Church of the Epiphany

Lent 5
Luke 20:9-19

“Jesus looked at them and said, “What then does this text mean:

‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone’?

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” When the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people.”

We are getting close to ending the season we call Lent. Next Sunday holy week starts, so naturally we will begin to turn our eyes and our focus towards the cross.

If I asked you, what was Jesus’ primary mission on earth, what would you say? You might say it was to love others. You might say it was to preach forgiveness and love. You might say it was to show what the law of Moses was really about. You might say it was to show the face of God to the world. These would all in part be true. However, Jesus’ primary purpose was redeem the world. And redemption would only come through death. He lived to die, rejected and alone. He set his heart towards Jerusalem, not to be enthroned, but to be killed.

From a political standpoint, the parable that Jesus told in our gospel lesson was insane. Jesus uses the language of Isaiah and other Old Testament texts which described the vineyard as God’s promise, his covenant with his people, or sometimes God’s people themselves. In Jesus’ parable, the tenants are the scribes and Pharisees, the stewards of the vineyard, the guardians of true religion and the power base of the people. The owner of the vineyard is God and obviously, the owner’s son represents Jesus.

Here is a parable that ends badly. The owner sends servants to settle accounts and collect the harvest from the tenants of the vineyard. The tenants beat the servants and when the owner sends his son, the tenants kill him, thinking they can become heirs of the property.

Jesus told this parable with the scribes and Pharisees in mind. In Jesus’ view, the scribes and Pharisees were unfaithful in tending God’s covenant and in shepherding God’s people. So much so that they would kill even God’s son rather than forfeit the vineyard and their own power base.

Naturally, as the Scripture says, they were furious and began to look for ways to arrest Jesus. This was the beginning of the end. You can see Jesus’ campaign advisers saying, “why wasn’t Jesus afraid of offending the Scribes and Pharisees? Why couldn’t he see the result of his choice?”

The reason? He was focused completely on his mission. The cross was his mission. Death was his primary purpose. And he knew that much of what he said and did was for that end, and would lead him there.

If we are to emulate Jesus we have some difficult work ahead of us.

The difficulty in proclamation of the gospel is that our message assumes that all are sinners and that the tenants of the vineyard are all of us. Isn’t it the most convenient thing in the world to blame everything in the gospels on the self-righteous Pharisees? Isn’t it so much easier to see the speck in someone else’s eye than to see the log that is in our own?

So many tiptoe around the scandal of the cross and the offensiveness of the gospel. As Will Willomon has said, “Unable to preach Christ and him crucified, we preach humanity and it improved.” Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said, “By the time most of us finish qualifying the scandal of Christian speech, very little can be said by the preacher that can’t be heard elsewhere.”

When you think about it, isn’t it a virtually impossible task to convince ourselves and others that we are all sinners? Sure our message is one of forgiveness and reconciliation, but there has to be sin for there to be forgiveness and there has to be alienation from God in order for us to reconciled.

However, we bring the message of redemption not because we want to be right and have everyone else be wrong, but because we want to have the same heart that Jesus has.

As Rick Warren says, “If you want to be like Jesus, you must have a heart for the whole world.”

The preaching of the cross, or being a ‘cross cultural people’ as my buddy Robert would say is difficult. But it is our mission. The light shining in the darkness is not only the star of Bethlehem, it is the glistening and bloody cross of Calvary.

We can all only imagine what things would look like if we as Christians fulfilled our mission. We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day last week, but we never get to the true St. Patrick. He was an evangelist who had a heart for the lost. When St. Patrick evangelized the Irish, secular leaders were glad that drunkenness and violence went down. If we as Christians really fulfilled our mission, we would not only have full churches, we would have transformed neighborhoods.

What is more sobering, though, is what things look like when we do not fulfill our mission. Notice what the owner of the vineyard did when the tenants killed his son. The owner gave the vineyard to someone else. In the US there are churches that are fulfilling the Great Commission. I believe we can be a church like that. But for every one church that is started, two close their doors.

God is going to use whoever is faithful in fulfilling the mission of the gospel. God does not need us to fulfill his mission in the world. He is doing just fine thank you. If one parish or denomination drops the ball, he’ll use another. Of course, as the Scriptures point out, we are co-laborers of Christ. We must fulfill our mission. But if we do not, God will give the vineyard to someone else. All the warnings from the scripture readings this Lent point in that direction.

