First or Last?

Scriptures:     Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32

One of the best-known preachers in contemporary Protestantism is William H. Willimon – now a bishop of the United Methodist Church in North Alabama (Methodists were actually smart enough to make him a bishop).  But before that he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, and a Pew Foundation Survey recently said that he was one of the two most frequently read writers by pastors in mainline Protestantism – in other words, a real preacher’s preacher.  Here’s an example of why that is the case – the kind of a story that Willimon tells that is oh-so-familiar to ministers…..and just might be for you as well:

“I disliked him, the moment I saw him.  I expect that it comes as a shock to some laypeople to hear a pastor say that he dislikes someone in his church.  Nevertheless, it is true.  When I met him during my first week in that congregation, I despised him.  He was loud, a braggart, probably a bully.  In the first five minutes of conversation with him, you quickly learned that he had made a lot of money, through all sorts of business shenanigans.  He liked running things and, no doubt, probably wanted also to run the church, to run me as well.  People said that he came to church, but only when he felt like it.  He had conflict with previous pastors and would probably have conflict with me. People said that he liked to make a big show of his financial success.  And yet, people also said that he gave very little to the church.  What he gave, he thought gave him a license to freely criticize the church and its pastor.  Of course, I kept him at arm’s length.

“While visiting in a nearby city, after being introduced to someone as the pastor of that church, the person said, ‘Isn’t that the church where John Smith is a member?’  I cautiously answered, ‘Yes, John is a member of the church.  He is a member, though not a particularly active member,’ I added just to cover myself.

“’I’ll always be indebted to John, me and a lot of people like me,’ the man said. ‘Indebted?’ I asked.

“’Yeah, John is the one who paid for my education.  My education and a lot of people like me.  I worked in one of his businesses after school when I was in high school.  My senior year in high school, I got a note from him.  He hardly ever spoke to me when I would run into him at work.  The note said something like, “I want to help you with college.  You get into the best college you can, and I will see you through.”  That was all.  I got in a good college and he paid just about every cent of it.  And I wasn’t the only one.  I expect that he must have footed the bill for a couple of dozen young people in that town.’

“’That’s hard to believe.  I don’t think I have ever heard that of John,’ I said lamely.  ‘I bet you never will.  He asked us not to tell anybody about his generosity.  He said he didn’t want everybody beating on his door asking for a handout.  I think the real reason is that he is, deep down, a genuinely humble person.  I do know for sure that he has sure done a lot of good in his own quiet way,’ the man said.”

Willimon goes on to comment about this story in a way that may seem a bit surprising, but is certainly all too human (even for preachers):  “Now I don’t know about you, but I find such unrestrained generosity, coming from a person like John, annoying. That’s right, annoying.  It is annoying when those people, those people who are not self-evidently good people, those people who are not well-formed church people, turn out to be such undeniably good people.  What are we – we undeniably good well-informed, well-formed church people – to do with their unrestrained beneficence?”

Did any of you get a picture in your mind’s eye of someone you know like this John Smith as I was relating Willimon’s story?  If so, did you have something of the same reaction of annoyance?  We get confused and don’t really like it when people don’t behave according to our expectations based on their faith commitments – or lack thereof.

And it doesn’t have to be about generosity in relation to money – there is also a generosity of the spirit that can upset mind-sets.  One of the things I was doing last weekend, as some of you know, was interring my mother who died last March at 99.  As I’ve mentioned to some of you, it wasn’t all that easy a thing to put together a memorial service for someone who was a professed agnostic and who had no church or any kind of religious connection for nearly all of her adult life.  Yet, as my brother and sister and the two daughters-in-law and I sat around reminiscing (which was the bulk of the memorial service) what was recalled was her mildness, her complete lack of judgmentalism, her complete lack (also) of anger – in other words, a total generosity of the spirit.  Here is someone whom any pastor would have loved to welcome into his or her congregation.  And yet she lived her (very full) life outside of any formal faith commitment.

What are we to do with people like this?  What are we to do with ourselves when we encounter such people?  These are the kinds of questions Jesus was raising with the chief priests and the elders when they came to question his authority.

What Jesus does – as he does so often throughout the gospels – is to disarm them.  First of all, he answers their question with a question – seemingly a fairly simple one, “’Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?’”  You would think they could give a “yes or no”, “this but not that” answer here.  But these were subtle and tricky men (we assume they would all be men), and so they suspected some sort of subtle trickery from Jesus.  But that wasn’t what he was all about.  He was simply seeking to get them to acknowledge that all true authority comes from God – this was John’s strength, and it was what propelled this Son of God on his mission.  Their dissembling (“’If we say “From heaven,” he will say to us, “Why then did you not believe him?” But if we say, “Of human origin,” we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.’”) demonstrated their fear but even more importantly their lack of understanding of how Jesus’ authority comes from God.

