Sermon on Matthew21:23-32

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Our Gospel readings for the next several weeks take us back to Holy Week. We’ll be reading several parables and teachings that Jesus gave in response to the religious leaders’ oppositionbetween Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

Let’s start by putting ourselves in the religious leaders’ shoes to see what they were reacting against.

There were rumors of this new rabbi named Jesus getting attention around the area. You don’t really believe the stories of miraculous healings—there are so many charlatans around—but then some people start saying he’s a prophet or even John the Baptist back from the dead. He’s getting more and more attention, and you worry that he might be spreading some unorthodox ideas.

Then, he arrives in Jerusalem on the same day as Roman leader Pontius Pilate. Pilate arrives on one side of the city like the grand, victorious Roman overlord he is.

And then this upstart rabbi Jesus approaches the other side of the city, riding not a warhorse but a donkey, with crowds of people cheering him on like he’s a military hero—an over-the-top form of political theater mocking Pilate and the Roman Empire. This guy is going to get us all killed!

Then, he goes straight to the Temple—the center of Jewish religious and cultural life, and he starts yelling at people and assaulting the merchants.

So, we religious leaders decide it’s time to put a stop to this. We decide to confront him and let him know he and his behavior aren’t welcome here.

We try to trap him into either discrediting himself or claiming divine power so that we can say he blasphemed and arrest him. Either way, we need him to stop talking before he gets Rome’s attention. We can’t be lumped in with this radical.

But then, Jesus parries our question with another question that entraps us instead! The nerve! And then, he tells a parable that portrays us as not doing God’s will and says that the most undesirable people in our society are going to join the Reign of God before us.

This guy is unbelievable! We can’t let him continue like this. Before the week’s up, this has got to stop. We’re going to put an end to this one way or another.

The religious leaders were trying to maintain order, keep the status quo, and placate the Roman Empire.

Jesus was challenging them, saying that they were missing what God was up to.

And since God was sending prophetic messages through John the Baptist and then through Jesus himself, the religious leaders should have accepted those messages, because they were very much in the tradition of the prophets who spoke to God’s people throughout their history.

There’s a whole section of the Hebrew Bible devoted to the messages of the prophets. We read from Ezekiel today, where God invited God’s people to turn from the unjust ways their society was behaving and get “a new heart and a new spirit.”

Surely John the Baptist’s message to God’s people to change their minds and ways wasn’t so different that the religious leaders couldn’t recognize God’s voice.

So, Jesus called them out on it.

And he invited them to change their minds too, just like in his parable.

The way was open. It’s a standing invitation. The doors of the Beloved Community are always open. It’s up to us human beings to be willing to change our minds and hearts to want to be part of it.

The religious leaders feared that Jesus threatened their power and even their safety—unbalancing their precarious relationship with Rome.

But Jesus was showing them a different kind of power—contrasting the military might of empire with the self-emptying power of God made human.

As our Bible study talked about on Tuesday, our reading from Philippians contains an early hymn of the Church that’s the centerpiece of the whole letter. Jesus “did not regard equality with Godas something to be grasped,but emptied himself,” humbling himself to the point of a humiliating execution.

And by the upside-down way God works, that wasn’t a defeat, but the ultimate triumph, breaking the power of death forever.

Jesus’ conflict wasn’t with the religious leaders or even the Roman Empire, but with everything that is death-dealing in this world.

And his purpose wasn’t to wage a military campaign against Rome or overthrow the religious authorities. It was to bring life abundant to the world, building a community that would uplift the lowly, comfort the broken-hearted, and help us to change our minds so that we see the world the way God sees it, with eyes full of love.

And John the Baptist was preparing us human beings for that purpose, proclaiming that God was up to something in the world and that we should pay attention.

But many of the people who should have recognized what was going on weren’t open to hearing God’s prophetic message.

What prophetic messages are we missing today?

It’s good to be discerning and not just accept anything someone tells you.People can use the Bible to support pretty much whatever message they want, depending on how far you take it out of context.

But at the same time, our own interpretations can start to feel comfortable, and we can find ourselves getting complacent or being unwilling to question the status quo.

Are we, like the religious leaders who were opposing Jesus, missing out on what God is up to today?

What prophets are we ignoring?

I was deeply saddened a few weeks ago to hear of the death of an author I consider prophetic.

They published their work under the name Lenny Duncan and used he/him pronouns at the time of publication, but I’ve come to learn that they more recently went by lynnyduncan and used they/them pronouns.

I read their book Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S. during my internship, and it was a challenging and important read.

Duncanhad been an ELCA pastor, (the ELCA being the whitest denomination they spoke of in the title of their first book) though they eventually left our denomination and continued to do scholarly and spiritual work in other capacities. They were 48 years old when they died of heart problems.

I wish they had had longer on this side of life to speak their prophetic message.

Their work challenged me. They talked about racism and homophobia in the church. They named specific things that we can change to be more equitable and just. They called out traditions and symbols I have loved and named them as problematic and hurtful. They called me to deeper thought and deeper love.

I can’t do justice to their work in one sermon, but here is one small passage from Dear Church to give you a taste of their prophetic message:

“Dear Church, we are the ones we have been waiting for. No one else is coming. You are the generation that has been chosen for this time, this place, this moment in human history. Stop waiting for some sort of transformative leader to arise from the body politic or the body of Christ. It is you. You with all your flaws, fears, doubts, brokenness, and downright utter humanness—you are called for more. The bags under your eyes are going to get darker. The weariness in your bones will get deeper. The amount of pain you are going to have to hold in your heart will grow bigger and almost unbearable. The calendar will be jam packed, and the road just gets narrower from here. But the narrow road is our only path for survival, Church.

“Dear Church, stretching God’s tent is frontline freedom fighting. Our role in the revolution was started in a synagogue in Galilee, when Jesus unfurled the text from Isaiah. He read to those gathered:

“’The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

(Luke 4:18-19; see Isaiah 61:1-2)

Don’t you get it that the text is fulfilled in your hearing? You have been given a post, armed with grace and armored in love, and you are being drafted to wage peace on the world. When someone gives you hell, you are ordered to give them heaven. This is a radical and dangerous act. If our places of worship really are the nerve centers for the souls of dozens of families in our communities, then this can be a shock to the system. Waging peace is more dangerous than waging war.”

I pray that lynny’s eyes no longer have bags under them and that they rest in God’s complete peace and love. And I’m thankful that their prophetic message can live on in their written words.

Prophetic messages can be painful, humbling, maddening. It’s no wonder so many prophets have historically been discredited, persecuted, and killed. It’s not surprising that the religious leaders resisted John the Baptist and Jesus so intensely.

We need the Holy Spirit to help us discern what messages to listen to, but ignoring anything that challenges us isn’t the answer.

God is still speaking prophetic messages to us. God will never stop speaking and inviting God’s people to change our minds and our hearts to help us embrace the world like God does.

The Beloved Community’s doors are wide open for tax collectors, sex workers, religious leaders, and you, and me. It’s not on a cloudsomewhere in the sky. It’s a way of life and of loving the world here and now that brings heaven to earth. And we get to be part of it.

There are prophetic voices pointing to it all the time. Listen to them with all your heart.