Proper 21 (Fall Retreat): Creating After God's Own Heart
Introduction
Good morning dear friends. What a wonderful weekend it’s been together. I have loved the opportunity to engage our imaginations together over the course of the last few days as we work with our hands, share meals, do activities, and find time to rest together. Today’s passages teach us a lot about the nature of words and their relationship to our actions, and they present us with an invitation to the grace of God found in repentance and confession. Jesus is inviting us to rid ourselves of false piety and discipleship in words only, in order to take personal responsibility, confess, repent, and live in a world transformed by the grace of God. Living as an authentic follower of Christ moves us from being passive recipients of the brokenness of the world happening to us, to becoming generative agents who reimagine the world newly created in Christ.
Kids sermon: I want to invite the kids up for our kids sermon today. Kids, I want you to look at this picture. What is this? One of you said that this is a pipe. Well done...except for the French at the bottom: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” That means “This is not a pipe.” Why in the world did the artist say it is not a pipe when it is clearly a pipe? This famous picture, trying to highlight a contradiction between words and images because we think we see a pipe, but actually what we see is a painting.[1]
And it is sort of funny because it reminds me of kids flash cards. As you flip through a child might say, “This is A. A is for apple. This is an apple.” The painting looks a bit like the kind of image you’d point out to a child and say “this is a pipe” except that the text says “This is not a pipe.” Sometimes the thing we see doesn’t match the reality of what it is and this is the case for the story Jesus will tell us today. He is going to get into a debate with some people in Jerusalem that look like they are the religious experts. Jesus is going to challenge the religious experts on the nature of what following God’s law means. There are those who say “Yes, yes, I know what I’m supposed to do to please God,” but then their actions don’t match their words. Jesus is inviting them and us to ask what it might look like to notice the ways that things are broken and because of which we can become broken, and then to ask for his help. This is called confession and repentance — naming and turning. This opens us up to the gift of mercy that God wants to give to his children and it invites us to look at the world in the way that God does.
As we look at the Gospel together, would you pray with me, “Dear God...You are good...and you give good gifts...to your children...Thank you...for making us your children... in Jesus. Amen.”
A) False piety and an imaginary world
In the story today Jesus is in Jerusalem in conversation with the religious leaders. He begins to tell some parables about how much the religious leaders have missed it with regards to obedience to God.
Today he tells a parable of two sons. A father asks the first son to go and work in the vineyard. The son says sure, but the does not do it. The second son he asks to work in the vineyard, the son says no, but then eventually has a change of heart and does it anyway. This parable follows on the heels of a question about John the Baptist. John had invited people to turn from their sins and to come back to covenant faithfulness with God. The two groups represented by the two sons are two ways to receive the ministry of John the Baptist. The religious leaders are meant to be represented by the first son. Their “yes” to the Lord is how they keep up structures and theology. But their lives don’t live up to the words they say.[2]
I had listened to a podcast last week where someone asked the question “what good is your theology if you’re mean?” Her point was a good one she was asking questions about the telos of theology, or to what end we explore theology. Kids, if someone says they’re your friend, but they are constantly unkind to you and make fun of you in front of others, are they really your friend? No!
The point of “good theology” is to draw ourselves and the world around us into the life and love of the Trinity. This immediately rehumanizes our neighbor and it fosters a vision in us for God’s compassion both for us and for others. Good theology draws us into God’s love. Anything less than that aim, like culture war Christianity for example which seeks for power more than love, runs the risk of making us like the son who says “yes, I’ll do it” but then we don’t.
The second son says no, but does it anyways. This represents those who had lived their lives in contradiction to the law. They hear the preaching of John the Baptist and want a fresh start to renew their commitment to God and his commandments. They are aware of their brokenness and need for God’s help.
We need examples to follow who are like the second son; we need saints who are marked with gratitude and mellowed souls, who have weathered all kinds of storms with Jesus at their side, and who have never lost a deep sense of their need for God’s help and have spent a lifetime cultivating a childlike wonder at the kingdom of God in their midst.
