Backwards, From Outer Darkness

The wedding guest who was cast into outer darkness by the king is me.  Or it might as well have been me, in a version of my own occasionally recurring anxiety dream, about which I have spoken from this pulpit before.  In my dream, I am not only without a robe, without the proper attire, I am without any clothes at all: I am naked and exposed, and I cannot hide.  Also, I am late; which I’m pretty sure was also true for the wedding guest in the parable.

My recurring anxiety dream, in which I am late for church and I have no clothing on, never reaches a conclusion, so I don't know if it resulted in my being bound hand and foot and then cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.  But such an ending is implied by the dream, I think.  It’s the nature of anxiety dreams (like so many dreams) that you never get to the end of them, I think.  They leave you hanging.

But those details of punishment, of how the dream could end, of the consequences of my naked lateness are aspects of the story over which I have no control.  The punishment is not really the cause of my anxiety.  My anxiety arises in my dreams precisely because of the things I should have been in control of: namely, being on time and clothed (with something, anything).  But even if my lateness could be excused, my nakedness cannot be - of that I am certain.  Do you know that anxiety, too?  That your nakedness, your exposure, being seen for who you really are, will surely result in your rejection?

This dream does not qualify as a nightmare, because nightmares are freaky and outlandish, and can be dismissed as “only a bad dream.”  But anxiety dreams are rooted in details that seem plausible, and that tell a story that we believe to be genuinely and mostly true.  I could have been on time, if only I have prepared sooner and left earlier, but I didn’t; I failed.  And I could have had a wedding garment on, but I was so frazzled that I didn’t even realize I was naked; I didn’t even notice how exposed I was.  And now I have arrived: late and naked.

We never find out what happens as a result of our anxiety - I never do.  I always wake up before it’s over and the actual consequences are realized. Not knowing how it ends is its own kind of torture, I suppose.  But all I have to do is listen to this parable to realize what happens to me as a result of my anxiety and my failure: I am cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Modern people are not supposed to worry about things like this any more.  But maybe our dreams and our anxiety are not as modern as we are.

Is this really what the kingdom of heaven may be compared to?  The citizens are indifferent to the king’s invitation, and are vicious with his servants.  The king is prone to fits of rage and is vengeful.  The only people who show up to the banquet are those who are compelled to do so, regardless of their virtue.  And if you should happen to suffer from anxiety; if you arrive late and you can be seen for who you are; if you should happen to displease the king for circumstances you were never prepared to deal with, and show up without the proper robe, then he will treat you with cynical cruelty, calling you his “friend,” as you stand speechless before him, just moments before he has you bound, hand and foot, and thrown into outer darkness.  I don’t much like this parable when you read it as written.

I’m wondering if this parable works out better if you read it backwards; if you start in outer darkness, having failed already, your anxiety having gotten the best of you, and having been exposed for what you really are: which is a disappointment and a failure.  I am deeply tempted to want to hear the parable this way: to try to hear it backwards.  I am tempted to try to dream my dream backwards.  It would go something like this:

It begins in outer darkness, where I find myself bound, hand and foot.  Somehow, I manage to free myself, hands and my feet.  And through some combination of cleverness and deceit, born of desperation, I manage to crawl toward the dim light of a street.  There, in the gutter, I can see that there are others, but I can’t tell who I can trust, so I dare not ask for help.  Eavesdropping, I discover that I am on the outskirts of the kingdom.  And the word is that a wedding banquet is to take place.  But I feel lucky just to be here in the street, to have escaped outer darkness.  I am profoundly relieved to be able to finally stop weeping, and to unclench my jaw as I cease gnashing my teeth.

Now that my tears have stopped flowing, I realize that I have been clutching a large and elegantly addressed envelope.  It is an invitation, addressed to me.  How I held onto the invitation through the ordeal of outer darkness , I cannot imagine, but what a stroke of luck it seems to me!  Uncertain, but with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, I venture through the streets and toward the wedding hall, where, wonder of wonders, I am immediately admitted to the banquet.

In the wedding hall there is music.  Dinner is prepared: oxen and fat calves have been slaughtered for the occasion.  Everything is ready.  And I realize that I am about to be presented to the king.  This is the first moment that it occurs to me that I have no idea what I am wearing.  I feel a dream coming on, a dream within a dream, an anxiety dream in which I am late and naked.  And so I turn to an attendant of the king’s, and the desperation on my face says it all.  In a flash, I am surrounded by a host of other attendants who whisk me away, strip me, and wash me, and who dress me in the kind of terry cloth robe you get at a good hotel, which is very comfy, but this one has no belt, and keeps falling open in front, so that I am somehow both covered and exposed at the same time.

