Monthly Archives: September 2017

16th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Living Wage

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Living Wage

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James E. Eaton, Pastor • Copyright 2017

September 24, 2017 • 16th Sunday After Pentecost-A

Matthew 20:1-16

September always reminds me of the time three years ago when our family first arrived in Albany and I became your pastor. We were, all of us, out of breath. Like a sprinter completing a race, we came here from a rushed, hard-working summer of moving. We lived in a larger house in Michigan with lots of storage. So we accumulated things. Now we knew that meant getting rid of things. So day by day, we cleaned and packed up. As the time shortened, we became more and more frantic. We hired a man to help us and he filled his pickup truck over and over with stuff for the dump. We took so many loads to the Salvation Army that they asked us to stop coming, stop donating. Always looming was that day in August when the movers would arrive to load everything and bring it here.

I thought about that experience this week as I read the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Harvest is a frantic time. Grape picking is handwork and there’s far too much for this vineyard owner and his family. So the next morning, early, he gets up, hurries out of the house to where the day laborers gather. Every city then, every city now, has such a place. He looks around, he hires enough to get the job done, offering to pay them the daily rate, one denarius. I imagine some of the men smiling: a denarius is a living wage. No one gets rich on it but it’s enough to get you through to tomorrow and maybe the day after and who knows what will happen then? These men live day to day. So they hurry off to the field and begin picking grapes. But the owner can see it’s not going fast enough so he goes back, and hires more, telling them he will pay them what is right. In other words, he’ll be fair.

Even as the day begins to cool, as the workday begins to close, he is still hiring more workers, desperately trying to get the harvest in. By now, he recognizes some of those he passed over earlier. “Why are you waiting,” he asks, and of course they reply with the obvious: they haven’t been hired. Imagine the desperation of those men. All day long, they’ve watched as others left to work on farms; all day long they’ve been hungry; with no job, they have nothing to buy lunch. All day long, each time someone came to hire, they hoped to be chosen but they haven’t been. They face going home to tell their families there won’t be a wage today, perhaps there won’t be supper, or bread tomorrow. So to those left at the end of the day, his hiring must have been especially happy. They know they won’t make much; after all, the sun is already setting! Still, something is better than nothing and I think they must have been glad to go, glad to make even a few pennies, to make something for the day.

Finally, the sun is down; the workday ends. The hired men drift in to the area around the sheds, ready to be paid, already tasting the dinner they’ll buy. They’re hot and tired; so is the owner. So far, this whole story is so commonplace it’s boring. It happens hundreds of times. The people hearing Jesus know it, they live it, they must have wondered, “What’s the point?” Perhaps some of them are day laborers; all of them know how hard harvest is, how frantic, how everyone works and works to get it done. So perhaps they are beginning to drift off, their attention wandering. He’s telling them what they know and then suddenly he isn’t.

The owner breaks the workers into groups, starting with those hired last. Everyone knows they will receive less than a day’s wage; after all, they only worked a couple of hours. Fair is fair. So imagine how stunned they are when they are given a full day’s wage. Imagine the surprised looks, too tired to even celebrate. Group after group are paid, all the same: a full day’s wage, regardless of how long they worked. At first, the early hires, seeing what’s going on must have thought: oh, great, we’ll get a bonus but they don’t—they get the same as everyone else: a day’s wage. So, of course, they begin to grumble. It isn’t fair, is it?

Wouldn’t you grumble? And then Jesus drops the conclusion on them. The owner says that it’s none of their business if he decides to pay everyone the same; they agreed to work for a day’s wage, they got their wage, the contract is fulfilled, the debt paid. I imagine these workers leaving, also, but with a different attitude, still grumbling, still saying, “Not fair”. Wouldn’t you?

Jesus is asking us to imagine acting out something he apparently said many times: the last will be first, the first last; the Kingdom’s arrival means a reversal. Well, we’re all in favor of that but we seldom ask what it really means. Now he’s imagining it: what if the last really are first; what if you—all of you, all of us—who are first get paid last and no more than everyone else? Ouch!