God does not need us to fulfill his mission in the world. He will work because of us and he will work in spite of us. This is why we need so much to pray for the lost of this world and to pray for our mission here at Epiphany. We need to have God sized goals because the mission of the church is that big.

How do we do this? One, we need to begin to think ‘eternally’ and not just of ourselves.
That question is for all of us, what are we allowing to stand in the way of our mission?

Brian McLaren, author of the book More Ready Than you Realize, offers some questions for reflection on whether or not we are people with a mission. Here are a few:

1. Have you ever told God you are willing to go wherever he calls you?
2. Do you believe that God loves all people, all nations, everyone in the world?
3. Are you investing your time in God’s global and local missions?
4. Do you see yourself as a consumer and the church as provider of religious goods and services–or do you see yourself as a partner in the church, which is a community engaged in God’s mission?

These are vital questions to ask ourselves, both individually and as a parish.

Nothing kept Jesus from fulfilling his mission. We started Lent with Jesus being offered the easy way out by the devil. Jesus didn’t take it. We see today Jesus taking on the political powers when he could have sought common ground. In the coming days we’ll again see Jesus’ emotional anguish and brutal physical suffering as he walks the way of his Passion.

Nothing kept Jesus from fulfilling his mission to redeem the world. Not pain, not ridicule, not politics, not even the powers of hell.

Why? Because he had a heart for the world. His heart broke to see what the power of human sin is capable of. So much so that he bore that sin on the cross. He fulfilled his mission because he had a heart for the world.

Tom Clegg in his book Lost in America recounts his time as a missionary in the village of Ka’arachi, which is on the Kenyan-Ethiopian frontier. Ethnic battles and famine in the surrounding areas produced thousands of refugees.

Tom pictured himself putting food in bowls and saying, ‘Here, because Jesus is alive, eat.’ But it didn’t work out that way. The camp only had the capacity to feed 20,000 a day. He says, “the math was painful. During peak times, each refugee would get a real meal only once every ten days.” He was forced to sit there and count to 20,000 every day and then push back the rest every night who were waiting and close a barbed wire gate on them.

The leader of the camp was a short, stout Anglican priest named Father Joey who was ‘five foot tall and five foot across’ as Tom describes him. Fr. Joey would grab Tom’s shoulder every morning and say, ‘God wants to talk to you boy,’ and call him to Morning Prayer. The only prayer Tom could muster was, “God, if you’re really there, get me out of here.”

One morning Fr. Joey grabbed Tom and said, “I have something for you to do, come with me.” Fr. Joey had a stole and a dog-eared Book of Common Prayer and they walked to the outside of the camp. Out on the camp’s edge was a huge trench, forty feet long, four feet wide and five feet deep. It was filled with the bodies of little ones. Tom realized they were there to do a funeral!

Tom was stricken with grief. He could hardly handle this scene and walked away with tremendous grief, questioning the goodness of God.

But day after day God was with him.

What Tom discovered, was that because of the simple, prayerful, loving obedience and faithfulness of Fr. Joey, the hungry were fed, the naked were clothed and the gospel was proclaimed. Some of those involved in the warring factions even became Christians and put down their weapons. All because of the faithfulness of a short, stout little Anglican priest.

Fr. Joey fulfilled his mission because he had a heart for God and for the world. He had a heart for the hungry and those held in spiritual bondage. Nothing, not suffering or grief or conflict could keep him from fulfilling his mission.

Do you have a heart for the world? For those who are hungry, for those in spiritual bondage, for those who don’t know the saving work of Jesus? If you do, you are being like your Lord. I mentioned last week that Moses was called to free those in bondage and a way to find our own calling is to see what moves our hearts–who we want to free from bondage.

I read an article recently about a young lady who was a self-professed atheist. Through a variety of means, she became a Christian. Christ himself drew her in. What is interesting about the article is the church that she chose to attend, and I presume was part of her coming to faith. It was St. Michael’s by the sea Episcopal Church in Carlsbad, California. I looked at their website expecting a hip and happenin’ parish that was very focused on evangelism. What I found was a parish focused on evangelism and discipleship, but also a church deeply committed to the liturgy and the Anglican Way. Their mission statement goes like this:

Our mission is to be a beacon of God’s truth and love through the richness of traditional Anglican worship, in the equipping of the saints to bear witness to Christ wherever they may be, and by sharing in Christ’s work of reconciliation and healing in the world.

Maybe we should do renew some of our language and build a statement around just those things: traditional Anglican worship, equipping and discipling, and bearing witness to Jesus and his reconciliation and healing.

