Koonung Heights Uniting Church
Exodus 17:1-7
Matthew 21:23-32
You know any grumblers? Or “murmurers” the bible calls them. Mutterers under their breath. Or occasionally a full throated denunciation of wicked practices that have made their way into the church. Modern songs and electric musical instruments. Coloured cloths at the front of the sanctuary, candles and banners, people eating or drinking where they should not. All around the church site Christians are quick to put up notices at the first hint of offending behaviour. The place most prone to accumulate these signs is the Church Kitchen.
The grumblers in life are never happy, or you could say they are at their happiest when they have found something they can whinge about.
The Hebrew scripture from Exodus today takes us back to the formative event in the life of Israel. The liberation of the slaves from captivity in Egypt. We have had the parting of the Red Sea and the people are on the road to the promised land but now got bogged down.
Remember they are liberated slaves, but the excitement of freedom takes a bad turn. No water – desert life without water truly a big concern. We have seen over the past couple of weeks the absolute necessity for water and with limited supply how water can be a contested area.
So I have got a bit of sympathy for the people. They are asking a vital question saved from… saved into… more suffering?? At one level quite understandable complaints but there is something else going on about how Israel is a covenant partner and that requires trust and Israel is not all that trusting and has to grow in this relationship.
And there is more grumbling going on in the gospel. Quarelling it is called in the passage from Matthew. Along with the parable of the Prodigal Son and the Mary and Martha story and the Workers in the Vineyard these are the grumbling, murmuring, passages in the gospels. Remember how a few weeks ago I said I get people approach me after I have preached on these passages saying, “You know I have lot of sympathy for that older brother or Martha or the workers who had been out all day because I had a brother or sister that got away with far more than I ever could get away with.”
But it goes even deeper and more sinister. Something that mirrors back to us some shadowy, murky side of both the church and us as individuals. Its about not being happy about God’s grace being showered upon those considered not worthy or not obedient or not something or other
Its when a passing flicker of resentment get rusted over and locked down so you can no longer turn the nut that attaches it to your spirit that we know we are in trouble. Something that has lost the innocence or the naivety of unbridled joy and celebration. It has got something to do with forgetting who we are, or better still, whose we are, where we have come from and what we have received.
At the end of the day you will live out of either love or fear. To live out of love is to be confident in the abundance and richness of life. To receive gratefully and to share what you have received. To live out of fear is to live with the suspicion that scarcity lies at the heart of life and so life becomes a matter of ensuring I will be protected from those who will threaten me and my security. And these two remain: love and fear and if I am not mistakes our scriptures insist that perfect love casts out fear.
The grumblers show up in the gospel in the form of the chief priests and the elders of the people. These are the interpreters of the law, they who are in charge of the religious system of the day and will never want to give up their power and authority. And so they question Jesus, not to find out more about him and his teachings but to challenge them, to denounce him and his teachings. So they ask him about the source of his authority. By what authority do you teach and act?
I don’t think it is just his miralces, healings or exorcisms they are enquiring about. More specifically and just a few verses earlier in Matthew’s gospel Jesus has driven the money changers out of the temple. Jesus effectively shut down the temple and sacrificial system. It is one thing preaching God loves even the lowly and the prostitutes and the prisoners and the mentally ill and the refugees but he has gone one step further and is now undermining the capital cities’ financial system! A bridge too far.
Who do you think you are!!?? What gives you the right!!??
And Jesus comes back with a question of his own. A common Jewish means of conversation and teaching. A while back I heard an old Jewish witticism in which someone asks his rabbi, “Why do rabbis always answer a question with another question?” to which the rabbi replied, “Why shouldn’t a rabbi answer a question with another question?”
Even after he has challenged the religious leaders with his counter question about where did John the Baptist gain his authority Jesus doesn’t drop the conversation. He goes on with a short parable. We have one father and two sons. You know the line from that more famous parable that we know as the parable of the Prodigal Son. When the father orders the one son to go to cut the lawn, he replies, “Forget it, I’ve got plans, things to do, people to see. Mow the lawn yourself!” But then, sometime after his father walks away looking rather wounded, the young man’s conscience gets the better of him. So he changes out of his cool hipster clothes, throws on his overalls, and heads out to the garage to get the mower out. Meanwhile the father has approached his other son and made the same request. “You got it, Dad! I’m on my way!” The father walks away from this exchange feeling good that at least one of his boys knows how to treat his old man with respect. But then, unbeknownst to the father, this boy high-tails it over to the mall to spend some time with his friends and so never does mow the lawn
I betcha when the old man looks over his beautifully manicured lawn later that day he thinks in his heart, that oldest boy, I am so proud of him, he always does the right thing – never suspecting it was the younger ratbag kid who mowed the lawn.
“Which son would you rather have?” Jesus asks. “Who really did what his father wanted?” The answer is obvious, so the chief priests give it, but the meaning of it all was a little less clear, so Jesus spells it out for them. John the Baptist really had come from God and, as such, he really did tell people what God wanted them to do. The people who looked like lowlifes and spiritual losers–the folks who had, by all outward appearances, said “No” to God–they ended up coming around to God’s message after all. They admitted their sins, let John baptize them, and so did what God wanted in the end.
But there were others in Israel who had for so long been saying “Yes” to God outwardly yet ultimately didn’t follow through. They looked like fine and upstanding children of God. They dressed right. Said all the right things. Made all the right promises. But when push came to shove (as surely it did when John the Baptist confronted everyone with his fiery message of repentance), these same folks turned away from God. Their former “Yes” was undercut by their having said “No” at what turned out to be the pivotal point in God’s plan of salvation.
The world has a word for that – saying one thing and doing another. It is sometimes reserved as a particular accusation aginst religious people. Hypocrite. It certainly true that religious people and specifically the Christian church falls short of its aspirations. But from having spent a lifetime working in ministry in the Christian Church from what I know of Christians few of them are willfully deceitful. Few seem to warrant the label hypocrite if that means characterised by deliberate deceptiveness.
But clearly there is a lifestyle gap.
It has been described as an indifference to truth. This indifference to truth is often caused by a kind of laziness, of failing to do the hard slogging work to “get things right.” I think that it is this that is more likely to be the case among Christians. I don’t see a lot of willful hypocrisy, but I do see a lot of talk about righteousness and holiness and compassion and justice with little energy devoted to examining how all that talking is going to be turned into action and results out in the real world. In short, Christians talk a great deal with little effort expended in moving from words to deeds. Outsiders hear all that Christian moral chatter and they also observe the lifestyle gap. The only word they have for what they are observing is hypocrisy,
When you say “Yes” to God, Jesus claims, you are simultaneously saying “Yes” to the least, last, lost, and lonely people God holds dear. So if you say “Yes” to God but then focus only on your own piety or on other people who are already just as religious as you are, then you are essentially being like the son who said all the right things when Dad asked but who turned right around and did nothing that the father really wanted.
