Bringing the Exiles Home: Sunday after Trinity (Proper 3)

Isaiah 49:8-16a; Psalm 131; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5; Matthew 6:24-34

“If the Sunday between May 24 and 28 inclusive follows Trinity Sunday, the Proper for the 8th Sunday after the Epiphany is used.” The Revised Common Lectionary, 1992, p. 33. In 2008, there were only three Sundays in Epiphany, then Transfiguration, then Ash Wednesday and Lent. All this because the Roman church won the fight at the Council of Whitby in 664, making the Easter celebration dependent on Sunday and the Moon, rather than the Eastern Orthodox custom of associating Easter with the Jewish Passover. That same council eliminated the Celtic version of the Christian church, and Celtic priests were forbidden to use the Druid tonsure (shaving the head back to the ears).

When we left the study of the Gospel of Matthew in January, it was the last chance for justice before plunging into Lent and the Easter Season. Picking up with the reading from the 8th Sunday after Epiphany puts us back on the “proper” track – or it could. In actuality, from the point of view of traditional church teaching, the Elves continue to solidify the belief system of those who won the arguments that raged from the 1st through the 4th centuries of the Common Era.

The Second Servant’s Song from Isaiah spells out the Servant’s mission. Adopted wholesale into the rhythm of the Christian liturgical year, the Servant is easily interpreted to be the Christ, who replaced Israel as the manifestation of God’s glory, and the bringer of salvation to the whole world. Cherry-picked Paul reminds the Corinthians that even though the apostles are “servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries,” and even though “I am not aware of anything against myself, . . . I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.” Matthew’s Jesus says don’t worry about food, clothing, or shelter. “Can any of you add one hour to life by fretting about it?” The Psalmist assures us that we have no need for greater or higher understanding because we can trust in God like the weaned child trusts in its mother.

Issues raised by an uncritical reading of these passages include a latent anti-Jewishness. Christians are “weaned” from the old religion. Because “the Jews” failed in the original mission spelled out by the prophets, it is up to Christians to bring all the world into the Kingdom of God established by Jesus. Matthew’s Jesus underscores this with his famous admonition that we cannot serve both God and wealth (as “the Jews” have been accused of doing). A second pit-fall is the so-called “Prosperity Gospel” preached by Christian mega-churches, which turns Jesus into a latter-day self-help guru. If we trust God, all the things we need will be given to us. If we donate money to such ministries, we will get a pay-back in health, wealth, happiness, and fulfillment.

Jesus’s point in the series of pronouncements on anxieties and fretting was that, contrary to popular belief, being rich is not a sign of God’s favor. In fact, Jesus says, you cannot serve two masters – God and wealth. You love the one and hate the other. Further, it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into God’s domain (Mark 10:25). Jesus did not say that “all these things will come to you as a bonus” if you first seek God’s domain. That idea was added later by gospel writers who were a generation or more removed from those who actually knew Jesus or his original followers. By the time Matthew’s gospel was written towards the end of the 1st Century, the Temple was gone, and the Jewish community that had been centralized in Jerusalem was dispersed. Under those conditions, it seems humanly logical that those who survived and thrived would have felt themselves blessed by God.

The admonition to look for God’s domain and try for God’s justice is an afterthought. Putting such a condition on God’s grace reverses the teaching. Jesus was concerned with the common folk and their day-to-day struggle for existence. It was revolutionary for him to say that wealth is not the definition of living in God’s kingdom. Instead, Jesus says, the sign that one is living in God’s kingdom is the certainty that there is no need to worry about life’s necessities: food, clothing, shelter. The poor (the meek) live as the birds and the lilies do, and God provides for them.

The composer of Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus say that “You are to seek God’s domain and his justice first” (The Five Gospels, p. 152). The NRSV says “strive first for the kingdom of God, which is a stronger verb than merely “seeking.” “Striving” implies struggle, work, perhaps even participation in Jesus’s ongoing program of restoring God’s distributive justice-compassion to a world that has chosen retribution and pay-back instead. As last week’s essay suggested, “Paul taught that participation with Jesus’s program of restoring God’s Kingdom of distributive justice-compassion means living Kenotically. It means a radical abandonment of self-interest; a radical inclusiveness, in communities, business dealings, and political structures, that functions on a very different footing from the normalcy of civilization.” This week, we are reminded of what God’s realm looks like. “There is more to living than food and clothing,” Jesus says. He has us observe the natural world around us, where the birds and the flowers neither plant, nor harvest, nor toil nor spin. He compares the grasses in the field, tossed into the fire without thought, with disenfranchised humanity that takes nothing for granted. Isaiah’s servant acts as a covenant to the people, “to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages. . . .”

Paul’s letters to the Corinthians must not be taken out of the context in which they were written. Paul was responding to that community’s struggle to understand how to live outside the structures of 1st Century patronage. His arguments might well apply to 21st Century societies that have fallen into habits of civilization that are unsustainable for life on Planet earth as we have known it. Trinity Sunday’s readings were about reestablishing economic, social, and political justice. The readings for this Proper 3 introduce the concept of eco-justice.

Sustainable, distributive eco-justice means the radical abandonment of the kind of self-interest that results in faulty building codes, protectionist trade policies for food and natural resources; the whole-sale plundering of the Planet for economic profit, whether corporate or individual. Matthew’s Jesus may indeed be most relevant. If we do work for policies that will support and sustain life, then those things that support human life – food, clothing, shelter – may indeed be given to us.

But we have to trust the process. We must be willing to let go of traditional, unsustainable land-use management, farming practices, and the kind of market forces we are accustomed to creating and reacting to. Perhaps above all, we must trust whatever the forces are that created the entire Universe. A third issue that arises with an uncritical approach to these readings is the heresy of substitutionary atonement. The worst excess of this belief is that a relationship with God and God’s Realm is impossible. According to this heresy, Jesus died at God’s command in order to atone for (make-up for, pay for) our sin. But that sin still runs so deep in the human heart that no one can ever hope to be saved, whether we believe that Jesus died for us or not. Paul seems to be hinting at this in the phrases lifted from 1st Corinthians. “Therefore, do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.” Our only hope is the capriciousness of God’s “mercy” once Jesus comes again to “judge the quick and the dead.” Substitutinary atonement is a heresy because it flies in the face of what 21st Century science tells us about the very nature of the Universe, where survival (salvation) depends on whether or not there is a niche that will sustain the life form, and where, on Planet Earth, the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

21st Century humanity is largely exiled from relationship with the natural (non-human) world. Even in developing countries, where economies depend on natural resources such as forests, oil fields, agriculture, animal husbandry, or fish and seafoods, human life continues in blissful disregard of cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Humans seem to love living on the edge of destruction, and either blaming the gods, fate, or themselves for the consequences. Much of this edginess could be alleviated through changing the emphasis from retribution/pay-back to distribution and fairness: or in John Dominic Crossan’s words, from a “greed-world to a share-world”

Only Covenant – the non-violent, kenotic partnership with the creative forces that sustain the Universe – can bring the exiles home again.

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