In order to reinforce the point Jesus offers them this paradoxical little story about two sons, one of whom says he will work in the vineyard but doesn’t and one of whom says he won’t but then turns around and does the work.  A very simple and straight-forward illustration of “it’s not what you say but what you do that counts.”  Professions of faith, good intentions, easily-made promises that are then not kept – how many of these have we encountered in our lives?  How many times have you and I been guilty of words but not deeds?  When I worked for the National Council of Churches one of the banes of my existence were the colleagues who would vow to take on a responsibility in a committee meeting…..and then fail to follow through.  On the other hand, the colleagues whom you knew you could count on to do what they said they would do – few as those were – became invaluable to me.  Now, admittedly, all of this was volunteered time and effort, and once you got back home to your own desk and office with all the work pressures lined up it was rather easy to let such a volunteer task slide.  That’s the nature of the ecumenical beast, I guess. Nevertheless, it did become quite frustrating; in this respect, at least, I was glad when I could move on to other forms of ministry.

It was easy enough for the chief priests and elders to see how the son who did the work even when he said he would not was the more righteous.  Although it kinda begs the question:  why would he have refused in the first place?  Just having a bad hair day and then thought better of it?  Felt guilty because he knew he would be letting down his father?  Was generally a negative sort who didn’t want to take part in family activities but thought just this once he would follow through?  You-all could probably think up other scenarios that would fit this profile.  The suspicion here is that Jesus was just using this juxtaposition of he-who-says-“yes”-and-doesn’t with he-who-says-“no”-and-does in order to set up what comes next.  Because now comes the real zinger:  “I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

Whoa.  Can you possibly conceive of any two groups of people who would be more despised and thought of as the lowest-of-the-low in Jesus’ time than these two?  Well, OK, maybe the lepers.  What Jesus wants these leaders of the temple to understand is that it’s not outside trappings of righteousness, it’s not solemn declarations of faith, it’s not public acknowledgement of how much one loves God that mean you are truly doing the work God wants you to do.  The message here is the same as in the story of the Pharisee and the publican, the same as in the story of the ten lepers who were healed and only one turned back, the same as in the story of the laborers in the vineyard who came at different times of the day, the same as in the story of the Prodigal Son – God is a God of grace and generosity, and God wishes for God’s people to be the same.  At the end of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard a couple of chapters earlier (Matthew 20:16) Jesus says, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”  This was not good news to these chief priests and elders who thought they were coming to trip Jesus up about his authority.

William H. Willimon again on this passage:  “On that day, Jesus’ critics – learned religious people, Bible scholars, frequent church attendees – criticized his work, wanted to know by what authority he did things, demanded to know who he was and what he was about, and how he backed up everything with scripture.  On that day, he turned to them and said one of the most disarming, disconcerting, and downright annoying things Jesus ever said.  To these good religious people, he said, ‘I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are trooping in to the kingdom of Godahead of you.’

“I suppose whether you find a statement like that an annoyance or a blessing depends to a great extent on who you are.  ‘Tax collectors and prostitutes, go into the kingdom of God before you!’  Do you hear that as good news or bad?  It may depend on where you are when you get the news.”

For you see, as we know all so well from our reading of the gospels Jesus did not come for the righteous – the good self-respecting church people who basked in their own goodness.  He hung around with those same tax collectors and prostitutes (and lepers, for that matter) – these were his kind of people, because they knew they were sinners and knew that Jesus had something to offer that they could not possibly have imagined before – a pearl beyond price.  There does seem to be an annoying tendency in Jesus to reach out to the “lost,” to work wonders among them. And there seems to be this complementary annoying tendency of the “lost,” to respond to the reach of Jesus.  The “lost” is tantalizingly similar to the “last”.  And there’s another word in English that is oh so similar to both of these and may be what Jesus is really getting at here:  the “least”.  In just three more chapters Matthew is going to have Jesus put it most succinctly:  “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

We are not just those who serve “the least of these”; we are also “the least” ourselves.  Insofar as we think of ourselves as first among the righteous, we are last in the kingdom of God. Insofar as we recognize ourselves as being there among the least, we are first with Jesus.

What this parable – and the others which are so similar to it – is teaching is something that we have talked about many times before:  the true nature of humility.  In his great pastoral ode in Philippians Paul understands at such an in-depth level the kind of humility Jesus brought to his life’s work.  Because he was of the very nature of God, Paul is saying, Jesus could have counted himself as being equal to God and flaunted that mastery over his subjects.  But instead he “emptied himself” – what a great expression for what it means to be truly humble – and became a servant for each one of us.  No wonder the “lost”, the “last”, the “least” flocked to him and saw a glimpse of what the kingdom of heaven could be all about.  And so God 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…..” This is what it is to be first when you believe yourself to be honestly and actually last.  We, whose knees bend at the name of Jesus, participate in that same leastness, lostness, lastness – and in so doing find that God’s kingdom awaits us in all its glory.

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
September 25, 2011