Fr. Sam

Rage and praise can come from the same lips.

Psalm 28 knows something we sometimes forget: you can be furious, heartbroken, grateful, hopeful, and exhausted all at the same time.

This Monday on Substack, I’m writing about suffering, lament, gratitude, and the tyranny of Now. Because what hurts right now is real. But it isn’t the whole story.

Coming Monday to an inbox near you.

This week's Sub Stack is brought to you by the first Christmas decorations in the CVS. If there is in fact a war on Christmas, Christmas is winning and we should band together and rise up against it. But it does bring to mind to question of how we prepared for the coming of the Lord. Check it out or sign up for these to hit your inbox every Monday morning 🙂

"We confess our sins because we believe that we have done wrong against God, against the people we love, and against the people we ought to love but we aren’t that good at it yet. We have done wrong and we are responsible for it.

We’ve got so many problems we can forget we are anything else."

In case y'all didn't get to church this Sunday, here is a homily on the 17th Sunday after Pentecost.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who hires workers for his vineyard. Some start first thing in the morning. Some come later. Some don't get there until almost the end of the day. When evening comes, the landowner pays them all the same amount. And that does not sit well with the people who worked all day.

There are actually two problems identified here. The first is that they have worked longer. They have borne the heat of the day. They have done more work. And now the people who showed up at the last minute are getting paid exactly what they got. That doesn't seem fair.

And the second problem Jesus identifies is that these guys who’ve been here all day “thought they would receive more.” So their complaint isn’t entirely what they say, which is that you made them equal to us. The slight is also, we imagined receiving something, got excited about it, probably already spent it in our heads… and you took it from us.

And the landowner says, I can do what I want with what’s mine. I gave you what I promised, the rest is none of your business.
That story makes sense on just about every level.
The guys who worked all day think it’s unfair? Yeah.
They briefly thought maybe they’d get a bonus too and they’re disappointed when they don’t? I think we’ve all been there, had a plan for money hadn’t actually received yet… I get it.

Also the landowner is objectively right, even here and now if you don’t like that Cheryll is making more than you, that’s a piece of information you can use to negotiate for more for yourself. You are not owed back pay because she got a better contract. Right? The landowner can do this. How that impacts tomorrow is up in the air, but he didn’t do anything wrong.

That whole story makes sense to me. I hope it makes sense to you. Weirdly generous landowner, but like the responses of everyone are very believable.

Then Jesus says, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

What?

That’s a weird takeaway. The landowner’s admonition could have ended the story and it’d be pretty clear. But Jesus adds a moral which does not seem to fit the details of His own parable. And Jesus is always doing this. He is always saying things that force us to go back and wonder about our own assumptions. He is forever teaching things which are so out of this world… they’re literally not of this world. They’re heaven things. They’re the logic of the Kingdom He proclaimed.

So much of the time no one knows what Jesus is talking about. He confuses everyone. People like Him. He’s celebrated in many places. Peter calls Him the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. But Peter very famously argues with Him and gets called Satan in that same conversation. He also denies Jesus three times during the sham trial leading to His ex*****on. Jesus said, we’ve gotta do this, y’all gotta follow me, and Peter’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking about I do not know the Man.

That’s someone who likes Jesus. Doesn’t get it.

There’s people who don’t know what to think of Jesus. John the Baptist sends some guys, like hey go ask my cousin what’s up, is He like the guy I’ve been talking about?! Pontius Pilate, who our historical records say was infamously bloodthirsty, hems and haws over what to do with Jesus.

A lot of people don’t know what to do with Jesus. They don’t get it.
And there are people who hate Jesus and try to discredit or kill Him. Repeatedly. The Crucifixion is not the first time someone tried to kill Jesus. The religiously and civically powerful people Do. Not. Like. Jesus. They don’t like this Guy at all.

And all this is important because Christian arguments in the modern era are so often about what exactly did Jesus teach. We can try to squeeze Jesus into the role of this great moral teacher. But why?

His closest friends and followers frequently don’t really get what He’s talking about. The early Church recorded their own confusion. They could easily have written the Gospels like, “Hey we understood all along you fools, here’s what you missed because you’re big dumb dumbs and we are special little boys who deserve a gold star.”

