The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland
29 September 2002
Proper 21 Year A, 19th Sunday after Pentecost
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Psalm 25:3-9
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew
21:28-32
The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Matthew and paraphrased by me: “Put up, or Shut up.” Now, usually I disapprove of bumper sticker theology, along with bumper sticker politics and bumper sticker activism. If you can fit your entire thought onto a bumper sticker, I wish you would keep thinking. But today’s gospel reading can pretty much be summed up accurately in this bumper sticker length concept: put up, or shut up.
If anyone’s thoughts are worth greater expansion and contemplation, surely Jesus’ are. The story he tells this morning, however, is quite simple. It’s a short little ditty about this father and a couple sons and what they said and what they did and if you missed it you can read it again, but it boils down to this: you can talk the talk, or you can walk the walk. Which is it going to be?
There’s nothing new here really. The idea that actions speak louder than words is not copyrighted by Christianity, and though Martin Luther confused a lot of people on this issue, Jesus seems to come down firmly on the side that you ought to do what you mean and save your fancy words for later. Luther was right in that doing good things isn’t going to be your salvation and isn’t necessary for God to love you. However, saying you intend to do good things and then not bothering to do them probably isn’t going to impress your deity much either. God already loves you, Jesus covered that in another chapter. What he’s getting at here is that it is better to do what your F/father wants even if you’re a smart mouth about it in the beginning than it is to pretend to listen to your F/father and then not do what you said you would.
For an example Jesus picks on two of his favorite losers: whores and tax collectors. Now, prostitute translates pretty clearly from Jesus’ time to ours, but a quick note on tax collectors. There are probably people in this very church who work for the IRS, or Social Security, or some other government agency to which we all have the occasional opportunity to contribute. I don’t want them or anyone else to get the idea that Jesus doesn’t love them. These folks get paid by the government for doing their jobs. Not very well I’m sure they will tell you, but better than the tax collectors in Jesus’ time who got paid nothing by the Roman government. If they wanted to feed their families or take a vacation, they had to charge their people extra so they’d have something to skim off the top. It’s a pretty cruel little tactic that Rome used to keep the people they conquered angry at each other, and not at Rome.
Anyway, Jesus says that when John the Baptist was preaching repentance, these whores and tax gougers would listen to him, and even though their very livelihood was offensive to God, some of them would repent and try to change their lives. The religious elite, on the other hand, went out an heard John, pretended to give him the thumbs up, and then had his head chopped off. Jesus scores a point here in his ongoing debate with the Pharisees because they have to answer his question about the F/father and the sons the way they don’t want to. They behave like the delinquent son, and they know it.
But what of the other readings? In today’s installment of Paul, we have a fairly utopian vision of Christian Community. Nobody is doing anything from selfish ambition or conceit, but only in humility. Everyone is of the same mind, having the same love. No one looks to his own interest, but only to the interests of others. This is a good thing because this is how Jesus related to God. This is of course a utopian vision and probably not what the real Philippians were like. That’s OK though, because Paul is confident of their ability to live the Christian life with his presence or without it. He ends with the somewhat ominous suggestion that they work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, assuring them that God is within them enabling their work.
Ezekiel is not so optimistic as Paul. Ezekiel tackles one of the most difficult subjects the children of Israel would deal with. Do the sins of the parents fall onto the children? It’s easy for us to say no. Of course a child is not to be held responsible for the sin of their parents. On the surface, this is true. If my father commits a crime and dies unpunished, I will not have to stand trial in his place. If my father is an alcoholic, I do not have to become one. But like my friend Shakespeare says, there’s the rub. If my father is an alcoholic, I do not have to become one, but there’s a better than average chance that I will. To say that children are not responsible for the sin of their parents is one thing. To say that children do not inherit the sin of their parents is quite another.
It is this inheritance of sin that Ezekiel struggles against. The taking on of sin, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly, by one generation from the preceding ones. Ezekiel was a prophet during a time of war and strife for Israel. Feuds lasted generations, enemies were born of enemies, violence was institutionalized. When God told Ezekiel to cross out that proverb about the parents eating sour grapes and the children setting their teeth on edge, it wasn’t going to be a matter of just leaving that proverb out of the book because it wasn’t true any more. The proverb was true then and is true now. God command Ezekiel and all the children of Israel to make that proverb untrue. To make the sin of one generation not fall onto the next.
The only way to do this is to take Jesus’ advice and to walk the walk of peace in actions, ignoring those who talk the talk of peace but allow the violence to pass on to the next generation. I hesitate to venture that Ezekiel would feel right at home on modern day Israel. I hesitate to mention it not because I am unsure if it is true, but because the situation in today’s Middle East is so wrapped up in history, and complicated politics, and Western morality, that it is nearly impossible to say anything about it at all without seriously offending someone. But somebody has to say something, for Ezekiel is not here to do it.
Fortunately Scott Simon was here to do it yesterday. Mr. Simon is a reporter for National Public Radio, and yesterday morning I heard him tell a story of peace in Israel; of people who walked the walk of peace. This is the story: Ione Jessner was a nineteen year old Jewish boy who grew up in Glasgow. Growing up, he wanted to be a doctor, but before he went to London for medical school, he wanted to spend a year or two in Israel helping to build the Jewish state and learning about his Jewish roots. Last week he got on a bus to go and visit his uncle. A few stops later a Palestinian man with explosives strapped to his body got on the same bus. Ione and five others were killed.
The doctors that tried to put the broken parts of Ione back together knew that he was a Jew, and they knew that he had wanted to become a doctor. They also knew Jasmine Ramayla, a seven year old Palestinian girl whose parents had been braving Israeli check-points three times a week to take her to the hospital for dialysis treatments because she was born with bad kidneys.
The doctors then made a very courageous phone call. They called Ione’s parents in Glasgow to tell them their son was dead, and then they asked if they might be willing to donate his kidneys to a little Palestinian girl. Up to that moment Ione and Jasmine were enemies. Ione was helping Israel occupy Palestinian land, and Jasmine’s people were fighting that occupation by killing Israeli citizens. Both these families had spoken violence, and conflict. But when the opportunity came, the walked the path of peace, and Ione’s family gave, and Jasmine’s family accepted.
So Jasmine Ramayla, with a Jewish kidney filtering the poisons from her Palestinian blood, will live a normal life; provided she doesn’t get hit by a random bomb or shot with a stray bullet. Ione’s brother had this to say: “We believe it is a sanctification of God’s name to bring something positive out of this terrible conflict.” Abu Ramayla, Jasmine’s father said, “We are one family, they saved my daughter…we are all one people.”
So while Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat speak of peace in newspapers and on TV every day, these two families acted. It was only one act, in one set of circumstances, and it probably won’t change much overall. But I think this is what Paul meant when he said we should work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. And I think this is the deeper meaning behind Jesus’ bumper sticker length recommendation to walk the walk and ignore the talk.
As I live, says the LORD GOD, this proverb shall no more be used by you. Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine…For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the LORD GOD. Turn then, and live. AMEN.