Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: The Holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ according to Matthew.
Glory to you, Lord Christ Jesus said. Listen to another parable.
There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower.
Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.
When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.
But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another and stoned another.
Again he sent other slaves, more than the first, and they treated them in the same way.
Finally, he sent his son to them, saying, they will respect my son.
But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, this is the heir. Come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.
So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
Now, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?
They said to him, he will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.
Jesus said to them, have you never read in the Scriptures? The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.
Therefore, I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.
The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard this parable, they realized that he was speaking about them.
They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds because they regarded him as a prophet.
The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Children ages 3 through 10 are invited to go with Miss Katie to the music room for Gospel Story time.
O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours and make us faithful interpreters of life to one another.
Amen.
I almost always read a column called the Ethicist that appears weekly in the New York Times Magazine.
Its subtitle is Advice on Life's Trickiest Situations and Moral Dilemmas.
I love tricky moral dilemmas.
I love puzzling over these situations where there are no clear answers, or where good people totally disagree on what's right, or where bad people try to get away with what is wrong.
There are questions about cheating and lying and stealing, some weightier than others.
One of the columns I found most interesting appeared on September 12th.
It's a long, complicated situation where a friend of the writer absconds with funds raised at a college fraternity, charity and Only the two of them know this.
When the writer confronted the friend who absconded, he confessed to being in dire financial trouble.
He was seriously depressed, and he just hadn't turned over the funds and never told the supposed recipients that the money even existed.
A whole year passed. Neither man did anything.
No one did anything to remedy the situation now. At first, this seemed easy to me. The person who wrote in should confront the friend, insist that he hand over the money or report on his theft to the college, and hold him accountable.
This was also the Ethicist response.
But the rater felt guilty for having kept the secret for a year.
In a way, he had collaborated.
He also feared losing the friendship and worried about how his revelation would affect the unfortunate friend.
And as he was successfully employed, he wondered if maybe he should just quietly come up with the amount of money raised and give it to the charity himself.
Or maybe he should just do nothing and move on, perhaps no further harm done.
The Ethicist column's response and my own first reaction were probably the right answer. Go for accountability.
But nevertheless, there had been and would be great harm, no matter what.
The impoverished friend would be shamed, possibly punished. The friendship would be lost.
The college might be implicated. We all know in this day what happens when colleges get implicated.
The writer would continue to feel guilty no matter what he did, unless, of course, he paid the charity out of his own pocket.
But then there would be no accountability for the other man, and that would rankle.
And if the man did nothing, then the deserving charity would be harmed, even though they really wouldn't know about that.
But it's a messy situation, to be sure.
Other situations seem even less clear. What about telling someone his or her spouse is having an affair?
Or whether or not to divide assets equally among heirs, even if their needs are quite different?
It always seems to come around too well. On the one hand, this. On the other hand, that people get hurt. Even if fairness is served or people luck out and escape responsibility.
This is the crux of moral dilemmas and why they are dilemmas. There's no clear answer that makes everything okay.
Divorce and abortion and aid in dying present moral dilemmas for many, and they sharply divide whole segments of our society.
How do we know the right thing to do in the face of complicated problems?
So let's turn to this morning's readings. Won't the Bible tell us what is right?
Unfortunately, I hasten to declare, it will not.
We will find no clear answers, but perhaps we may find at least a glimmer of hope for the faithful.
Let's see if we can discern God's will for us as moral agents in the readings we've just heard.
Now, these readings say a lot of things about who God is and what God wants, but they seem wildly inconsistent.
Let's have a look.
Before we even get to the readings, we have a collect, and the collect that we heard is a special one for this season of creation. But the collect in the lectionary for this morning presents a God who is of utter grace and mercy, always ready to hear and to give us more than we either desire or deserve. The whole prayer is a call for forgiveness and love without us having to earn it.
Following, though, is the Old Testament passage in which Moses delivers the Ten Commandments to the people that he has received from God on Mount Sinai.
This is a God of law and judgment. Moses even tells the people at the end of the commandments that God has given these to test them and to put fear of God in them so that they won't sin.
It's a call to righteousness based on fear.
The psalm begins with how glorious God is and then moves on to how just and clear God's commandments are.
But after the part of the psalm we heard, it goes on to how fear of God endures and how God's judgments are true and righteous altogether. Fear God do the right thing, and then at the end, the psalmist declares he will be whole and sound if he can keep himself from presumptuous sins.
So far we have a lot of law and judgment, but also the sense that God's laws are good for us. Good for us in a way that a loving parent's rules are good for children, that they are part of a parent's profound love.
Even if we obey out of fear, it's worth it, because living by certain rules makes our lives and the lives of our community better.
At least that's the premise.
So then we heard a passage from St. Paul's letter to the Philippians, and it's like a whole different story.
Paul talks of how his righteousness under the law has become worthless to him, and only his faith in Jesus Christ makes him at all worthy.
God's love of him, shown through Jesus, is now the only thing that makes him righteous. The rest, says Paul, is rubbish.
This seems consistent with the radical grace and mercy expressed in the collect.
We are loved and cared for and heard by God, no matter what, quite different from law and judgment.
So at this point I could perhaps put forth a neat little treatise about how mercy and judgment Are both necessary parts of love.
Parents know this. Judges on the bench know this.
Certainly God's love for us includes both.
But. But then we move to the gospel, and here we could completely throw up our hands in confusion as to what this might mean for us.
What's the moral lesson here? Where is God in this story?
It is known as the parable of the wicked tenants. They sure were. They cheated, tortured and killed the owner's slaves to keep the fruits of the vineyard. Then they even killed the owner's son. Perhaps Jesus was referring here to his crucifixion. But even so, this tale is brutal. It continues on with the miserable death the owner will then inflict on the wicked tenants when he comes back to the property.
What's the right answer?
But then the story shifts away from whatever accountability might have been called for here, to the bit about the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, and then to the importance of bearing fruit, the fruits of God's kingdom.
Do the slaves who did bear the fruit only to be killed for it represent those who bear fruit regardless of punishment? Those who do the right thing, no matter what?
Does it say that God demands that we bear good fruit? And is that consistent with the God of unconditional love?
I don't know.
It's back to the realm of murky moral dilemmas where right answers seem scarce.
But I am reminded of a pretty simple rule of thumb held out by my former colleague and mentor at St. Mark's Jim Adams.
Jim said it can help, when facing some difficult ethical choice to ask ourselves this question.
Will my behavior be life giving or death dealing?
Will my behavior be life giving or death dealing?
And maybe the answer will be both.
But then in what measure? Who will get hurt? And who will get hurt most?
And who might be helped or helped most?
In other words, what will be the fruits of my behavior?
And then where, though, does grace and the forgiving love of God come in? If I'm just weighing costs and benefits, trying to get it right, what if I fail?
Well, that's it.
That's where God lives in us and for us.
We'll get it right and bear good fruit sometimes, and we'll feel ourselves in tune with God and God's kingdom.
Other times we'll get it wrong horribly or just sort of no good fruits to offer God.
But the trying, the taking these dilemmas seriously and as individuals and I have to say as leaders and as a country is the thing.
The trying, the taking things seriously.
I believe God has given us freedom both to succeed and to fail. And that God does love us no matter what loves us. In both our grandeur and woundedness, the grandeur and woundedness of our humanity.
We are graced with gratitude and satisfaction when we succeed.
But we are also graced with consolation and forgiveness and energy to make a new start when we fail.
This is mercy. This is divine love. And our faith that this love is. Is always there for us can help us thread our way even through life's most difficult moral quagmires.
Amen.