I am returned to the wedding hall.  And this is how I am presented to the king: smelling clean and fresh, my hair a little wet, my feet bare, clutching my robe in front to try not to embarrass myself as it falls open.  Here I stand before the king, having had the good fortune to dream this parable backwards.  He is a king that I had been encouraged to believe is ill-tempered, erratic, and judgmental, prone to fits of rage.

But approaching him backwards through the parable, I discover that this is not the case at all, as I try to figure out how to bow to him properly without letting my terry cloth robe fall open in front, exposing myself.  I am not successful.  But I have traveled through this parable backwards, and the king, who when encountered in the other direction, at the end of the parable, is capricious and condemning, presents himself quite differently here at the beginning of the parable.  For it was here, at the beginning of the parable, that the king always intended to greet me (and you).

As I lift my head, clutching my robe awkwardly and unsuccessfully in front of me, the king does, in fact, see me for who I am, barely concealed behind the soft robe.  And he smiles, and extends his arms as he comes to embrace me.  And what does he say to me as he does so?  Oh, I don’t even know, for the sound of his voice strikes me as something akin to the sound of a cat purring, as he reassures me and holds me, “My child, my child, I am so glad you’re here!”  Or something like that.

Gripped by anxiety and shame that God will see me for who I really am, I lose track of the fact that God has always known me for who I really am, and I could never hide that from him, no matter how successfully I might hide it from others.  And from the vantage point of anxiety and shame, I am tempted to hear the parable the way it is presented in the scriptures; as a parable that leads to outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But when I begin in outer darkness and crawl back toward the light, that’s when I realize that the invitation has always been mine, and the king was always ready to see me for who I truly am.  It was only my anxiety that led me to believe that he could ever see me any other way.  It was only my shame that led me to believe that he could cast me into outer darkness.  And if I am ashamed of who I am when I am exposed then what does that say about what I think of the king, who is the one who made me who I am?  I need to read this parable backwards, because otherwise I am doomed to a life that is a perpetual loop of my anxiety dream in which I am always late and naked: always missing out and inadequate, always failing and a disappointment.

But Jesus does not tell the parable because he wants his followers to learn that they belong in outer darkness with the late and the naked, the missing-out and the inadequate, the failures and the disappointments.  Jesus tells this parable because he wants us at the banquet.

Oh, that’s a very loosey-goosey way of reading this parable, I admit.  But I think at this moment, when it’s so easy to feel as though we are in outer darkness of our own or someone else’s making, we might need a more loosey-goosey way reading of parables like this.  And if you are certain that Jesus wants you at the banquet, then I think you can read the parable any way that leads you there, held in the long, warm embrace of the king, who sees you for who you truly are, and who purrs in your ear when he holds you, “My child, my child, I am so glad you’re here!”  Or something like that.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
15 October 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Whose Vineyard Is It, Anyway?

The parable we heard today is known as “The Parable of the Wicked Tenants.”  This moniker is helpful, I guess, but it doesn’t really tell you what the parable is about.  You may have noticed that Jesus is telling parables aimed at the chief priests and the Pharisees, but it takes them a while to realize it.  It takes them a while to see that they are the wicked tenants, in Jesus’ telling of this parable.

It takes us a while to realize that Jesus is talking to us in his parables, too.  It’s easy for us to think that we are better than the chief priests and the Pharisees, or at least that we are certainly not them.  And we probably feel pretty sure that we are not wicked.  So what does any of this have to do with us?

If you think the crucial question for us in reading this parable is, “Who are the wicked tenants today?” then, chances are good you will dismiss the possibility that you are a wicked tenant, and this parable will have little or nothing to say to you, and you will start making your shopping lists in your head right about now.  But, it’s possible that this parable can answer more than one question, if we can be attentive enough to find a question that we think might have more to say to us.  I think it’s worth trying,

There is much to distract us.  We could get hung up on the issue of slavery, and wonder if that’s the question we should ask about.  We could get hung up on the violence and ruthlessness of the wicked tenants, who beat one slave, killed another, and stoned another.  Twice.  We could get hung up on ownership rights, and the delusional notion of the wicked tenants, that if they killed the landowner’s son, they would somehow be rewarded with his inheritance.  Getting hung up on any of these questions, might lead somewhere fruitful, but I am not hung up on any of them at the moment.

