the parable has only one answer: The son who initially refused to go and work in the vineyard, but then changed his mind and went, is the one who did the father’s will.

There follows the Lord’s “zinger”: The tax collectors and the prostitutes will enter the kingdom of God before you chief priests and you elders. The reason is simple: The tax collectors and those other sinners have nothing to offer God but themselves, unclean and sinful as they are. They’re willing to admit their shortcomings and their failures. To the chief priests and the elders’ way of thinking, there’s no way that the tax collectors and the notorious sinners will ever enter the kingdom at all, much less ahead of them. After all – by their own estimation – they are the holy ones, the ones who have been keeping all the requirements of the Law of Moses. They are the ones who are the exemplars of upright and proper living.

But they are proud of their self-made righteousness. They are proud of their training, their status, and their authority in all matters religious.

That’s the problem, exactly: Pride.

The chief priests and the elders’ pride prevents them from admitting that they, too, are sinners, and they are notorious ones, at that. From God’s perspectives, they are prevented from entering the kingdom precisely because they are giving God lip service, but little else, just like the son in the parable who told his father he’d go work in the vineyard, but didn’t.

In contrast, the tax collectors and those other notorious sinners have nothing to offer God but themselves. They have no platform of their own making upon which to make any claim on God’s mercy and God’s favor.

But, in reality, that’s the beginning point for each one of us: We come to God, empty-handed, offering only ourselves to Him. That, however, is the richest gift we can offer, and the one that God prizes the most: Ourselves.

So we come, admitting we fall short of God’s holiness, and seeking God’s forgiveness and mercy. In so doing, we enter the door that our Lord has opened for us, entering into an intense, personal relationship with God.

AMEN.

Pentecost 16, Year A (2020)

Proper 20 :: Exodus 16: 2–15 / Psalm 105: 1–6, 37–45 / Philippians 1: 21–30 / Matthew 20: 1–16

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, September 20, 2020.

“VALUES:   GOD’S AND OURS”

(Homily text: Matthew 20: 1–16)

Today’s Gospel text, which contains the Lord’s Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, ought to disturb us, for it turns our normal, everyday way of thinking and living on its head.

We live our lives according to bargains and contracts. We enter into agreements to work under certain terms, we come to agreements to buy things for a certain price. In all these things, we place values on things, things like the value of our time, or the value of something we want to take possession of.

In our Lord’s day, people expected that there would be a contract, a bargain, with God. The usual expectations went something like this: If I keep the sacred law, the Law of Moses (Torah) faithfully, then God will bless me. God’s blessings would usually come my way in the form of a long life, a healthy life, or perhaps with earthly wealth (or with all three, if I’ve been especially faithful and righteous).

Such an attitude can be seen in the encounter between Jesus and the rich young man, whose text immediately precedes today’s parable. The rich young man comes to the Lord, and asks what he still lacks in order to obtain eternal life. The young man’s question discloses that there’s something still missing in his bargain with God.[1]

The Lord responds with a test: “Go, sell all that you have, give the proceeds to the poor, then come and follow me,” He says to the young man.

We can imagine the young man’s inner thoughts to such a test as he turns and walks away. Perhaps his thinking went something like this: “You’re asking me to give up all the benefits and blessings that my faithful behavior has brought my way.”

Yes, exactly, that’s the intent in the Lord’s test of this young man.

Be willing to part with everything, to give it all up, to give up any and all claim that we might think we have to God’s goodness, that’s the bargain.

To illustrate this point, Jesus tells the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, saying that those who were hired late (or last) in the work day were paid the same as those who had been hired first. This doesn’t make sense, from our usual way of assigning values to things.

Our Lord’s parable drives home the point that it is God’s choice to be generous, not ours to claim on the basis of our behavior.

The only thing we can claim and it is a claim we make in Holy Baptism -is the claim that the only thing we have control over, the only thing we can truly offer God - is ourselves. Essentially, that’s what the Lord was asking the rich young man to do: Offer yourself.

In so doing, we lose it all (or have the potential to), but we gain the truest and fullest sense of the real meaning of life. The choice is ours to make.  AMEN.

---

[1]   The great reformer Marin Luther was troubled by just the same concern. Luther was concerned that his faithfulness to the Church’s demands in his day wasn’t enough for him to earn merit with God.

Pentecost 15, Year A (2020)

Proper 19 :: Genesis 50: 15–21 / Psalm 103: 8–13 / Romans 14: 1–12 / Matthew 18: 21–35

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by Fr. Gene Tucker on September 13, 2020.

“CONDUITS” 
(Homily text: Matthew 18: 21–35)

Conduits are essential tools upon much of what we experience in our daily lives depend. Consider, for example, these conduits: A extension cord connects the wall plus and its supply of electricity to the light or the appliance that needs that electricity in order to work. Or consider a rope or a chain, which can be used to connect the pulling power of a two vehicle to one that’s stuck in the mud or sand. Another example would be a hose, which connects a source of a liquid and the receiver of it.

You and I are conduits, conduits of God’s truth, conduits of God’s grace, and conduits of God’s forgiveness.

It is to the matter of forgiveness that we now turn, since our Gospel text, appointed for this morning, deals with our Lord’s teaching about offering forgiveness.

