Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 21:23-32

There are some questions that are best not to answer:

Mom, who is your favorite, me or my brother?

Pastor, now that you’ve heard the whole of the story.  Who’s right?  Me or my wife?

Honey, do you know what happened my favorite t-shirt?

And from a card I received once: Does this pulpit make my butt look big?

To answer some questions means that you have to step into a world of assumptions.  You have to accept certain ground rules. These aren’t really the kind of questions that seek answers or flow from curiosity, they’re questions that are looking to confirm an underlying worldview: a world where there are favorites, one winning perspective, secrets, and all kinds of judgments about what’s good.

“Where does your authority come from?  Who gave it to you?”

At this point in Matthew’s gospel, Chapter 21, we are in the last week of Jesus’ life. He and his followers have arrived in Jerusalem.  He’s been greeted as a king with palm branches.  He overturned the tables in the temple, which precipitates this question.  “Who do you think you are that you can come in here and create a disturbance?” From now until Thanksgiving, we will be exploring the sayings of Jesus during this last week. He doesn’t hold anything back.  Again and again, he creates a contrast between how the world works and how God works.  The contrast has so much power/authority, and is compelling enough, that it gets Jesus executed. The folks on the margins got it right away.  These are the “sons” who, in the end, go into the vineyard.  They’re not just all talk and show. They know they need another way.

The religious political leadership want to shut it all down.  They really aren’t interested in learning about the kind of power that surges through Jesus’ ministry.  They can only understand power in their own way:  control, privilege, status, being on top, protecting themselves and those just like them.

In this gospel text, Jesus doesn’t overturn the tables, he just turns the table, “Did John’s baptism come from heaven or from himself?” They know immediately that they’re stuck.  Ugh!  If we say that John was from the Spirit world, he’s going to say, “Why didn’t you believe him then?”  But if we say, “He just made up, we’re going to be in trouble with all the people ran out into the desert to be baptized by him, a politically difficult position?” So they gave the answer that politicians still give, “We’re not prepared to answer that question at this time.”

I spent part of this week at a leadership retreat at a beautiful place outside Tucson, Arizona.  The site produces its own honey, and one of the sessions was about the bees.  When the beekeeper pulled out some of the comb, dripping with honey, it seemed biblical. We were in a land flowing with milk and honey.  One of the people in the class asked the beekeeper why the bees didn’t attack him for taking their honey.  He said, “You’re projecting your world view on the bees.  We’re the ones who live in the world where we fight over resources.  The bees know that they have enough.  They’re making a calculation that it’s better to share the honey, or even make more to replace what was lost, than to resort to violence, which ultimately leads to their own death and possibly the death of the hive.  We’ll never understand them if we use our own world to discover who they are.”

We’ll never understand them if we use our own world to discover who they are.

What’s so compelling about Jesus—his authority–is that he projects just like every human, mapping his history onto life, but he projects heaven onto earth.  He’s grounded in a profound way. He sees, and embodies, an alternative pattern at work that opens instead of closes; invites rather than restricts, gives space rather than draw boundaries, promises a land dripping with milk and honey, home right here, and home forever.

At this retreat, I began to learn about manifesting.  It’s a spiritual practice of naming out loud the world you want to create for yourself or for others.  At first, I was suspicious of its authority.  It sounded a little new agey, a little woo-woo.  Some of the examples sounded like the prosperity gospel you see on TV, “I will be rich.” “I will be successful.” But instead of being judgy, I decided to be curious.  I listened and took notes.

You can be a co-creator with God to elevate your life and the life of the world.[1]   It grows out of meditating, or what we might call prayer. “I’m going to find what I need today.”  “I will be open and loving.”  “I will do my part to create justice and harmony.”  The teacher said, “You need to align your positive energy with that of what you desire AND take the practical actions necessary to create it.”  Since I was reading this gospel text all week, I thought, “Jesus’ authority was in his alignment to the Spirit.”  What he wanted, what he did, was what God wanted and what God did.  In the temple, Jesus was manifesting the reign of God.  There was such integrity between the Spirit world and this world–meeting in his body–that those around him were both captured and terrified of what this WAY could mean for the world.

It all made me understand the parable of the two sons.  It’s about manifesting the Spirit, aligning our depth and our surface, our words and our actions, our hearts and our minds.  Having integrity.

For my own manifest, I keep thinking of that bee keeper, holding up that comb of dripping honey.  It’s abundance.  It’s sweetness.  It’s gift.

What does it mean to trust, “We live in that world.  We live in that world.  We live in that world.”

May it be so.  Amen.

[1] https://gabbybernstein.com/dos-donts-manifesting/#