Here’s the question I’m hung up on: For whom did the landowner plant his vineyard?  Why did he put a fence around it, and dig a winepress in it, and build a watchtower?  Why, oh why, did he immediately lease the vineyard to tenants, and go away to another country?  And why did he make the vineyard fruitful enough that the tenants would want to fight over the yield from its produce?  Why did the landowner plant this vineyard, and who is this vineyard for?

Let’s cut to the chase a little, and recognize the landowner for who he is; he is God.  Why did God plant a vineyard, and who is the vineyard for?

It seems clear that the vineyard was never meant for God’s own purposes. The vineyard is not an investment property.  What does God need a vineyard for?

The only thing God needs a vineyard for is for the pleasure, the fruitfulness, and the occupancy of his beloved creatures, who no longer live in the gardens of paradise.  But God still wants them to have someplace nice, someplace safe, someplace where it is possible to lead a happy and fruitful life that has a significant measure of joy in it.  Notice that it’s a vineyard, and not a potato field.

Why did God plant a vineyard and all its accoutrements?  He built it for love.

The vineyard was always built for his people, and not for himself.  Which is to say that the vineyard was always built for us: for you and for me.  If you close your eyes, you can imagine, if you will, that we are living in a vineyard of God’s planting, where God means for us to be safe and happy.

Let’s not fuss too much about where the vineyard is located.  Let’s say that the vineyard can be easily gerrymandered to include whomever needs or wants to be included.  Let’s say this is the best possible use for gerrymandering, and that it is a far preferable method, when identifying the boundaries of the vineyard of the Lord, than, say, firing rockets at one another.

So if God planted us a vineyard and allows us to enjoy the pleasures and safety of it, as well as much of the fruit of its harvest, is it fair, is it right, is it reasonable for God to expect us to offer something back to him come harvest time?

For the last three weeks in church, we have heard parables that include a vineyard.  Last week, a father asked two sons to work in the vineyard. The week before, we heard about the laborers getting paid for their work in the vineyard.  Next week, we will hear about a banquet.  And I assure you that wine was or will be served at that banquet: wine from the vineyard.  I keep thinking how reassuring it is, in this world in which so much is uncertain, I keep thinking how reassuring it is to be told that there really is a vineyard.  There really is a place that God intends for us to be well and happy.  And there really is a banquet at which we will enjoy the fruits of the vineyard.

I can hear you stop making your shopping list for long enough to think, “What is he talking about?  A parable is a story, not a map.  There is no vineyard.  It’s a figure of speech, a fable at best.  There’s nothing real about any of this.”  We are so used to gerrymandering our territory; we are so used to firing rockets, that it’s hard for us to discern that Jesus is telling us something that is true.

To say that there is a vineyard, is to say that there is a kingdom of God - or more precisely, that there will be for us, since what already exists for God may not yet exist for us, even though everything is always happening everywhere.  Somewhere in everything-always-everywhere there really is a kingdom of God; there really is a vineyard.  And the grapes that grow in that vineyard will produce whatever kind of wine you want or need, including non-alcoholic wine, if that’s what works.  There really is a vineyard.  And it belongs to God, but he has given it to us for all intents and purposes.

And even though everything always happens everywhere (which means that God is never far away), it feels to us as though God has gone away to another country.  So many people feel as though God hasn’t been seen in years!  God’s been gone so long, that it seems to many people that they are not convinced that he was ever here in the first place, and, second of all, there is no point in pretending that we owe him anything.  We can keep it all for ourselves.

But to some of us, it feels as though we have one foot in a vineyard in this world, and the other foot already in the vineyard of the kingdom of God.  That’s why we’re here today.  Because we can’t shake that feeling.  (And we sense that everything is always happening everywhere, which is another way of talking about eternity.)  And it feels like somehow we have always known why God planted the vineyard, and who he made it for.  We have always known that it was for love; that it was for anyone who wanted to claim God’s love and call themselves God’s child.

And when we realize for sure that there is a vineyard; when we know it was planted for us; when we see that all of it was made for love… are we moved by love to return some measure of that love back to God?  Or do we insist that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and we never even dream of giving anything back to the One who gave us everything?

God planted a vineyard.  He put a fence around it, and dug a winepress in it, and he built a watchtower.  He planted, and he built it for love of us, his people.  And because God knows that it’s hard for us to perceive that everything is always happening everywhere, God also knew that it would feel to us as if he’s gone away to another country.  This feeling, God knows, opened the door to all kinds of mischief, even wickedness.

But God does not want us to fall pray to mischief and wickedness.  God wants us to enjoy the blessings of the vineyard in the presence of his Son.  So God put a fence around the vineyard, and dug a winepress, and built a watchtower… to try to account for our safety and our joy.