It is Peter, whom we might expect would be the very one to ask the Lord about the number of times that he (or someone else) should offer forgiveness to another person, who asks the Lord, “…how often will my brother or sister sin against me, and I forgive them? As many as seven times?”

Peter’s question flows naturally out of the Lord’s previous teaching, the one we heard last Sunday, about dealing with wrongdoing on the part of a member of the Church. There, the Lord concluded His teaching by saying that, if the guilty person doesn’t listen to the judgment of the Church, the Church is to treat them like a “Gentile and a tax collector”. Recall that we concluded last week that the Lord’s mandate in such circumstances is that we in the Church are to continue to reach out to the wrongdoer in hopes of re-establishing relationship, for that’s how the Lord treated the outcasts of the day, the tax collectors and others.

This week’s text follows, then, quite naturally out of last week’s, and in my humble estimation, constitutes one teaching, not two separate ones.

Matthew seems to want to be sure that we don’t miss this important and vital teaching from our Lord, for he includes not one, but two, teachings having to do with offering forgiveness to another person. The first may be found in Matthew 6:12, 14 – 15. There, in the Lord’s Prayer, we read this petition, “and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us (verse 12). But then, just to be sure (at least that’s my understanding of it), the Lord continues in verses 14 and 15 by saying, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.”

(It’s worth noting that Matthew is fond of repeating some of the Lord’s key teachings…Just as there are two teachings about forgiveness in Matthew’s text, so there are two teachings about marriage and divorce in Matthew’s account, to cite another example.)

The text we’ve just cited from chapter six illustrates the nature of our relationship with God and with others: We are conduits, passing along to others the good things that the Lord has given to us. Forgiveness is but one of those good things, for we cannot exist without God’s forgiveness, and our relationship with others will either be impaired or even ended if we do not hold in mind the many times God has forgiven us, as we deal with others. Conduits serve no function if they don’t connect two things, one to the other. So it is with us: We are to connect God to people and people to God, preaching the Gospel, and using words, if necessary, to do so, as St. Francis of Assisi said.

We end with this question which we might ask ourselves: “To what extent am I an effective conduit of God’s grace, goodness, mercy and forgiveness?”

AMEN.

Pentecost 14, Year A (2020)

 Proper 18 :: Ezekiel 33: 7–11 / Psalm 119: 33–40 / Romans 13: 8–14 / Matthew 18: 15–20

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, September 6, 2020.

“PRESERVING THE CHURCH IN ORDER TO PREPARE IT FOR MINISTRY”

(Homily text: Matthew 18: 15–20)

There are many things that can undermine the Church, things that, if left unaddressed and unattended to, can cause the Church to be ineffective in its work and ministry in the world.

Some of those destructive things might include:

1. A failure to assign Holy Scripture to its rightful place as the supreme authority in all matters pertaining to faith and salvation. (Yes, we Episcopalians, who are inheritors of the Anglican ethos, confirm that supplemental sources of authority consist in Right Reason (we might say “common sense” today), and also in the Church’s received tradition….but these two sources of authority are supplemental to the authority of Holy Scripture….so there is no so-called “Three-legged-stool” of authority, as if to say that Scripture, Right Reason and Tradition are all equal in their weight.)[1]
   
   
2. Dilution of the Church’s proper focus on doing God’s work by shifting our attention onto secondary concerns….the Church’s main reason-for-being has to do with its work of connecting God with people and people with God, and with the nurturing of that relationship. 
   
   
3. Adoption of a secular agenda to such an extent that the Church begins to look like the secular world in which it is situated. 
   
   
4. Allowing interpersonal strife and disagreements to crowd out our Christ-like witness to the world.

It is this last point which is the focus of our Lord’s teaching, heard in our Gospel text this morning. Jesus describes the way in which personal wrongdoing is to be handled in the Church: His approach preserves the privacy of the wrongdoer, and values the continuing relationship that can exist between an offender and the body of Christ. That is the reason for our Lord’s prescription which calls for a wrongdoer to be approached privately by one person who has knowledge of the situation.

If that initial encounter between an offender and a person who has knowledge of the nature of the situation doesn’t resolve the matter, then the Lord says that two or three witnesses are to go with the individual to confront the person. Only then, if this second step fails to bring about a rightful outcome, is the Church as a whole to be brought into the decision-making process.

The Church, should it find that there are grounds for dealing with a wrongful act(s), is to treat a guilty party by treating them as a “Gentile and a tax collector”. At first glance, that should prompt the Church’s members to shun a guilty person. But if we remember that our Lord sought out such persons, again and again, His example should encourage us to seek reconciliation and restoration of relationship.

Why is it so important that the Church maintain unity within its membership? Why is it so important that each member of the Church live a holy and exemplary life? I think the reason is that we are called to show forth by what we say and by what we do that our Lord Jesus Christ’s presence within our hearts and minds goes so deeply into those places that our desire is to live righteously and uprightly before the Lord and before the world. A saying which has been attributed to St. Francis of Assisi seems to be an appropriate way to summarize how we are to live: He said, “Always preach the Gospel. If necessary, use words”. AMEN.

---

[1]   It was the 16^th century Anglican priest, Richard Hooker, who articulated the Anglican understanding of the sources of authority.