A key issue of this story is the notion of a living wage. The standard daily wage for a worker in Jesus’ time is a denarius. it’s enough to buy food for the day or two; in that sense, it’s a living wage. So if you fall below that, if you don’t make the days’ wage, you don’t have enough to eat, enough to get through the next day. Today, a swelling movement including the United Church of Christ is building support for raising the minimum wage so that it will be a true living wage. I imagine in many pulpits today, that’s what’s being preached and it’s a good and worthy cause.

But I don’t think it’s the point of this parable. Every parable invites us to experience something and this one invites us to experience the workers. It asks us to imagine their hope of being hired, their hope of being paid and their sense of fairness, of justice. “I’ll pay you what is right,” the owner says when he hires them and this seems to be an agreed daily wage, a living wage. When the owner pays those hired last the same as the others, the parable compares their grumbling with the owner’s generosity.

Where does that generosity originate? Perhaps it is in the compassion that comes from noticing the condition of the workers themselves. This is, after all, how some great movements have begun. The movement to abolish slavery began in this country in 1789 among the Society of Friends and soon spread to others. One of those was a free African American who had gone to Sunday School at the Second Congregational Church in Norwich, CT. David Ruggles moved to New York City where he helped lead abolitionist efforts. Others were also working to end slavery. Still, the movement grew slowly until the 1850’s when Harriet Beecher Stowe, another Congregationalist, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a sentimental novel but it reached beyond the intellectual arguments of the abolitionists and made people feel the horror of slavery. President Lincoln, himself, is said to have believed the book was a major reason for the passions that ignited into the Civil War, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery.

Well, abolitionism is a big issue and we are mostly day to day people. Does this have anything to do with us? Erik Reitan in an article responding to an evangelical Christian condemnation of LBGTQ people said, “The first act of Christian love is compassionate, empathetic attention.” What Stowe did was to focus compassionate attention on slavery. What happens if we bring compassionate attention into our own lives and focus on someone we need to forgive? I’m often asked, “Ok, I know I should forgive, but how do I do it?” Last week I talked about taking the first step, which is to embrace our own forgiveness. The second step in forgiveness is compassionate attention to another.

In 1993, Mary Johnson’s son was murdered by another young man, Oshea Israel.

Israel was arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned for the crime. I’m sure Johnson didn’t think it was enough; I can only imagine the restless anger she must have felt. She talks about seeing Israel in court and wanting to hurt him. She continued to be obsessed with him and made repeated requests to meet him when he was in prison. Finally, he agreed. It had been 16 years since the murder. Israel, a 16-year-old boy when he committed the crime, had grown into a man in his early 30’s.
“I wanted to know if you were in the same mindset of what I remembered from court, where I wanted to go over and hurt you,” Johnson tells Israel. “But you were not that 16-year-old. You were a grown man. I shared with you about my son.”
“And he became human to me,” Israel says.
At the end of their meeting at the prison, Johnson was overcome by emotion.
“The initial thing to do was just try and hold you up as best I can,” Israel says, “just hug you like I would my own mother.”
Johnson says, “After you left the room, I began to say, ‘I just hugged the man that murdered my son.’
“And I instantly knew that all that anger and the animosity, all the stuff I had in my heart for 12 years for you — I knew it was over, that I had totally forgiven you.”

Johnson set down the burden of anger. She forgave this man who had so terribly injured her. She went on to help other mothers of murdered children as well.

Now what Johnson did isn’t fair, is it? I know some are thinking, “I could never do that”; I know it because it’s what I thought when I first read it. Yet that’s the destination Jesus is leading us toward: a place where, as he says, burdens are light because he takes them up; where forgiveness is the rule.
This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like: it’s not fair because we could never survive fair.

No, the Kingdom is where the principle isn’t fair, the principle isn’t what we earn, the principle isn’t what we deserve: it’s what we need. This is how God works: giving what we need, hoping we will accept it, use it, share it. That is indeed a living wage, it is what we need to live in the light of the love of God, it is meant to be shared.