Whatever the case, we are stewards of the gospel and its mission here at Epiphany. We are ‘cross cultural’ people!

Don’t let anything keep you from fulfilling your mission. Nothing kept Jesus from fulfilling his.

Let us pray:
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth your hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.

Lent 2
Luke 13
Phil 3
So, James Cameron, the director of Titanic has found the remains of Jesus. And surprise surprise, he was married to Mary Magdalene and had a kid named Judah. Well, I guess I’m done here. Glad that part of history is over.

Why do people want to come up with this kind of stuff? I think it’s pretty simple, actually. If we can get Jesus out of the way, well then his words die with him. We then can ignore what Jesus says–and we can do things our own way. But the risen Lord Jesus does not allow us to do that this morning. His words are hard and we must take them seriously.

Jesus is clear in our gospel that we enter a narrow door into the Kingdom of Heaven. If you do a casual reading of our baptismal vows, which we did in our Anglican Foundations class, you’ll see that indeed the door is narrow.

People might say, well, how hard is it for a baby to get water on their head? But, as members of the church, young and old we ‘renounce Satan,’ we renounce our sinful desires, we accept Christ as Savior and Lord. In our baptismal covenant we promise to continue in our live in Christ, we promise to resist evil, we promise to repent, we promise to proclaim the gospel and we promise to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is a narrow door. A narrow way. Few enter it. When Jesus says to ‘make every effort’ to enter the door he is using the term in Greek where we get the word for ‘agony.’ In the soft sell world of Christianity, we rarely talk of entering the church as being ‘agonizing.’ And, Christ himself is the gate or the door–and the only gate and door. As one author has said, ‘entry comes through the means Jesus provides or not at all.’

But there is more. I like the apostle Paul’s wording from Philippians, as the church we are ‘citizens of heaven.’ What does this mean? Does it mean that we wear white robes and walk around and chant? No for us, as citizens of the Kingdom we live radically and love unconditionally. We live a life of the narrow door.

I am reading a fascinating book written by a friend of mine and another author called Living on the Borders. In this book the authors say that living in the Christian community is a lot like living in an immigrant community in the United States. The US has long been celebrated as the melting pot of the world. Immigrants for many years have come into the US and been ‘assimilated’ into American life which the authors call “McWorld.” Often a family of immigrants’ language and culture will disappear within a generation or two. A 3rd or 4th generation immigrant, if properly assimilated, will no longer know his/her native language, and will no longer understand the folkways and practices of their own culture. Eventually the values and practices of the Old World are replaced with the values and practices of McWorld. The authors say that the new focus on multi-culturalism really only prolongs the inevitable. Immigrants who want to preserve their culture do so at great cost of both convenience and reputation.

The premise of the book is that the Christian community finds itself in the same place. The religious melting pot of American culture wants us all to be the same—McChurch. We are acceptable to the culture so long as we are not a threat to the culture’s consumerism and immorality. We are acceptable as long as we say we’re all the same. We are acceptable as long as we do not live the life of the narrow door.

We truly are like immigrants in a foreign land. 1 Peter calls us ‘resident aliens.’ We have to learn how to function in a world of commerce and hyperactive media. We have to learn how to speak the language. But we have to be ‘in the world but not of it.’

You see, our citizenship is in heaven. We have our own language of intimacy–the Scripture, the Prayers, the hymns and spiritual songs. We are a family. The Christian language is a language of the heart. I am excited at what I hear from you on a regular basis. Many of you ask me ‘what do we need to pray about, who do we need to pray for?’ I know that many of us exchange phone calls and e-mails sharing or concerns and our needs for prayers. That is the language of the heart, the language of intimacy. Try going up to your boss or even the grocery clerk and say, ‘hey, can you pray for me about such and such?’ All you’ll get is a funny look or the grocery clerk will get on the line and say, ‘security.’

In the church we are citizens of a heavenly country. We have our own values and ways of doing things. We even have our own language–the language of intimacy, the language of the heart.

But if we are to be the people of the narrow door, we must never take what we do and who we are for granted. We must not be wooed by the world around us. The choice to follow Christ is always the more difficult, but it is always the right choice.

I am reading a book by and about a Chinese Christian called ‘Heavenly Man.’ This book describes the life of a house church leader in China named Brother Yun. If you doubt that there is massive persecution in China today, read this book. I was reading about a time early in his pastoral career. One day, there was a meeting of state church and house church representatives. Brother Yun had a choice to make. He could register with the state church and enjoy a life without danger. Or he could refuse to register and be considered evil and dangerous.
He was tempted to register with the state church and even have a position of leadership. But the Lord would not allow it. He told the authorities, ‘I cannot serve atheists and God at the same time, to do so would be idolatry.’ From then on, he was a marked man and much of the book describes his beatings, torture and imprisonments. He chose the narrow door. Which door will we choose?

