proper24-st-peters.md

Homily: St. Peter’s

Proper 24: Oct. 22, 2017

Opening

I love it when I can get a clear sense from the reading of scripture that these people about whom we read were real flesh and blood people – just like you and me – only more so. I get that sense in today’s readings.

Exodus

On first reading or hearing this passage I can be confused. That’s the first caution. Being confused. Because how can you know someone’s name but not know who they are? Back in chapter 3 God introduces himself by name to Moses in that wonderful scene in the cave where Moses is instructed to take off his shoes and a bush doesn’t burn. But here we have him later in Exodus saying I don’t know who you really are. And God says to him, “Alright already. I’ll let you see me my backside as I pass by. So hide behind this rock.”

The scene is a classic text demonstrating how the understanding was deep-seated in ancient Israel that to see the Lord was to risk death. God was a powerful thing not something we genuflected to on occasion. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.

Gospel

The scene from The Gospel of Matthew – told in a very similar fashion in the other two synoptic gospels Mark and Luke – is at first seemingly straightforward. The Pharisees are trying to catch or trap Jesus. Jesus somehow outsmarts them the story tells us. But from our vantage point, so many centuries later, at least to me, the whole text seems watered down. I’ve heard commentaries over and over again about money and taxes. About how much should go to the church and how much to the state, etc. etc. I never truly was convinced that it was about paying taxes or a tithe to the church.

The Pharisees set Jesus up with false flattery – “Oh we’ve heard about how fair-minded you are.” Jesus isn’t tempted in the least. He knows the Pharisees well – much better than we do today, actually. Jesus knows that on many things he and the Pharisees see eye to eye. That’s why there’s so much competition coming at him from the Pharisees.

The first inkling that I had that there was more going on in this passage was a scene from a play that was done in England several decades ago. It was shocking to see Jesus portrayed in it as a rough and tumble dock worker at a port in England. His best buds were a tough-looking lot themselves. When the Pharisees ask their question, this particular Jesus responded with power and it was clear that no one could respond to it. They were silenced.

There is more though. One of my teachers at Notre Dame, John Howard Yoder, pointed out or argued that when the Pharisees asked Jesus about the payment of taxes to Caesar, it was clearly understood that Jesus had a position opposing the paying of taxes. Otherwise, Yoder said, the argument made no sense. But they could catch him, of course, if publicly he came out against the paying of taxes to the Roman occupiers. Especially if they could catch him for example when the microphone was turned on as it were.

The other aspect of the story that is vital for understanding it in its proper context is that Jesus and the Pharisees were not somehow at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The Pharisees and Jesus actually had much in common for both of them sought to renew the spiritual life of the people of Judea, the Jews living in Palestine. Jesus however was more radical than the Pharisees. After the destruction of the temple by Rome’s soldiers, the Pharisees went on to morph into the rabbis who essentially created modern Judaism. Jesus was prepared to do away with most of the very laws that defined what it meant to be a Jew as he sought to be faithful in a radical way to his God Abba the father. Jesus went on to become just one more victim of the Roman occupiers in their stranglehold on the people of Palestine. He appeared to Cephas and the 12 and later to Paul – and as they say – all the rest is history.

Jesus, in his response to the Pharisees, was making clear that this coin which he showed them had an engraving of a man claiming to be Son of God. It was both blasphemous and idolatrous. For Jesus all things belong to God. He wasn’t sort of resisting Roman taxation. He was resisting all that Rome stood for.

Listen to your life

For myself, these two passages bring God into my very life. When I listen to these texts and recognize Moses and those dock workers listening to God speak to them, to their very life, I can begin to listen to what my life is telling me about God.

Two authors have spoken to me over the years, though I never had the chance to meet either of them. Parker Palmer and Frederich Buechner are their names. Each of them have written about the need for us to listen to our lives if we are to hear what GOd has to say to us. Each of them had a knack for listening to one’s life, to the hurly-burly, to the rough and tumble, to the deep reality, of the lives that we live, and finding there the backside of God, the tossing of a coin with Caesar’s face imprinted on it. And looking and listening and feeling those lives, they encounter the Living God.

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” P. Palmer

These two episodes from our Bible this morning tell us something about how to live our lives, listen to our lives, and live the life God has set before us. Moses was hiding in the rock waiting to see God’s backside – just a fleeting glimpse – but he knew that this was indeed the living God. And the Pharisees together with the other workers having their lives examined by a Rabbi named Jesus. He knew that their efforts to trick him, obscured the truth that they truly are Children of God, called into Covenant with the Living God and called to give everything to The God Whom they must follow.

The power of Jesus’ response to the Dock Workers gathered around him is precisely because he does not say in words who they are and whose they are. He leaves it for the silence in which they can hear their own lives. Again and again that is the way Jesus speaks to us, in the silence which makes it both possible and imperative that we listen to what God is calling us to do and to be. Jesus tells them they’re on the docks who they are and whose they are in words or silence that allow them to here. He speaks to us in the silence in which he left those Pharisees that day. A silence when they had to choose who they were. They went away amazed.

Where are we?

In our lives we may be old or young, discouraged or motivated to move forward. To be in the presence of the living God is a dangerous thing.

In our lives we may be sorting things out, trying to prioritize, or we may just be coping day to day. But in the end the coins we carry in our pocket will not get us anywhere.

“The End” is a song by the Beatles – It was the last song recorded collectively by all four Beatles, and is the final song of the medley that constitutes the majority of side two of the album “Abbey Road.”

• ‘And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give,’

The message for today is a wake up call to ask of our lives who the Living God has made us for. We may want to hide, but in the end, what we have to give is our life – in love.