God did it all for love.  And the hope of God’s heart, is that we will return some measure of that love back to him, by loving him with our whole heart, and soul, and mind; and by loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
8 October 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Power Belongs To God

If adherence to anything like the Christian faith is on the wane, there are good reasons for it.  Not the least of which is how much you seem to have to give up to follow Jesus.  In case you haven’t been paying attention, Jesus seems to call us to live our lives according to a different set of rules.  But what I am talking about here is not conservative or liberal religious values.  It has more to do, I think, with power.  And the Gospel calls us to reject the kind of power that is easy to grab, and instead find power in places other than where we’re generally being told to look by the world around us.

If you expect to gain power with your money, Jesus will tell you to give it away.  If you think it is your status that will get you power, Jesus will tell you to be humble and take a lower seat when you walk into a room.  If you want to use brute power to accomplish your goals, Jesus will tell you to put your sword back into its sheath - even if it was him you were trying to protect!  If you think that being the smartest person in the room will get you power, Jesus tells you to be more like a child: more like someone who doesn’t know much at all, and who has no power.  Feeling meritorious?  Did you think showing up early and working hard would get you power?  Remember last week, when we learned that in the kingdom of God, the guy who shows up last gets the same pay as the ones who were there at the crack of dawn.

Indeed, the paradox that the first shall be last and the last shall be first is all over Jesus’ teaching and all over the Jesus story.  And mostly we don’t know what to do with it.  Because generally speaking this paradox only sounds like good news to  people who already know that they are behind everyone else, beneath everyone else, and have nowhere to go but forward and up - that is to say, to people who have no power.

Reading the stories about Jesus, we are flummoxed (or at least I am) by the one instance in which we hear of Jesus asserting power with force - when he drives the money-changers out of the temple - because it is so uncharacteristic of him.  But then, he is fully human.

St. Matthew provides us with two instances of this kind of teaching on power this morning.  First, we hear Jesus engage with the chief priests and elders of the temple about where his “authority” comes from.  “Authority” is a description of a certain aspect of power.  Don’t be fooled here, the chief priests and elders are challenging Jesus’ power, because they sense clearly that everything about him challenges their power.  They might as well be asking him, “Who do you think you are?!”

It’s telling that Jesus will not answer them.  Not because he can’t; he simply won’t.  He doesn’t see the need to assert his authority (his power) any more than he already has, since to do so would be to use a kind of power that he is not willing to wield.

Then he tells a parable about two sons.  The one son says he is going to work in the vineyard, but doesn’t do it; the other says he won’t work, but does.  Jesus doesn’t even have to provide an ending to the story; he lets the chief priests and the elders do it themselves, before they realize that the parable is about them!  And the moral of the story that Jesus reveals is that the powerless penitent will sooner find entry into the kingdom of God than the righteously indignant.  First will be last, and last will be first.  This parable is not about knowing what to do, it’s all about knowing who you are.  The chief priests and the elders think they know who they are because they are in power.  But Jesus tells them that they are wrong, and that the powerless (the tax collectors and the prostitutes) are closer to the kingdom of God than they are.

Jesus seems to know that power is a problem, or at least that the way we humans tend to use it and abuse it, is a problem.  This could be a difficult insight to learn from the Son of God, a God who, we are usually eager to point out, is omnipotent!  How could the all-powerful Son of the all-powerful God teach us anything about power, except that the more of it you have, the better off you will be?  What else can God know about power other than that power belongs to God, as the Psalmist puts it?  This is an important question, that goes, I think to the heart of Jesus’ mission to humanity, the question of why God became human.  And Jesus shows us time and time again that he is unwilling to use the power that we all assume was surely within his grasp, because, after all, he rose from the grave and  conquered death!

But it is St. Paul, dear, troublesome St. Paul, who we often think of as one of the most powerful figures in history because of what he accomplished in spreading the Gospel and growing the church.  It is St. Paul who shares with us insights about the nature of Jesus’ life and ministry, and indeed, about the nature of Jesus’s power that we need to hear.  St. Paul engages with the paradox of the Cross: that what we can intend for evil, God can intend for good.  Thereby the first end up last, and the last may enter in first.

Paul does not shy away from Jesus’s paradoxes, and especially not when it comes to the paradox of Jesus’ power: that the all-powerful Son of the all-powerful God doesn’t seem to be especially powerful, by any worldly standard.

And St. Paul sees the wisdom of God where others have a hard time seeing it.  Here’s what God showed St. Paul about Jesus, that it was hard for others to see: “… that though he [Jesus] was in the form of God [which is to say that he shared everything with God], yet, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born human likeness.”

