Not Fair - Just

Pentecost 16A, 9/28/14

Ezekiel 18:1-4; 25-32

God of righteousness, help us believe in you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

This past week I got to see my favorite show of all time – Les Miserables, which is playing at a theater nearby. Have any of you seen Les Mis before?

I love this show because it is constantly demonstrating the mercy of God. Through the actions of some of the characters, we learn that people really can change, and that punishment doesn’t need to be drawn out across a person’s whole lifetime.

Javier is the law enforcer. He judges himself based on the sins of his own family… there’s one song where he admits that he was born inside a jail, and he has spent his entire life compensating for his humble beginnings.

Valjean, the main character, is judged by Javier based on one mistake that he made as a young man – and then throughout the next several decades, Valjean is unable to shake the labels thrown at him.

“Men like you can never change!”

And then we have Eponine, the girl who chooses a different path than the one her parents took.

And there’s Marius, and a group of young students, who decide to fight the establishment that their forefathers have helped to create, and work for the freedom of the working class.

It seems that just about every character in Les Mis is breaking some stereotype or another. They are all proving wrong the assumption that people are condemned to repeat the crimes of their parents.

And that is the belief that the first reading today refutes as well.

People aren’t judged based on the sins of their parents, but everyone is held accountable for their own actions.

This is in contrast to previous teachings in the Old Testament. The prevailing wisdom at the time that Ezekiel was living was that people were held accountable for their sins for generations.

Children could be punished for the sins of their parents.

Everyone was condemned to their place in life because of the role their parents had played in society. This is true even today sometimes, right? Just ask any psychologist, many of us are carrying heavy burdens because of who our parents are or what they have done.

But that’s not the way that God works.

You call my ways unfair? says God.

Aren’t your ways the ones that are unfair?

Human ways, human prejudices, are what make us believe that people are condemned to repeat their parents’ mistakes in life.

We assume that if someone has a sketchy family history, they are more likely to be a bad influence on our society. Our own pre-assumptions judge the children of criminals as more likely to be criminals themselves.

Our human ways are unfair.

That’s not the way that God works.

This past week in confirmation, we talked about people being able to change.

We learned about Saul, who became Paul. He went from being a persecutor of Christians to the most important missionary in the history of Christianity. It’s hard to believe that people can truly change their lives so drastically, but the Bible is full of examples of people who do just that.

If a person has done something wrong, if they have made a mistake or committed some crime in the past, it is hard for us to believe that they have truly changed and will not commit the same crime – or a worse one – in the future. We tend to assume that they are condemned to repeat their own mistakes over again.

What I love about the show Les Mis is that it throws all these assumptions out the window. Every character in the story seems to be in charge of his or her own destiny, no one is defined by who they or their family were in the past.

By the grace of God, people can overcome all odds and live faithful and productive lives.

There’s the way of the law, that is enforced by Javier throughout the play… and then there’s the way of the Lord, that is introduced to us at the beginning by an overwhelmingly generous bishop, and then Valjean tries to live it out for the rest of his life.

The old teaching, the one that is referred to first in the reading from Ezekiel, is to punish the children for the sins of their parents.

But God says, I don’t want you to live like that any more.

I have a better way – a more fair way – of running the world.

You call my ways unfair, says God, but I am the one who will let you all have a new beginning in life. You humans are the ones who judge each other based on past actions and family history. Aren’t your ways the ones that are unfair?

God’s teaching is that each person gets a new start in life.

We are accountable to God for our actions, but we are accountable only for our own actions, not for the actions of our predecessors.

The judgment of God is limited here. We can’t be condemned for something over which we had no control in the first place.

Each one of us gets a fresh start in life.

That is a refreshing way to redefine our relationship with God!

Hear now, O house of Israel, is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?

Last week I talked about God not being fair. Today’s message seems to contradict this. But really, the distinction here is that God’s fairness is not the same as human fairness.

When someone sins against us, we tend to hold a grudge. It’s human nature to look for someone to blame, even when it’s clear that the individual who sinned against us is no longer around to be held accountable for their crime.

Human justice is done when revenge has been exacted, or retribution made.

But is that really fair?

What justice is there in holding the children of criminals accountable for the sins of their parents?

God’s ways are different than our ways. God says, take a fresh start on life.

God’s grace lets people begin again, to turn over a new leaf.

Even if the sin was their own, once the punishment has been carried out, God says, OK. You get a fresh start. Let’s see what you can do with the new life ahead of you.

People’s ways are unfair.

God’s ways are just.

God’s justice is not the same as our human measures of fairness.  

God’s justice is defined by grace.

We are still held accountable for the mistakes we make in life, but once the penalty is paid, it’s done. The punishment doesn’t last forever. If the wicked turn from their ways, Ezekiel tells us, they can live new and productive lives. They don’t have to carry the burden of one mistake around with them forever.

