Year A Proper 22 2017 Metrics of our Success

Year A Proper 22, 8 Oct 2017

St James the Less Episcopal, Ashland, VA

“Metrics of our Success”

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Then God spoke all these words:
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work.
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.”

Philippians 3:4b-14
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Matthew 21:33-46
Jesus said, “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:
‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes’?
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. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

I want first to acknowledge the awful tragedy of last Sunday in Las Vegas. I spoke on it at our Wednesday morning service, and I would invite you, if interested in reading that on my blog, rev.rocks, please do so. We live in a fallen world, and we need Christ’s message of love and peace all the more, and in a roundabout way, that is what today’s sermon is all about.

One of the hard parts about growing up is deciding which voices we will listen to. And, which ones we won’t. In fact,  one of the greatest challenges for young people today is discernment. Often at Church we use the word discernment in regards to a calling to the ministry. What is the voice of God, and what is not? I truly feel that the greatest discipleship challenge in the Church today is teaching discernment to everybody.

Discernment is defined outside the Church as “the ability to judge well.” That is exactly what each of us must do. We must judge the messages that we receive, and consider the source of that voice.

I had never really thought about this much, until I attended a conference on the Brain and Learning co-sponsored by Harvard and MIT while I was a teacher. In one of the workshops the speaker pulled up Google, and typed in Martin Luther King, Jr. Now the number one hit on the search was…? [Wait for response] Of course, Wikipedia. And as a teacher I always told my students to only use Wikipedia if you knew NOTHING and needed a place to start, but to be very wary and not to trust it completely, and to NEVER use it as a source. It has gotten better, but it is still written by any and everybody. We do not trust it because we can never know the source of the information given. We have to be discerning. As we continued in our search on MLK, there were some good sources, but nestled into the top 5 was a site that seemed legitimate until you dug several web pages in. It was sponsored by a white supremacist group, and the first few pages were intentionally designed to lure in kids doing work on the life of MLK. It was horrific, and deliberate. And it taught the lesson well. Know to whom you are listening.

Our readings for the day reflect just that. The Exodus passage is well known to us. It is even transcribed on our wall. The Ten Commandments. God’s Little Instruction Book. The Ten Words, as our Jewish brothers and sisters call them, were a great place to start. “Want to live a good life?” asks God. “Start here.” It shows how to live well and peaceably with our neighbors and with our God. Wonderful! But as we grow, we know that the black and white of the Ten Commandments do not cover a lot of the grey areas of living life. It is not that we do not need these, we do, we really, really do, but if these covered everything then we would not need lawyers, or biblical scholars, either. No offense to any lawyers in the room.

Jesus’ parable is much the same. His story is about those that decided not to listen to any of the messages of the one who owned their whole world, the owner of the vineyard where they lived and worked. The workers got into a situation that Psychologists might call GroupThink, where the ideas of a group rationalize and justify their own opinions because they are limiting the information received from outside their own circle. Time and again, the owner sent the voice of authority, reason, and sanity, and they dismissed them at best, and killed them at worst. He even sent the heir apparent to them, hoping they would respect his authority through the son, but alas, they did not. They killed the son. This was a prophetic parable, and foreshadowing, wasn’t it? They had convinced themselves that they were right and could keep what was not theirs, despite all the messages. And they did not heed the Voice they actually needed to hear.

The most powerful lesson for me today, though, is when St Paul gets very honest and very personal. The word I use is vulnerable. The years have taught me as a preacher, that for people to connect I have to take a risk and put myself out there. If a play it safe, there is very little return. When I dare to risk, and be vulnerable, the return is great. That has been my experience anyway. Like life teaches us all, WHAT COMES EASY WON’T LAST, AND WHAT LASTS WON’T COME EASY.

Paul oozes authenticity as he shares what makes for greatness. He had a litany of success according to some measures, but he learned that the metrics he had used were RIDICULOUS. They did not lead to the ETERNAL.

“If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

My old life, as it was, by any metric I had arrived.

• By Jewish standards, CHECK ✓
• By Legalism, CHECK ✓
• By Zeal, CHECK ✓
• By Righteousness, CHECK ✓
• By Jesus, NADA, ZILCH, ZERO 𝟬

All the metrics he had used, and lived SO METICULOUSLY by, were NOTHING. Think of the crisis of identity he went through! When he was “blinded by the light,” physically he could not see for days, but according to the story, he had to wander in Arabia for three years [Galatians 1:17] to overcome and wrestle with the idea that his WHOLE LIFE had a been a waste. Why else would he argue across the whole Roman world that Jesus was the Christ and invented the idea of being a missionary? Here was a man who had been confronted with the truth that his whole life was based on lies, that what he held most dear was for naught.