Jesus, though he was God, emptied himself of his godly power, to share the life of the powerless, and to do his divine work powerlessly.  Why do this?  Because the wisdom of God knows the cynicism of power that’s exercised with strength - what we often hear referred to as “hard power” these days.

Try to find someplace these days where the exercise of  worldly power does not carry a whiff of the cynical.  In Washington?  At the United Nations?  On the Moon?  Even there, on the Moon, power is cynically deployed and exploited.  Lord Acton was right: power corrupts.

Knowing how cynical power can be does not prevent most of us from wanting it, especially since we know most of us can’t have it.  And we are conditioned to strive for the things that will bring us worldly power: money, status, and force.

Power corrupts religion, too.  You don’t need me to provide you with the details to prove it.  The decline of religion in our time is at least in part a result of how much bad religion has been foisted on people over the centuries.

Don’t you think that Jesus knew that power corrupts?  How could he establish God’s kingdom of peace and love by exercising power in the ways of this world?  If war can even break out in heaven amongst the angels of God, what can God do to curb the abuse of power as he establishes his kingdom?  Isn’t a kingdom just a social construct of power?

Listen to St. Paul again: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”  Who does St. Paul think he is, the Speaker of the House, calling for us to put principle over party?  On what basis can he make this argument?  He goes on: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.”

Though he was God, he emptied himself of his godliness, emptied himself of his power and became powerless except to serve.  St. Paul is able to teach this way because of what Jesus taught him when he looked to Jesus for power.  The details of Paul’s inner struggle are murky, but the insight from Jesus was absolutely clear.  Paul prayed to God for relief from whatever it was that tormented him.  He says he prayed three times, which is to say, I think, that he had prayed all he could, and his prayers had run dry.  And Paul reports that Jesus said to him in his torment, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness.  Who could say such a thing and be believed, if he had not died on a cross?

The Cross is the place where the awesome power of God meets suffering, injustice, and death with all the weakness of humanity.  And the way this happens is that the all-powerful Son of of the all-powerful God empties himself of his godly power to become just as weak as you and me.  For, it is when Jesus has emptied himself of his power that we can believe that he has become un-corruptible.  And only when he is powerless can he share his grace with the rest of those who have no power and who know that there is nothing else for them to rely on - nothing else for us to rely on - other than the  sufficiency of Christ’s grace.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes.  And I suppose that that is because foxholes are obvious locations of powerlessness.  We had thought that foxholes were a thing of the past, but we know better now, don’t we?  But still, we avoid them if we possibly can.

Do you remember that famous line from the film, “The Usual Suspects:” “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”?  Well, maybe the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that we wouldn’t find ourselves in foxholes anymore.  Which is to say, that, without foxholes of the real or spiritual kind, it is easy for us to think that we can rely on whatever power we can amass, and that life might be all about gathering power, one way or another.

And maybe that’s why God became human: because of how misguided this basic human endeavor would become; because of how destructive the relentless pursuit of power would become; because of the damage such profound cynicism can to to a nation, a people, a faith, a religion, when all that matters is where the power lies.

Jesus is to be found where the power doesn’t lie, because Jesus gave up his power when he came to live with us, to be one of us, and to save us.  I think this may be why the church came to venerate her martyrs so highly.  Because those who had given up their lives for their faith, embraced the powerlessness of Christ, relying solely on his grace at the cost of everything.

Most of us are not called on to give up quite so much.  But whether it’s money, status, or force, or some other nuanced category that doesn’t fit neatly into this scheme, most of us have been working to gain enough power to at least maintain control of the conditions around us, and preferably a bit more than that.

But there is no amount of power that will ever make us safe, that will ever protect us from everything, that will ever give us everything we want.  There is only grace.  And Christ’s grace is sufficient for us.  And his power is made perfect in weakness.

Eventually we all find ourselves in a foxhole with no way to defend ourselves.  And the reason Christ emptied himself of his power, is because he knew that this would be the case, and he knows that it’s at these times when we need him most.  333“My grace is sufficient for you,” he tells us, “for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

“What good does that do us, now?!” we are tempted to shout back at him!

And Jesus reminds us that it was when he was at his weakest moments that he embarked on his most important ministry, that it was from the Cross that the awesome power of God met suffering, injustice, and death with all the weakness of humanity and triumphed over death; that it was from the grave which had swallowed him up in death that he rose to bring resurrection life to all who would accept his grace.

So, “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.

“Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
1 October 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia