Serve with (humble) Authority

“Serve with (humble) Authority”

Philippians 2:1-13         Matthew 21:23-32

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 21, Year A

September 27, 2020

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

          Jesus is the author and perfector of our faith.  In other words, Jesus is the archetype, the place-holder for humanity, and what happens with Jesus happens with all of us.  With Jesus, for example, we hear over and over how Jesus and the Father are one.  Unity is the foundation of this relationship of love, grace, and peace.  And Jesus prays that the disciples be one, just as he and the Father are one, he in God, God in him, he and God in us, as we are in God and Christ.

Jesus is the archetype, and he says we will do even greater things.  Wow!  That’s the type of encouragement behind Paul’s letter as we read in Philippians a call for unity in Christ.  Encouragement, consolation, love, sharing, compassion, sympathy, joy; these are qualities Paul mentions in relation to our participation in the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The same mind, same love, giving to others, living in humility: these are divine qualities reflected and lived in our life.  The dynamic of living as spiritual beings having a human experience celebrates God as our life; without God, there would be no life.  The joy of Christian faith is living in the awareness of this love holding us in each moment, no matter what the circumstance or context we are facing.

Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman, even in the midst of suffering injustice at a concentration camp, wrote, “There is a really deep well inside me.  And in it dwells God.  Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.”

(Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp, quoted in an email by Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation, September 19, 2020).

This is the relational message that the chief priests and the elders of the people confronting Jesus in the temple totally miss.  The religious leaders that, of anybody, should know this intimate, covenant connection of the heart with God; yet they don’t get it and Jesus reveals the scandal of this disconnect.  That’s why they have their discussion about authority, and in answering Jesus by saying, “We don’t know” they reveal their ignorance of spiritual matters, and their corruption is exposed as they are allowing small thinking and political expediency to dominate their lives.

We shouldn’t be surprised, because even in our culture there are many, many older people, but very few “elders.”  There are many people for whom chronology has caught up, but the depths of spiritual wisdom have not freed their hearts from fear or the tyranny of their false self, living in the small thinking of the limitations of our mind.  Even many church leaders and institutional religion get focused on externals, with very limited inner experience of authentic transformation.  Western society is based on Descartes’s observation that “I think, therefore I am” as we too, tend to limit our identity to our own thoughts about our identity.  We think we are our thoughts.  But there’s much more to life than thinking.

Friends, Jesus is pointing out that there are different ways of knowing.  It’s very easy to become like those confronting Jesus that day, stuck in dualistic thought patterns, low-levels of cultural maturity that get fixated on authority, and totally miss the point Jesus demonstrates in his ministry that in giving our life away we find it, in dying to ourselves, we find life, in loving our neighbor we discover deeper love for ourselves, because in reality, we and our neighbor are one.  Our world does not encourage inner experience, especially in space and silence, or other non-conceptual ways of being.

At a certain level, we can read the parable Jesus shares about the two sons as a comparison of the religious leaders to the tax collectors and prostitutes that tend to resonate with John’s call to repent.  The chief priests do not repent, do not turn their hearts to God, but stay in the comforts of their own thoughts, projected through doctrinal faith and traditions of external practices, conveniently aligned with the ruling classes.  Those marginalized by society, in comparison, do turn, opening their hearts to God and changing their lives in response.

But this story is more than a social-justice issue, more than a mere political critique of corrupt leaders.  If we limit ourselves to social issues and politics, then we’ll just stay on the same hamster wheel as the chief priests and leaders of the people.

Jesus is teaching about other ways of knowing, deeper than the mind.  This is the teaching, the Perennial Wisdom, they are rejecting, and that’s the scandal.  But to expose this, Jesus gradually drills down through some layers.

“Son, go and work in the vineyard today,” is what the father asks.  This is one type of knowing: the physical.  “Go and work” means physical labor, farming, working in the field, the vineyard.  Do you know that less than one percent of the American population is involved in agriculture?  The small, self-supporting family farm is a thing of the past as culture has shifted from an agrarian model of sustainable independence to an industrial model of short term profit with long term dependence and decline.

Physical labor is something Americans subconsciously look down on and try and avoid.  Leisure and entertainment are the sedentary, consumer goods now.  Yet work and physical labor have an inherent value, and human beings are connected genetically with the majority of the world, in history, that did and do labor with their bodies and not just their minds.  Listening to our bodies reminds us of our need for exercise, movement, creativity, and work as something beyond thoughts.  We don’t need to think about our heart pumping faster, or consciously tell sweat to come onto our skin.  Our bodies know what to do, it’s encoded in our physicality as created beings.  This is one type of knowing, deeper than conceptual, cognitive thinking.

Thought is one type of knowing, physical body is another type of knowing.  A third type is even deeper that either of these: it is our soul.  Our soul is the deep well where we meet God inside of us.  Our soul is that eternal Presence, Divinity itself as Christ is expressed in our creatureliness as created beings that live out God as our life.  Our soul has ways of knowing that don’t involve thought, that are not dependent on noise or words or concepts.  Our soul can be quite in tact even if our body is broken.  As physical decline claims us over time, which is inevitable; spiritual growth is optional.

That’s another aspect to this parable as Jesus the archetype gives us a blueprint of spiritual living.  When asked to go work in the vineyard, it’s the older son of whom it says, “I will not; but later he changed his mind and went.”  The younger son said he would go but didn’t.  This parable explores the two halves of life, the first half of life and the second of life; our younger years, and our older years, and the dynamics of spiritual growth in each.

In younger years we take the stories that are shared and are generally agreeable with them.  But they may not translate because they never really “took” at any deep level.  This is the saying Yes, but not actually living it.

In our older years we are invited to a different kind of knowing, to move beyond the limitations and splits that words force us into as life is constantly divided, compared, counted, and measured, everything assigned value judgments and commodified.  Somehow, the older son broke free from this.  The older son went because he changed.  But notice what it is that gets changed: his mind.  He changed his mind, he was freed from the tyranny of thought, from the limitations of concepts, and he allowed a deeper knowing to shape his actions.  This is what brings the older son into alignment with the will of the Father.  That’s second half of life spirituality.

But that’s why we don’t have very many elders in our culture, because to get there involves humility, a giving of oneself for another, and a practice of letting go.  In a hedonistic, narcissistic culture, obsessions over outside appearances take center stage and dominate news cycles, and humility and letting go, the path of decent is counter-cultural.  But as human beings, we are meant for these deeper ways of knowing: we are social creatures, one in Christ, united in Love that is deep, abiding, and is the shape of ultimate reality.  Our soul will not be satisfied by anything less than eternal, infinite Love, the very Presence of God.

To help us claim deeper ways of knowing, both the physical sense and the soul-full way where silence and space are most helpful, here is an exercise.  The classic prayer position involves putting your hands together.  It may even include a slight bow.  Let’s assign some meaning to this posture, meaning we can internalize.  Each hand represents something, and bringing them together is a physical action with spiritual depth.  One hand can mean deep, like the depths of our soul, unfathomable love, bottomless grace, eternity; that which has no limits and there is no need to measure or count.  These realities are beyond our mind’s ability to comprehend and they are too deep for words.

The other hand can mean well, like a spring of living water continually filling with cool, life-giving water.  A well that never runs dry, so deep that it echoes and we cannot see the bucket as it hits that refreshing promise that waits in the darkness.  One hand deep, the other hand well.  Deep.  Well.

Now, take the “d” from deep, and press it together with the entire “well” and you get “dwell.”  D-well.  Dwell.  In prayer, we dwell in God’s Presence.  This is why a slight bow is kind of nice as a symbol of humility, thankfulness, honoring.  God’s Presence is deep, loving, eternal, and full of life.  In Christ, our soul and God are one as Deep calls to deep.

Sitting in prayerful silence is a way of knowing.  Not the thought kind of knowing.  Not even the physical, body kind of knowing.  Not the first half of life knowing that is trying to measure and figure out and define.  But the second half of life kind of knowing that trusts and leans into and abides; that has had its fill of words and is ready for the space around those words; that has had its fill of noise and is ready for even more energetic silence.

As we engage in a prayerful stance, inviting our body and soul to participate in deep love, fear is washed away.  May we learn from the blueprint of Jesus as he shares Wisdom to create elders, united in Christ, the archetype of our faith.  Thanks be to God for parables and deep ways of knowing.  May God’s humble love be glorified as we serve others in the name of Christ so our hearts may transform as we turn and change our mind to live in response to Love.  Amen.