His metrics had to become realigned. I remember one time I went to the State Fair and one of the exhibits were giving out yard sticks. I was teaching science at the time, and always needed more rulers and yard sticks. One day in class, one group’s work was repeatedly off, and I as a teacher came in to show them how to measure something correctly. But THEY WERE! Their yardstick, their unit of measurement, was off. You see, measuring properly was impossible. As soon as I saw this to be true, I took the yardstick and broke it over my knee and threw it away. When we learn that what we measure with is FALSE, that can be our only response.

And that is what Paul did, and that is why it is so hard. We understand WHO WE ARE by the metrics we use. Paul traded in his Jewish heritage, his legalism, his family, for what he held most dear, JESUS CHRIST.

“I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Everything he does, everything he says, everything he thinks, everything he eats, and drinks, and breathes in, he wants it to draw him closer to Christ, and draw him deeper into Christlikeness. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him…

The world is screaming at us about what success means. By the clothes we wear, by the car we drive, by what we consume, and we get tricked into thinking that that is who we are. Which voices will you listen to this day? Our golden calves today are much less easily identified. They come in a many shapes and sizes, but they are no less idolatrous.

And none of us have arrived. None of us are fully committed. The saints of God, when you read their writings, repeatedly stress how they wish they could give even more to God. Mother Teresa, Augustine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and yes, even Paul.

“Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

That was his all-in-all, that “heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” And as we finish our first month together, I want to toss out a metric for us to use as a parish. If there is one thing that we need to be about, the one unique thing that the Church can and should be, is organization that points to God. That’s it. While many of the things we do might be good, and even noble, the thing that only we can do is point people to the Jesus way of loving God.

I remember when I first heard of this church. I thought to myself, what a funny name. No irony is lost on me that this is where God would send me, and the important lesson that I needed to learn. If you look at history, often persecuted groups take an insult and turn it into something else. Even the term Christian was an insult in Antioch, meaning “little Christs.” And in my first days I prayed about how “the Less” could mean something more. How could we take something that sounds inferior to the world and its metrics, and give it up to the glory of God? You may have already seen it in the e-Blast on Wednesdays. I rolled over in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, and a verse was rolling around in my head. “With less of you, there is more room for God and God’s Rule.” With LESS of you… With LESS of you… I could not remember where I had heard it, and after a Google search, I finally found where. In Eugene Peterson’s translation The Message, he shared the first Beatitude that way. Normally we hear it, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” Peterson put it in words that we could all understand. “You are blessed when you are at the end of your rope. With less of you, there is more room for God and his rule.” [Matthew 5:8] And so as we round out our first month together, and after a lot of prayer, I want us to follow St. Paul’s example, and St. James the Less’s example, and Mother Teresa, and Bonhoeffer, and all the saints of God, and work on this.

In what we say and think and do as a congregation, let this be our new metric.

me less than God

me < GOD

A friend visited us last week, and loved being here. He actually wrote on my Facebook page that maybe we should change the name of the Church to St James the MORE. He meant it in love, and appreciation. And as I put that in my spiritual cud, it struck me that I feel called to double down. The world is going to repeatedly tell us to be more, bigger, better, bolder, but I remember our reading from last week, that wonderful hymn to Jesus.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death--
even death on a cross. [Philippians 2:7-8]

When I get out of the way, Jesus has more room to come through. So, may we be THE LESS. Some of you have even made comment about my license plate, THE LESS, which is a great reminder for me, and a wonderful conversation starter. Already, I had a guard at a check-in see my license plate and ask, “Do you know there is a man in Scripture named THE LESS?” I responded, “Yes, St. James the LESS. In fact, I am the priest at St. James the LESS Church!” He smiled broadly and said, “Well, God bless you then, sir! God bless you today!” And as we become less so that God can increase, may God bless us all.

May we embrace that name, and let it be our rallying cry. As we strive to run the race that is set before us, let us strive to be like Christ and in doing so we will become who God meant all along for us to be. Thanks be to God. Amen.