Lectionary for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost: Exodus 17:1-7 / Ps 78:1-4, 12-16 / Philippians 2:1-13 / Matthew 21:23-32
I want to start today by drawing our attention back to the collect that we prayed together at the start of today’s service. Here’s how it went:
O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Grant us the fullness of your grace, that we, running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
“O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” This collect struck me as I sat with our readings this week, because there is something so fundamental to the gospel, so basic to our life as a church community buried in this short sentence – yet something that is so easy to forget.
What do you think of, when you think of God? What comes to mind? For many of us church-y folks, I think words like ‘greatness’, ‘glory’, ‘omnipotence’, or ‘power’ are often near the top of the list. And this makes sense. In a few minutes, we will recite the Nicene Creed – which we do every week – and the Creed begins by having us affirm that “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth”. This idea of un-ending power is core to our belief in God, but what does it mean that God is all-powerful? What does God do with this power, and what does that tell us about who God is?
Most of the ‘powerful’ people in our culture use their power to selfishly control the world around them – to make themselves rich, to secure themselves, to accomplish their desires in society through political or economic force, to defeat and demean those who disagree with them, those who they consider their enemies. They tell us, out loud or implicitly, that we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, work harder, be more productive, more successful, more powerful, more like them, if we are to have any value in their world. But God’s ‘almighty power’ is utterly unlike all this.
As Christians, the most fundamental thing that we believe God does with his un-ending power is to be Jesus. We believe not only that Jesus is God, but, as Paul tells us in Ephesians, that Jesus is “the fullness of him who fills all in all,” the clearest expression of God’s nature and character. In other words, if we have a question about what God is like, we look first and foremost to Jesus.
And what do we see when we look to Jesus? Someone “who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.”
The power of God looks like humility, looks like Jesus emptying himself of glory, letting go of his almighty power, taking on pain and shame and eventually death to bring the life and love of God to a world full of people in desperate need of that love.
In our gospel this morning, Jesus confronts the chief priests in Jerusalem with a parable about two sons. The father asks them both to go work in his vineyard. One son says that he’ll do it, but never does. The other initially refuses, but eventually goes out and does the work – and Jesus affirms that the second son is the one who does the will of his father, regardless of the fact that he refused at first.
I think this brief parable reveals what Jesus is here for, reveals what the power of God looks like: no matter what we’ve done, how many times we resist or refuse, how many times we start and stumble and stop – God keeps reaching out, Jesus keeps inviting us back, making a way deeper into life with him. Like the Israelites in the desert, even when we forget God (which we will!), when we ignore the gifts we’ve received and all we can see and feel is the exhaustion and pain right in front of us, God still shows up. And when God shows up in our Exodus reading this morning, he does not shame or punish his grumbling, stumbling people, he just gives them water from the rock. He shows them that he has not forgotten them, that he hears them and will not abandon them.
Our Nicene Creed tells us that the first thing God does with his almighty power is to create all things, to make us. Jesus reveals that God made us to love us, that he does not stop loving us, and that the most important thing he does with his power is to keep reaching out and drawing us back into that love. That is the wellspring from which our life as Christians must flow, the fact that deep down at the root of things, we are loved by God – we do not have to strive to earn it and nothing we do can separate us from it.
A few of us from St. Matthias spent most of yesterday afternoon at the Whitter Pride festival down the street at Whittier College. Throughout the day, a few people came up to our booth and thanked us for being there. They shared that it was meaningful for them to see a church at the event, because their experience with churches in the past had made them believe that God did not love them, that they had to do and be something else in order for them to be acceptable to God and God’s people, let alone loved by God. They had been taught, like I was taught growing up, that God’s power is primarily for separating and judging and punishing those whom God doesn’t like – and it wounded them deeply. Imagine how different their lives might have been, how different our world might be, if their churches had taught them instead that “God declares his almighty power chiefly in showing mercy” – taught them that they were utterly loved by God, that they did not have to work or change to earn it, and that God would always be reaching out to invite them in.
May we at St. Matthias help one another, and every person that walks in those doors, to remember this love. Amen.