Amen.

15th Sunday After Pentecost/A – The Forgiveness Dance

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The Forgiveness Dance

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – Copyright 2017

15th Sunday After Pentecost/A • September 17, 2017

Matthew 18:21-35

Click below to hear the sermon preached

“I’ve told you a million times…” Have you ever said this? It’s what gets said about those little things someone does out of habit that annoy us until it boils over. “I’ve told you a million times…” I’ll let you fill in the detail.

Once I was talking to a couple planning their wedding. They’d both been married before and we talked about those relationships and what had made them end. She was quiet at first, reticent, but as she talked about her marriage, she said, “It was little things. His socks: he never picked up his socks. It sounds silly but it became a big issue.” We were talking about their wedding vows, at least I thought we were, and as we moved back to that topic she brought up the socks again. So it was that on their wedding day, as part of the ceremony, her groom stood before a whole congregation and said solemnly along with promises to love and cherish her that he would always pick up his socks.

“I’ve told you a million times..” Of course, no one says something a million times. We exaggerate and this scripture begins with Jesus doing the same thing.

Forgiveness: How Much?

Last week we began to talk about forgiveness as the path to Jesus. Now Matthew imagines Peter stewing about this and trying to get a fix on just how much forgiveness is required. That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not forgiving the one big hurt that hangs us up; it’s the million times bump, the thing that happens over and over again. “Do I have to forgive as many as seven times?” he asks. Jesus replies with something hard to translate; sometimes it comes across as 77 times, sometimes 70 times seven. The meaning, though, is clear: there is no limit to this forgiveness.

Does that make any sense? At some point, don’t you have to just say, “Look, this person is never going to do the right thing,”? I imagine Peter and the others looking with that disbelieving, “I can’t believe you said that” look people get about Jesus. So he tells them a story, a parable, about forgiveness.

The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant

Imagine a rich, Gentile King. Maybe it’s the Persian King; maybe it’s the Roman emperor. We know it’s not a Jewish king because the things that happen in the story are not according to Jewish law. Imagine the Emperor, the King, having one of his key administrators arrested, brought before him, because the taxes he was supposed to pay aren’t paid.

We don’t know what happened. Did he embezzle them, was it a bad year, is it simple theft? No details. We just know he is brought before the King. This isn’t the oval office; this would be a palace full of people, guards in armor with sharp swords. Surely this man, this servant knows some these people, was friends with some of them. Now they look away, now no one reaches out to help when he stumbles as the guards roughly bring him in.

A richly dressed guy stands by the king with a document recording the debt: 10,000 talents. Do you know what 10,000 talents is? It’s all the money in the world. Literally: a talent is the largest unit of money Jesus and his world knows. Ten thousand is the largest number they use. So it’s the largest number of the largest amount of money. It’s huge.

No one could ever pay it off; no one could ever work it off. You could work your whole life and not make a dent in it. So the King orders a punishment that takes his whole life: selling his wife and children, something so awful, so terrible, Jewish law forbade it. But Gentiles did it, Kings did it. Now the debtor stands there quaking, fearing, losing everything. What would you do?

What he does is the only thing he can do. Flinging himself on the floor the way they do in Eastern courts, he begs for mercy. He makes a promise everyone knows is ridiculous that he will eventually pay it off. There must have been a moment of silence. Think of the embarrassment of his former friends; think of the tension in the room, the fear of the debtor. As he lies there, something comes into the King, some impulse. He pities the man; he knows he’ll never get his money. Suddenly he does something no one would have expected. He tells the man to get up, to get out and he forgives the debt.

Wow. Can you imagine that moment? Can you imagine that man, lying there on the floor, on the cold stone floor, afraid for his life, afraid for his family, barely able to believe what he’s just heard. “Get up and get out, I forgive you and your debt.” It’s more than he asked. The best he hoped was to stay out of jail; instead, he’s just been given a whole new life, like someone born again. “The Lord released him and forgave the debt.”