Lastly, and here’s the crux of the matter (pun intended). As a church we are a community that is called by Jesus. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.”

What was the problem with Jerusalem? You see, they had a vocation, a calling to be a light to the world around them. The whole purpose of the Law of Moses and the worship of the Temple, was to reveal the nature of God to the world. Remember the great commandment of Jesus that summed up the law: ‘love God and love your neighbor.’ Jerusalem struggled to live up to its own calling. And Jesus uses the language of the prophet Ezekiel when he says that Jerusalem becomes a ‘desolate’ place–similar to how Ezekiel described Israel in exile.

It is easy, though, to pick on Israel or Jerusalem. As our bishop said wisely in the Christian Education hour last week–if when we read the parables or teachings of Christ and we see ourselves as the ‘good guy,’ we are not reading the gospels rightly.

The Church has a calling–we as Christians have a calling to fulfill God’s purpose in this world. Under God’s care, the Kingdom becomes like a mustard seed–a small seed that becomes a huge tree that birds can nest in. We, as the church, are an integral part of his Kingdom work. How are we doing in that work?

The door is narrow, but you would think it was wide. We are supposed to agonize to enter–but rarely we see our faith life in such terms. We’re here for comfort, not challenge. The consequences are much worse for those who do not enter–weeping and gnashing of teeth, but we rarely have a burden for those who do not know Christ.

Some of the most difficult language that Jesus speaks is found in this passage. He says that there are many who will seek to enter the door that he will simply say ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’ ‘But we ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets!’ ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me all you evildoers!’

Those words are frightening–‘I never knew you, I don’t know you or where you come from.’

This faith of ours is an agonizing faith. We come to the Kingdom with the full intent of knowing and following Jesus. Actually, there is no other way to come. Bring it all or not at all.

We don’t become Christians the same way we become Democrats or Republican or Shriners or members of the country club. Our membership is not like a membership to the museum. We are citizens of heaven. To be a Christian is to know and to follow Jesus. We do not carry a card, we have a real, living, refining, relationship with Jesus. As one author has said,

‘It is a tragically erroneous assumption to think that a mere formal connection to [Jesus] means that one will celebrate with him in the end…the central issue is knowing Jesus, not just having casual contact with him.’

In places like Scotland, the village churches usually only have 30 or so elderly folks show up on Sunday. In Scotland, they only have communion twice a year, so to stay on the rolls, you have to come out at least for the two communion services. What happens those two times? The place is packed. Twice a year folks keep their formal relationship with Jesus intact. But is it a real relationship?
But what about us? This is where the season of Lent is so valuable. ‘People get ready, there’s a train a comin’…are we on the train?

When they ask Jesus, ‘will only a few be saved,’ Jesus turns it back on them. ‘Make sure you strive to enter the narrow door…’

This passage falls on the heels of the teaching that the Kingdom is like a mustard seed. The small becomes great–like the tiny Christian movement that overtook the world in a few centuries.

I hope that we can see ourselves as that mustard seed. By some standards, we are small and insignificant. But our calling is great. We have a choice to make. We can live up to that calling and be people of the narrow door, or we can surrender to the culture.

When Brother Yun was reflecting on his choice to stay with the house church movement rather than join the communist led state church, he said the state church was like a caged bird. There is no freedom there. In fact they must constantly report to the authorities, they cannot teach about Jesus second coming, they cannot evangelize, they cannot teach children, they cannot teach about healing or about the casting out of demons.

But as he said, ‘the caged birds have a hard time reproducing.’

‘In the house church we are truly free in the Holy Spirit. We are in constant danger but we are free. And free birds are the best at reproducing.’ There is no way of knowing how many house church Christians there are in China. Many estimate that there are millions. And I’ve heard that many are learning Arabic so that they can go out and preach in Muslim lands. I hear they are grateful for the Communists, because they have taught them how to persevere and how to suffer.

We probably feel a million miles away from Chinese Christians. We have no worries of persecution. But the calling that God gives us is the same. Since there is no danger, why not preach the gospel. Since we are free to pray as we wish, why not pray? We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Live as people of the narrow door, fulfill the calling that God has given you!