The Lord is my Shepherd

Exodus 32:1-14
Psalm 23

         On Facebook many of us like to share pictures with captions that strike us as funny or cause us to think.  Those who are my Facebook friends know that I like to post pictures from the website “I can has cheeseburger” that depict cute cats in compromising positions with captions such as “No not right now human…I’m busy being a cat” and “I eated Barbie…house mine now.”  However there is an interesting image making its rounds on Facebook.  On the left hand side is a drawing depicting the Israelite people worshiping the golden calf, underneath it is the caption “Canaan circa 1300 BCE”.  On the right hand side is a photograph of a bronze sculpture of a charging bull, underneath that is the caption “Wall Street circa 2000 CE.”  Above these pictures is the title “Bovine Idolatry Through the Ages.”  The more things change, the more things stay the same.

            It is easy for us to vilify the Israelites for their dance around the golden calf.  We wonder, what are these people thinking?  Do they not remember that the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham and Isaac is the same God who freed them from slavery from the Egyptians, who parted the red sea so that they may escape capture and then drowned the entire Egyptian Army with these same waters?   How could they turn away from the God who has given them mercy in order to worship lesser gods?

            Yes the problem was that the Israelites were not thinking when they worshiped built and worshiped the golden calf.  They were only reacting to the immediate circumstances that surrounded them.  We remember that the Israelites wandered in the barren desert for forty years after they were led out of Egypt. At first they encountered hunger.  They became anxious and complained to Moses that they wanted to go back to Egypt, “‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’” (Exodus 16:3)  God heard their complaints and sent them manna, bread from heaven.  With it God assured them that they would be provided for and commanded them to only gather enough manna to sustain themselves for the day.  However some Israelite tried to horde more manna than they needed for the day but quickly melted or went rotten. 

As the Israelites journeyed further into the desert they ran out of water.  Once again anxious for their survival they complained to Moses, “‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?... ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’” (Exodus 17:3b, 7b)  God heard the anxious complaints of the people and provided them with water.  There seems to be a pattern developing here, the Israelites encounter hardship, they become anxious, they react by complaining, and God provides for them but not according the Israelites terms or timeline.  Even though God has provided for their basic needs, the uncertainty of how and when they will be provided for fuels their fear.  With each setback the Israelites react with impatience.  They immediately think that God has abandoned them and that they can no longer wait for God’s reappearance, so they seek to fill the void with other things.  Whether it is a desire to return to the halcyon days of slavery in Egypt, or the useless hording of manna or even the worshiping the god of the golden calf, the Israelites try to ease their anxiety with a quick fix. 

The search for the quick fix is a natural part of the human condition.  Whenever we encounter something triggers our anxiety our instantaneous response is to either fight it or flee from it.  Without thoughtful discernment, we surrender to our anxiety and react to our situation without thinking.  We rely too much on our own expertise and rush towards other solutions without waiting for God’s guidance.  It is too easy for us to make the most important life decisions marriage, calling, career, family without bringing God into the conversation.  Sometimes it is just too easy to be just like the Israelites, seeking a quick fix instead of thoughtfully discerning a long term solution.

What we forget is that we are completely and utterly dependant on God just as sheep are completely dependant on their shepherd.  We cannot do it on our own.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want

He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;

He restores my soul.  He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” (Psalm 23:1-3)

Some note that the Israelites longed to live with God as sheep live with a shepherd but their fear got in the way.  “They were too afraid to keep believing that this shepherd was leading them to green pastures or that goodness and mercy would follow them.  So they frequently rushed down more promising paths toward more manageable gods, which always led them to unmanageable trouble.”[i] 

Many of us go to the 23^rd psalm in times of distress.  It is often read at funerals and hospital bedsides to ease our grief, to calm our anxiety and to strengthen our trust.  From the beginning of the psalm with the words “The Lord is my shepherd” we are told who God is and who we are.  God was, is and will always be in control, we are not.  If we trust in God to lead us, God will always lead us to refreshing places along the best paths.  And even when we walk through the dark valleys of illness, depression, addiction, abuse, rejection, bitter disappointment and other hard experiences of life we will have no fear because God is with us, sitting by us, suffering with us.  God blesses us abundantly even when we are experiencing life’s most difficult times.  Yes there may be anxiety and suffering, but there are always blessings to be enjoyed even in the extreme situations where we are in the presence of those who oppose us.[ii]  If we stop dwelling on golden calves and the false gods of greed, domination, and the quick fix and instead choose to dwell on the house of the Lord which is a place of abundance and beauty surely goodness and mercy will follow us all our lives long.  May it be so.  Amen.

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[i] Craig Barnes “Sheep on the Run” The Christian Century March 10, 2002

[ii] David B. Calhoun, "Poems in the Park: My Cancer and God's Grace," Presbyterion, 2008.