Imagine having your biggest problem something you’ve worried about, something that kept you up nights, suddenly solved. Imagine having all your debts paid off; imagine having whatever scares you solved. Imagine being given a whole new life. Don’t you think that’s what this guy must have felt? How incredible would that feel? How new? How different?

So there is this stunned, amazing moment and then he must have gotten up. The King and his advisors are already going on to the next thing. Before the King can change his mind, I imagine the man walking out, still afraid of the guards that only a moment before had been a threat, now ignoring him. Perhaps slowly at first, not wanting to attract attention, he begins to back up, to move out of the crowd, and then faster. Smiling now, feeling the joy of it, the release of it. Everything paid off; everything taken care of, solved. He moves back through the crowd, mind whirling and then settling down, wanting to tell his wife, his family everything is ok, everything will be ok. He moves out of the crowd, down the corridor, outside into the market. What would you do? Where would you go? How would you feel?

Leaving the Moment

There he is, coming down the steps, there he is, jostling in the crowd, and just as he walks through the last people in the palace crowd, he bumps into someone he knows, someone who owes him a little money: a hundred denarii, that is to say about three months salary. It’s nothing, compared to what he’s just been forgiven. It’s pocket change.

Yet in that moment, all the new life, all the possibility of his forgiveness seems to fall away. He grabs the guy by the throat, calls for a guard, demands immediate payment.
Now this man makes exactly the same plea the first man had made to the king, word for word the same plea. Did you get that when I read it?

Just like the first man before the king, he’s caught short of funds; just like that man, he’s about to go to jail. Just like the first man before the king, he begs for time to pay. That first man has just been forgiven all the money in the world and now he’s being asked to forgive a trifling amount but he hasn’t learned anything. Instead of passing on the forgiveness, he refuses and has him thrown into prison. Stunning, isn’t it? He was forgiven everything; he forgives nothing.

What happens next is a cascading disaster. People from the court see this performance and tell the King. The King is offended, angered, and he has the first man arrested, brought back. The new life is over before it began. He’s sent off to be imprisoned, tortured, the point is clear: “I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ [Matt 18:32] I imagine the disciples leaning in, listening, trying to follow this story, trying to follow Jesus, just as we are doing and suddenly he looks up at them, his eyes searching, and says quietly, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Wow: ouch! How did we get from more forgiveness than Peter could imagine to such a disaster?

What is Jesus teaching?

To see what Jesus teaches, we have to let go of trying to reduce it to a set of lessons and let ourselves experience what he asks us to imagine. If we take seriously the experience of this parable, what we find is that the unmerciful servant was confronted by the possibility of new life. That’s what it really means to take our own forgiveness seriously. It’s what Peter missed when he asked his question. Peter was still focused on how much forgiveness he has to dole out: seven times? Seventy-seven times?

Jesus wants him to realize the issue isn’t how much forgiveness he does, it’s how much he has received. Forgiveness isn’t first about what we do: it’s first about what we receive. It’s suddenly understanding that despite all our flaws and failures, the one Jesus calls our father in heaven has forgiven us and still loves us. It’s realizing we are, each one of us, just like that debtor before the King: failed at times, yet loved beyond failure.

Feeling Our Forgiveness

That’s the experience he wants them to have. And to see also: that our forgiveness invites us to be transformed. Until we know ourselves forgiven, we will never be able to fully forgive, we will always be grabbing someone else, demanding payment.

The final note about torture isn’t a moral, it’s a fact. If we don’t learn to accept our forgiveness, we don’t learn to forgive others. The burdens that pile up from that torture us, imprison us, like the old cartoon of the prisoner with the ball and chain.

Jesus means us to experience this embrace, this forgiveness and then live it out day to day. For the way of Jesus isn’t a doctrine, it isn’t a set of directions you follow, it’s love itself.

The Kiss of Christ

Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov contains a long section imagining a Grand Inquisitor questioning Christ, like a Communist or Fascist or CIA interrogation. At the end of all the questions, at the end of all the darkness and threats and fear, Christ replies. And the reply is simple, wordless: Christ kisses the Inquisitor.