But they didn’t write that. They wrote this. All four Gospel accounts include people not knowing what Jesus is talking about. The Church did not begin by saying, "We have found this incredible enlightened guru. Here are all of His teachings. And also, unfortunately, He died before He could tell us more."

The Church began…
Jesus Christ is Risen.

He is how we know who God is, and yes He did die, and yet He lives. So you and I can still follow Him.

The first witness of the Church is our Easter refrain, Jesus Christ is Risen, the Lord is Risen indeed, Alleluia. And having proclaimed the Resurrection, we go back and ask what the life and teachings of Jesus meant in light of what He did on the Cross.

What does it mean that Jesus welcomed people everyone else rejected? What does it say that He ate with supposedly unclean sinners and s*x workers? What are we to learn from how He raged against the machinery of organized religion but took seriously the religious questions of ordinary people? Why does He tell stories in which the last become first and the first become last? Or just why does He keep tearing down our assumptions about power and holiness and righteousness?

The earliest Christians didn’t learn the secrets of the universe. They knew a Man. If God's purpose were simply to make sure that human beings believed exactly the right things, that’s super easy. If God wanted every human being to possess exactly the correct theological information, He could just put it in our brains. The Holy Spirit could have inspired a much simpler Bible. In fact, if God wanted, it would be impossible to misunderstand.

But instead, God became a human being.

God came into the world as a particular person, in a particular place and time. Jesus told stories and parables. He answered questions with questions. He said things the Gospellers didn’t write explanations for. He Himself wrote down nothing. That is a remarkably inefficient way to communicate a list of propositions.

Unless the list was never the point because God’s real purpose was to be in relationship with us; to love us, to be loved by us, to see us love one another.

And when you love someone, what you know about that person changes over time. You discover things. Your relationship changes the way you see the world. And most of all when you love someone, because you grow and learn… your impression of them changes. How many people live in fear they can’t change their belief because the belief is all they have?

That’s not faith. It’s certainly not love.

Growing and learning is what the apostles did after the Resurrection. It is what the early Church did when it wrestled with questions the first Christians had never imagined. It is what Christians have done for two thousand years as we have tried to understand what it means that God was in Christ. It’s what we’re still doing.

Which brings us back to the vineyard.

Jesus gives us a story that refuses to fit neatly inside our ordinary ideas about fairness. At first glance the story makes sense. Everyone's perspective is kind of reasonable. Obviously we are disappointed when we think we've earned more, even if that isn't what was promised to us. And Jesus says, look again. The Kingdom of God is not quite as simple as that.

Look back at this story in light of the Resurrection. God’s love, generosity, and grace is not just remarkable. Like, woah God is extremely generous. God’s love is sacrificial.

The world teaches us to crunch the numbers. We’re laboring over here like looking at our neighbor wondering if they’ve gotten a better deal than us. God’s like, what are you talking about, I love you so much, I love them so much, I am willing to give everything for you. You’re worried about whether it’s fair?! It’s not fair. You don’t get what you’re owed. You get what I give you and it’s more than you could possibly ever earn.

Maybe one of the things that doesn’t make sense to us about God’s Kingdom is we are comparing ourselves to one another. God’s like, ain’t none of y’all worked hard enough for this, and I give it to you anyway.
And we can figure out some of it. We can speculate like that. We can see through this mirror dimly and know something of the love of God and try to follow Jesus. We won’t figure everything out. The disciples didn’t and they had front row seats!

But we can devote our lives to knowing that God has revealed a world, a future, so thoroughly beyond the scope of our day to day worries that it won’t make sense in the context of the lives we lead. In fact, it may only ever make sense in the context of the life He led.

But also that makes it sound like the past tense. And that’s not how we know Jesus. We know, as the Church has always proclaimed, that Jesus Christ is Risen, the Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia. Alleluia.

My Google calendar says today is the first day of Fall...

So if you know anyone named Adam or Eve, keep those people away from talking serpents and unidentified fruit because last time it was a bit of a to do.

Monday's Sub Stack article, now with 100% fewer academic footnotes!
What if Judgment isn't God sorting the good people from the bad, but God finally reckoning with everything that's broken, in all of us? A new piece on Malachi, fire, healing, and why fearing Judgment might mean you've misunderstood it.
Coming tomorrow to an inbox near you. (Or at https://substack.com/)