God gives us second chances when we don’t deserve them – God shows us grace even when we’ve proven that we’re likely to mess up our decisions in life. God always comes back to us with mercy and compassion. 

Our life of faith can be a new beginning. Again, in Les Miserables, the main character starts out as a thief. Then he is given a gift that is so generous, he never needs to steal anything again.

         Some people would say once a thief, always a thief.

         But this character proves them wrong.

He accepts the grace that is offered to him and makes a new beginning to his life. Moving forward, he will not be the same man as the one he was in the past.

Who do you know in your life who has done something like this?

Is there someone you know who has been trying to change? Can you give them a second chance?

We can so easily be guilty of judging other people based on their past. But this isn’t fair, and it isn’t what God wants us to do.

So here is a challenge for you: this week, look at everyone you encounter with fresh eyes. Forget any grudges you’re holding against other people. Try to push aside any hurt feelings you’ve been harboring. Treat other people as beloved children of God.

         See how this attitude changes your relationships.

If you’ve had negative interactions with someone in the past, try to forget about them. Move past those hurt feelings and give the other person the benefit of the doubt. The only interactions that matter are the ones that you will have going forward – from now on, you have a new relationship with other people.

And when someone else messes up – when they do something wrong – well, the reading also tells us that God will judge them. It’s not up to us to exact revenge or rain down justice on the people who have wronged us. God will take care of the punishment.

Our job is to love one another, to withhold judgment, to assume the best of other people, and to forget about past wrongs that have been done.

Those human ways of judging aren’t fair.

God’s justice and grace is the better way to go.  

So let’s love one another, let’s withhold judgment, and let’s try to be a little bit more like God.

And may God help us to do so.

Amen.

Not Fair

Pentecost 15A, 9/21/14

Jonah 3:10-4:11; Psalm 145:1-8; Matthew 20:1-16

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

There’s one thing that most of us know about Jonah. Anyone?

Right, he was swallowed by a whale, or technically, a “big fish.”

         We forget sometimes how he ended up in that situation in the first place.

God told Jonah to go to the biggest, most immoral city in the area, and tell the people there to repent, or they would be destroyed.

Like any rational person, Jonah is intimidated by this prospect, and so he tries to run away from God. He gets on a ship, but they haven’t gone far before they get caught in a terrible storm. The only way to keep from capsizing is to throw Jonah overboard. So, Jonah gets tossed into the sea, and God sends the fish to swallow up Jonah and keep him safe until he gets spit out onto the shore.

We can debate how “safe” Jonah might have actually felt in the smelly belly of a giant fish…

Anyway, the fish spits the prophet of God out on the shore, and Jonah does finally go to Nineveh. He gives them a half-hearted order to repent or God will destroy them, and then he figures his work is done.

But then God does something unexpected.

God shows mercy to the people of Nineveh.

God chooses not to destroy the city after all, because once they heard Jonah’s warning, they repented and tried to live better lives.

And Jonah is ticked off!

“Seriously, God?” Jonah says. “This is why I didn’t want to go on this fool’s errand in the first place! If you’re going to send me somewhere to warn people of their impending destruction… well, I expect you to destroy them!

But no.

You have to be all merciful and compassionate, like you always are, and you don’t punish the city full of sinful people like you said you would.

If you weren’t going to follow through on your threat, God, why did you send me there in the first place?!”

And God says,

Why are you mad, Jonah?

Have I done anything to hurt you?

Or are you envious because I am generous?

OK, actually, that last quote is from the Gospel reading today.

But the two stories are making the same point.

They’re teaching us about the nature of God.

And the nature of God is, God is not fair.

God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

We sang that description in the Psalm today.

If you were here last week, we sang the description then, too.

It shows up all over the Bible.

We certainly don’t know everything about God, but we do know that God is gracious and merciful. We do know that God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. We can be sure at least of those few things.

And because that is who God is, we can also be sure that God isn’t fair.

God does not always give people what they deserve.

Thank God, right?

Imagine if God was so fair that every time you stretched the truth a bit, you were punished for lying. Or if you had to answer for every time you’ve ever used God’s name in vain. Or when you work on the Sabbath, fire rains down from heaven upon you.

Thank God for grace, for compassion and mercy – for the ability to mess up occasionally and ignore God’s laws a few times before God really gets serious about punishing us.

Because we all make mistakes, don’t we? And it’s wonderful to know that we won’t be held accountable for every tiny error we’ve ever made in our lives. God is willing to forgive us, just like God forgave the people of Nineveh.

The first thing we can learn from Jonah and the Psalm and the Gospel lesson today is a little bit about who God is – God isn’t fair, but God is merciful and gracious.