Lord Have Mercy On Me

There is a spiritual discipline that can help move us toward this. It’s very simple, a short prayer: “Lord have mercy on me.” That’s it, the whole prayer. It’s meant to be prayed over and over; some teachers suggest synchronizing it with your breath or your heartbeat. “Lord have mercy on me.” Over and over. You can pray this in the car, at a stoplight; you can sit quietly and say it over and over. What this prayer does is to focus us on our own forgiveness. It opens the door of the soul and lets things out.

We need this because so many of us owe so much, are burdened by so much. What are you carrying around that needs forgiving? What would you like to lay down, what would you give to get rid of the bonds of that burden?

Forgiveness isn’t about what we do for someone else; it’s what we experience through Christ from God. And if we live in that experience, we will stop asking how often to forgive others because we can’t focus on limiting forgiveness if we are living in the fullness of it.

That’s the tragedy of this unmerciful servant. He has the greatest prize of all given to him and he lets it slip through his fingers in the moment when those fingers grasp his own debtor. Just as Jesus says: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive others.” We say that every week, perhaps you say it at other times. Forgiveness is a dance, a rhythm of receiving and giving. We can’t do one without the other; the dance is both or neither.

Lord have mercy on me: this week, may you feel the embrace, the kiss of Christ in your life. May the forgiveness and new life he offers overflow like a wine glass poured too full until you have no choice but to share it.

Amen.

14th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Come See Jesus

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Come See Jesus

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – Copyright 2017

14th Sunday After Pentecost/A • September 10, 2017

Matthew 18:15-20

Hear the sermon preached by clicking below

One of the big issues in my life is that I lose stuff. Do you find this? Keys, cellphone, little things: I misplace them. Last week on my boat I lost my phone. The boat is a small area. I knew the phone was there somewhere. Half an hour later, I resorted to begging a dock worker to call me so I could find it. I lose things all the time. Now if you lose things too, you can feel the problem of the people to whom Matthew is speaking in today’s scripture reading. He’s writing to a group of Jewish Christians about fifty years or so after Jesus left his earthly ministry and here’s their problem: they’ve lost Jesus.

Where Is Jesus?

How do you find Jesus? Where is he? How can we get him back? How can they find the assurance that he is present? How can they talk to him, walk with him, hear him. Where do you go to find Jesus? What are the directions that will allow us to come see Jesus?

The classic way to deal with this is simple: you make a statue of Jesus and hang him on the wall. All great Roman Catholic cathedrals have these; European art museums are full of pictures of Jesus, hanging there, easy to find. Of course, the problem is you have to go there to find him; that’s not much help if you want him with you, walking with you, where you are.

Another solution is just to make up a picture of Jesus. That’s what prosperity gospel preachers like Joel Osteen do. They give people a picture of someone with all the problems solved and tell them well that’s Jesus, be like him. They live like rich people which in our culture looks like living successfully. Their problem, of course, is that it isn’t Jesus they are portraying, it’s just living like a rich guy.

But how do you find the real Jesus? This scripture lesson is all about finding Jesus, it’s a sign that says, “Come see Jesus.” Listening to it is like reading a map, like someone saying, “Come see Jesus, he’s over here.”

“…where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matt 18:20).

I know you’ve heard this saying of Jesus before; it’s frequently quoted, especially by Congregationalists. I wonder if we’ve really taken it seriously enough. Every time you and a friend get together and treat each other like Jesus treats people, every time you have compassion on a stranger the way Jesus has compassion on strangers, every time you treat someone like a child of God, the way Jesus treats everyone as a child of God—there he is. Every time we gather here in his name to worship, here he is. Every time one of our Boards or committees gets together and thinks about how to help people in his name, there he is. “…where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there…,” he says. Every time I visit with one of you in the hospital and we pray, there he is. All it takes is two or three of us, gathering in his name, for him to appear.