Like those saints, we have to name brokenness honestly and hold it before God. This is confession. Where we see this brokenness in us we ask for God’s help to restore us. This is repentance. This opens us up to a world transformed by the grace of God where we start to see the kingdom of God and a world restored.
B) Personal responsibility and re-imaging the world.
Substantive discipleship involves reimagining the world. This is part of Ezekiel’s point today to the exiles in Ezekiel 18. The exiles find themselves in all kinds of hardships. Rather than doing the hard work of asking what is going on inside them, they shift the blame to God and others with a proverb about parents eating sour grapes and the children’s teeth being set on edge.[3] The good news in Ezekiel is that God does not desire the death of the wicked and because of this, if someone takes the personal responsibility to repent, God will meet them with grace.
Creativity after God’s own heart is an antidote to a broken world. God is creator and those who join the work of new creation see the world in abundance; they will take difficult circumstances, reflect on them, grieve appropriately, and look for opportunity. This person will take personal responsibility for their contributions to negative situations with others because they long for reconciliation and for Jesus’s resurrection to bring new goodness out of the ashes. Someone who has lost their ability to create sees the world in scarcity, anxiety, and simple cause and effect. They fixate on what cannot be done because of a lack of resources and see themselves as passive: any negative circumstances are things that happen to them. Life is constant anxiety and reaction to the next problem they’ll encounter. The hard work of confession and repentance, and taking personal responsibility, brings us to a place where we move into God’s redemptive new creation work.
A number of years ago I was translating Syriac texts for publication, which is my artistic labor. I remember wrestling with just the right words to translate a couple of lines. In my personal life I was wrestling with some really heavy issues that I could not fix. When I cannot fix something, I can spiral. I have learned to let myself feel sad when I cannot fix it. The sadness is necessary for me to begin to rebuild. Poetry has been a salve for me. I remember crying when I finally came to these lines:
“Come here, mind, see the Messiah standing amidst the assemblies, resembling the Gihon River, full of compassion, coursing and overflowing with all manner of healing for the afflicted, and the land of Judah is flooded by it and its remedies. Abounding mercy flows from it like a deluge and its floods — destroying diseases and pains. By it the blind saw, the deaf heard, the dead lived, and by it the whole land of darkness was illumined.”[4]
I needed that poetry. I wrestled for hours with how to bring those lines from Syriac into English and by the time I was done, I sat back and read them for myself. It was like God gave me permission to cry and be honest. He was listening. It was creative work after God’s own heart.
This is one of the values of art. Art is a necessary gift that helps us become better truth tellers as we cultivate an imagination for a redeemed world. It might be an opportunity to pen poetry or prose. It might be painting, gardening, wood carving, or scrapbooking. It is a space where we take back agency and reflect rather than react in anxiety because we are learning to create like the God who creates and see the world restored. It gets us in touch with what it means to be a restored image bearer of God.
Conclusion:
As we close our time out this weekend, let’s remember Jesus’ question of which son in this parable has done what pleases his father. It is a call to follow Jesus with integrity and not just to be seen as someone who is following Jesus, or worse, to be seen as someone who has all their doctrine just right. Jesus invites us to ask what gets in the way of following him with integrity. We have to be those who have our need for God’s help at the forefront of our imaginations. We need to keep rhythms of identifying what is broken, telling God about it, and asking for his help to change. This opens us up to the redemptive work of co-creating with God and reimagining the world in the light of the kingdom of God. Take what you’ve learned this weekend together and make some space to reflect on it this week. My prayer is that in being together and doing life together as a community this weekend that God is giving us glimmers of hope that He is at work for our good and for his glory. Please pray with me:
“O merciful Lord, grant to your faithful people pardon and peace, that we may be cleansed from all our sins and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] René Magritt, “The Treachery of Images”, 1929.
[2] Matthew 23:2-3.
[3] Ezek. 18:2.
[4] Jacob of Sarug, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Lord’s Prayer, trans. Morgan Reed, Piscataway: Gorgias Press. Lines 57-64.