A World Communion Sunday Sermon

Matthew 21: 33-46 

Let me begin this sermon by letting you know that I think this is one of the most depressing parables of the Bible.  Yes we know that Jesus’ parables are meant to disturb rather than comfort, but come on Jesus, what’s up this story.  The landlord has lost his harvest, his slaves and his son.  The tenants have lost their lives.  Nothing is gained, in the end everyone has lost.   As always the first step of Biblical interpretation is to understand the context from which this story comes.  In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells this parable the day after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, what we now celebrate as Palm Sunday.  He has just stormed the temple by overturning the tables of the money changers and driving out all who were selling and buying in the temple.  The temple leaders, the chief priests and the elders hear of Jesus’ mayhem and also see that the crowds turning against the established leadership.  It’s time to stop Jesus and his ragtag group of followers before all hell breaks loose.  So the chief priests and the elders look for Jesus and find him in the temple teaching.  They confront him by asking “By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you this authority.” (21:23b) and Jesus answers them in his usual fashion, he tells them a series parables which include this disturbing parable of the wicked tenants.

We remember that Jesus’ audience was very diverse, rich, poor, man, woman, etc. etc.  So each person hears this story in a different way.  The poor farmers in his audience who have toiled in the vineyards under their absentee landlords would have hung on every word that Jesus said thinking that he was on their side.  As they hear about the tenants killing the slaves sent over by the landlord they cannot help but cheer.  “That’s showing them Jesus…send them away packing.”  But when Jesus asked “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do with those tenants?” and they hear the answer, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to the other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” The peasants wonder “Where is the good news for me in this story?”

Then there are the landowners who are only doing business like their fathers had done before them, and their father’s fathers had done.  They may acknowledge that the conditions that their tenants live under maybe harsh but that is of no concern to them, the landowners feel they have earned their place of power and comfort through their hard work rather than from their place of privilege.  To think otherwise would mean giving up many of the comforts they enjoy.  Yes, they can identify with the landlord in Jesus’ story but then they also feel Jesus pulling them towards hearing the plight of the peasant farmers. 

However it is the elders and the chief priests who are most disturbed by this parable.  They are good people living what they had been taught to believe to be a righteous life, where they work hard to eat the right foods, associate with the right people and keep the purity rules to the letter of the law. However they hear Jesus telling them that they’ve been doing it wrong. They see Jesus claiming to have the authority of God, yet they see him continually breaks the purity laws that the church leaders had been taught their whole life to follow.  And most offensively they see Jesus eating with and relating to people who are flagrant sinners and of the utmost impurity, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the lepers.  The religious authorities gasp at the end of the parable because they know that they are the evil tenants that are to be tossed out of the vineyard. 

We remember that every word and image in Jesus’ parables stands for something other than what is actually said.   In this parable the land of Israel is the vineyard, the landowner is God, the slaves that the landowner sends out are the prophets and that the son in the story, sent by the land owner is Jesus.  Each person in the audience hears condemnation as Jesus says, “Have you never read the scriptures.  The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing… The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” 

As I stated earlier, it would seem that nothing good has come of this story, that in the end everyone has lost because of fear, greed and violence.  But then we remember that in this story Jesus directs us toward the God’s kingdom to come. “Therefore I tell you the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”(21:43)  The powers and principalities of the world may live by rules of domination, hierarchy, greed for wealth and conquering others but God’s way lives by love and justice![i]  Jesus is the cornerstone and his life and ministry was all about living into God’s love and justice.  He taught us how to live in right relationship with all of God’s creation.  That fruits produced in the kingdom of God is all of creation having what they need in order to live whole sustainable lives.  It will be those who are good stewards of the abundance which God has given the world that will prosper in God’s kingdom and it will be those who do not heed to God’s ways that will lose their very lives to the forces of fear and greed.

How are we to take this story in light the economic distress we are facing at this time?  Our economy as we know it has imploded upon itself because of greed.  The market conditions go up and down like a roller coaster because of fear and as a result many are unemployed.  And one of the outcomes is the increase violence increases such as the hate crimes perpetrated in Concord a few weeks ago.  However, the good news is that God’s kingdom is going to come regardless of opposition even if we are part the forces that are opposing it.  The salvation of humankind is given to us freely not because we follow a set of rules, but just because God loves us.  It is the systems of domination that are judged by God.  Our call as people of faith is to be mindful of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom here on earth and to do everything we can to be the hands, feet and voice of God in bringing it to fulfillment.   When loving God and loving our neighbor become our bottom line we are able to let go of our fears and work towards a building a world where all who are afflicted are comforted, where all who hunger are fed, and all who hunger and thirst for righteousness are satisfied.  This my friends is the kingdom of God here on earth. 

Every time we gather around Christ’s table we share with each other the fruit’s of God’s kingdom, the bread of life and the cup of liberation.  And on this World Communion Sunday we remember that all over the world, our Christian sisters and brothers are at Christ’s table as well.  From the prairies and pampas of the Americas, the dusty deserts of Africa and Asia, from the majestic mountains of Europe to the vast outback of Australia[ii], we all come to the table humbly expecting the fruitful harvest that God has graciously enabled us to bring forth.  God’s kingdom is here and it continues to come, may we as a community of faith make it our own.

May it be so.

Amen.                

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[i] Linda McKinnish Bridges, "Preaching the Parables in Matthew's Gospel in Ordinary Time: The Extraordinary Tales of God's World," Review & Expositor 104 (Spring 2007): 338

[ii] Ana and Tod Gobledale, Come for the Meal is Ready! World Communion Liturgy.  (Cleveland:  Local Church Ministries and Education Team, United Church of Christ, 2008), 2.