So where do you go to find Jesus? The answer is specific: you go to others. And one sure place is to the gathered congregation of his followers. One of the jobs of pastors is to listen to excuses for not going to church. I learned early not to tell people on airplanes I’m a pastor, for example, because they would tell me why they didn’t go to church last Sunday. High on the list of excuses is, “I find God in nature.” Sometimes nature means the golf course, sometimes another place. And, of course, we’ve all felt the stirring of inspiration seeing God’s creation. Sometimes that may work; often that is inspiring. But it’s a chancy thing. If you want to be sure Jesus will come along, if you want to be sure about finding Jesus, you need a congregation, you need two or three or more other followers.

The second thing it’s important to notice here is the number required. Jewish scribes had settled on ten men as the minimum number to get God to be present. The book of Genesis records a wonderful conversation between Abraham and the Lord. The Lord is angry at Sodom and decides to wipe them out. Abraham asks whether the Lord will wipe out the righteous with the sinners. Abraham asks if 50 righteous people would be enough; God agrees 50 would be plenty. Abraham goes for 40; God says ok, 40 is enough. Finally, Abraham gets the Lord down to ten: ten righteous men will be enough to stop the destruction. From this, Rabbis deduced the requirement that ten righteous men are needed.

Now Jesus reduces this. Notice that he doesn’t specify gender: it’s not just men, it’s any followers of Jesus, and it only takes two or three. This is the foundation for our church order. Where some believe that it requires a whole structure of bishops and officers to constitute a church, Congregationalists believe it only takes a congregation, meeting in covenant for worship. How big a congregation?—two or three.

So if you want to see Jesus, come to the congregation; where faithful followers gather, he promises presence. The verse before this makes it clear: “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” The reason is that what we are doing is what Jesus is doing: we are literally the body of Christ in the world because he is present here with us, in us. Christ is present here and this is our destination: to go where he is, to be with him, to walk with him.

But it’s not enough to have a destination, you also need directions on how to get there. Navigation can be tricky. When I’m sailing, I write down the buoys I’ll pass, the courses to take. I still make mistakes. Last week, I was coming back from a little cove and I suddenly realized I’d misread one of the buoys that marked a big shoal and I was about to run aground; I had to change direction fast to be safe.

What are the directions to Jesus?

The directions are in the part just before his statement about presence. One of the issues the early church faced is what to do about people who hurt each other in the church. So here it is, laid out in detail: first you tell them they hurt you—-you say ouch!-—and if they repent, you forgive them. If that doesn’t work, you get some other folks to mediate between you, and when they repent, you forgive them. And if that doesn’t work, you get the whole congregation involved and if they repent, you forgive them. Finally, if even that doesn’t work, you treat them like outsiders; in other words, following Jesus, you give them special love and care.

Now if you listened closely to these directions, you heard the same word over and over: “you forgive them.” The directions to Jesus are to forgive; the directions from Jesus are to forgive. The first step on the way to Jesus is forgiving others and accepting forgiveness ourselves.

Nelson Mandela was a young lawyer leading a revolution in South Africa when he was arrested in 1962. Beaten, imprisoned, he might easily have become hardened and bitter. Instead, he let the love of God bloom in his heart. He learned to forgive. In 1990, after 27 years, he was finally freed. Desmond Tutu, a bishop in South Africa said this.

Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC’s military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.

Mandela became the first President of a new South Africa. Many had predicted a racial civil war. Thanks to his efforts and example of forgiveness, his nation sought instead reconciliation and became a model for this.

It’s no accident that this section on forgiveness is connected to encountering Jesus: forgiveness is the path to gathering in his name, to his presence.

For the next few Sundays, we’re going to think about this theme, see what Jesus says, imagine what it means to live out forgiveness in our daily lives. Perhaps in your life, there is someone you need to forgive; perhaps you need to seek someone’s forgiveness. Perhaps you need to feel God’s forgiveness.

The farther we walk on the path to forgiveness, in our prayer life, in our daily life, the closer we come to Jesus. “Come see Jesus”, is the gospel invitation: come see him here, come see him in the light of the forgiving love he shares and that we share in his name.

Amen.