Today’s Bible readings bring up another point, also.

We tend to judge God’s fairness – or lack thereof – based on the way we are treated in comparison to others.

But that’s not an accurate judge. God doesn’t want us to compare ourselves to each other. God doesn’t bless us in comparison to others – we only receive blessings according to our own needs.

So the question that today’s stories raise is, “You have enough. Why are you not satisfied?”

It’s not our place to compare our lives to other people’s.

We’ll never measure up, there will always be something more that we want.

When we use other people as our gauge for what life should be, we will never be satisfied. We’ll be jealous of something they have – and for what?

God doesn’t want us to waste our energy that way.

We gain nothing by comparing ourselves to others.

In fact, it’s a waste of our God-given talents to spend all our time wishing for things that other people have.

One post that I read this past week summarized the Gospel lesson this way: the only reason you should ever look into your neighbor’s bowl is to see whether they have enough.

If your neighbor has enough, how wonderful for both of you! Life is good. Even if what your neighbor has is more than what you have, that is still a reason to rejoice – it means that you both have what you need to get through this life.

If your neighbor doesn’t have enough, then you have an opportunity to share out of your own blessings.

That’s basically what’s going on in the Jonah story today, and in the parable from the Gospel of Matthew.

Jonah has enough, God has provided everything he needs.

The workers in the vineyard have a day’s pay for a day’s labor – they have what they have earned.

And yet these people complain to God about the unfairness of the world.

And God’s answer is, those other people’s lives are none of your business.

I have given you all that you need, God says.

I am gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

So what are you complaining about?

It’s human nature to behave like those laborers in the parable, or like Jonah after God fails to destroy Nineveh.

But that doesn’t mean it’s how God wants us to respond.

Are we envious because God is generous?

Or can we find a better path?

The gracious, merciful, God-like response to our neighbors being blessed, is to rejoice with them in their blessing.

Don’t compare ourselves to others with measurements that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Simply find ways to recognize God’s blessing, in the life of other people even when you can’t find it in our own life, and give thanks for the generosity of God.

Amen.

Keeping Score

Pentecost 14A, 9/14/14
Matthew 18:21-35; Romans 14:10-12; Psalm 103:1-13

Gracious and compassionate God, give us your slowness of anger and your abundance of love in our relationships with one another. Amen.

If we were to hold a vote for “the one thing I wish Jesus had never said,” this passage would certainly be in the running for top place.

The God we know and love and worship and pray to is the God of Psalm 103, who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

The God of Christianity is a God of grace and forgiveness, or so we have been led to believe.

But the God in Jesus’ parable today is one who does deal with us according to our sins, who does repay us according to our iniquities.

Like the king in the parable, Jesus says, God will hold us accountable for every debt, and maybe even torture us until we can pay, unless we forgive our sister or brother from our heart.

Yikes. That sounds an awful lot like God’s forgiveness is based on our own action.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been taught that God’s forgiveness comes through grace, as a gift, that there’s nothing I can do to earn it and also nothing that I can do to invalidate it.

Does that sound familiar to you?

But this parable seems to suggest that if I don’t forgive other people, God will not forgive me when I mess up.

And that’s a scary thought.

It’s hard for us to reflect on the God who judges people, especially when there’s a chance that God’s judgment will be directed at us.

How can the God of judgment be the same as the God of compassion?
How is the God represented by the king in this parable also the God who the Psalmist describes as slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love?

God’s judgment is a difficult topic to discuss, so we’ll keep that topic on the back burner for now.

Let’s move first to the condition that God puts on forgiveness – the condition that makes it sound like God’s grace is conditional.

According to Jesus in Matthew 18, God requires us to forgive our sister or brother from the heart, if we want to be forgiven.

But what is it that we are supposed to forgive, anyway?

A few months ago I got an email from a friend of mine, asking if we were OK. She thought that she had offended me.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Finally I realized that she had disagreed with something I posted online a few days earlier, and she thought that I might still be upset about it.

I assured her that we were fine.

But that interaction brings up a good point.

If we don’t recognize when we’ve been wronged, hurt, insulted, or sinned against in some way, we won’t ever be able to forgive our sister or brother from the heart.

Right? We have to acknowledge that a wrong has been done before we can say, “Don’t worry about it, I’m over it, it doesn’t matter any more.”

So let’s do a little exercise here. The ushers are going to pass out cards to everyone. There should be pencils in the pews in front of you, but the ushers have a few extra if you need them.

This project is going to be confidential, so no peeking at someone else’s paper. It won’t work unless people feel like they can write without being watched.

Does everyone have a card?

What I want you to do is write out every wrong that has been done to you so far this weekend.

Really. That’s the first step towards forgiveness – having something to forgive. It can be big or small – maybe you got into a fight with your sibling or your spouse. Maybe a friend stood you up for coffee yesterday or the neighbor neglected (again) to pick up the present his dog left in your yard. Maybe someone cut you off while you were drying into church this morning. 

If you can’t think of a way that someone sinned against you this weekend, you can go back a couple more days, and think of some of the ways you were wronged last week. I’m guessing that you won’t have to go further back than that to remember something that rubbed you the wrong way.

Some of us will have more to write than others. That’s OK.

Once everyone is finished writing, the ushers are going to hand out seven more cards, and I want you to take them home with you. At the end of each day, you need to write down every action that someone made against you during the day. It’s important to keep track of everything so that you know what to forgive!

And then next week, when you come back for worship, you’ll get a whole new set of cards to last you through the next week.

Oh, and did I mention that every single card that you write, you have to carry around with you, on your person, for the rest of your life?

OK, obviously those last things are exaggerations to prove my point. I don’t really want you to write down every sin that anyone ever commits against you.

But imagine what it would be like if you did.

Imagine what kind of lists you’d accumulate. How heavy the stack of cards would get after a few months.

Imagine how painful it would be every time you looked back at any of the previous cards.

And as we all know, the more we do something, the better we tend to get at it. So if you actually did take stock of all the sins that people had made against you every single day, you’d get pretty good at it. Your list would probably get longer and more detailed each day, and take more time to write, and consume more of your energy.

It would be torture.

Isn’t that what it’s like when we don’t forgive others?

Jesus says that God will torture us unless we forgive our brother or sister from our heart.

The question is, does God actually torture us? Or do we bring that torture on ourselves?

Keeping records of debts owed to us by other people can be exhausting. Trying to remember every wrong that has ever been done to us is virtually impossible.

        

Letting go of that scorecard, on the other hand, can be liberating.

That’s actually why I wanted you to write something on those cards this morning. Not so that you would know what it feels like to account for every sin ever made against you, but so that you would know what it feels like to let them go.

That’s the literal meaning of the word for “forgiveness,” by the way. The Greek word, aphiemi, means “to let go” or “to send away.”

Forgiveness is a way of taking a weight off your shoulders, of lightening the load, of un-burdening yourself of something that you’ve been carrying around, that’s getting in the way of you living life to the fullest.

So let’s let go of our scorecards.

Let’s forgive all those wrongs that other people have done to us.

One of the ushers is going to walk down the aisle again, this time with a box. Please put your card into the box. I don’t expect you to pass it off to your neighbor – you don’t want them to read it – but you should be able to reach over to the aisle to put your card in.

No one else is going to read these cards, I promise. They are all going to be shredded by someone I know, who’s not a member of this church, and who has promised to shred them without reading anything.

So go ahead, let go of those sins that people have made against you.

Until they can get shredded though – until our resentment can get completely destroyed – let’s make do with giving it to God. The box will sit on the altar once everyone has put their cards in.

And hopefully, this box can be a symbol for us of what it really means to forgive.

By getting rid of our scorecards, and by bringing them to the altar, we are offering up our complaints to God and also relinquishing any ownership of those complaints. God can deal with them from here on out. They don’t matter to us any more – we have let them go.

Forgiving our sister or brother from the heart means letting go of any wrong that they’ve done to us – not necessarily forgetting about it altogether, but finding a way to keep that previous negative action from interfering with any future positive interactions.

It’s like First Corinthians 13 says – love keeps no records of wrongs.

Or similarly, in today’s reading from Romans, Paul makes it clear that God can judge, but we shouldn’t.

We might not understand God’s judgment, but that’s not our job. Our only job is to withhold judgment from our brothers and sisters. We can be in charge of our own actions, and we can be accountable for our actions to God and God alone. We can toss those scorecards away from us and move forward assuming the best of one another.

Our job is not to pass judgment on one another, but to leave that work to God.

God is the judge.

We might not understand God's judgment, but we can at least understand that God is the one who has authority, and we don't.

Today’s parable sounds kind of harsh, especially when we get to the application part of it. But basically Jesus is saying what he says over and over again to his disciples.

You guys just don’t get it!

You’re asking the wrong questions.

You want to know how many times to forgive someone, Jesus says to Peter? Well I’ll tell you. If you count how many times you forgive someone, you’re doing it wrong.

Instead, just forgive. Always. And if punishment needs to happen, let God take care of it. Don’t let your judgment of other people color your relationship with them.

Let go of your anger and your bitterness. If you hold on to that, it will eat you up inside.

Let God take care of those ugly emotions. You? All you have to do is forgive. Let go. Move on with your life.

Treat others with the compassion that God shows to you.

And when you do so, you’ll be more fully able to understand the gift of forgiveness that God has already given to you.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.