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A Careful Read (Matt. 18:15-20)

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The woman in front of me was a woman of integrity, deep faith and sincere commitment to the church, She had been hired to be a pastoral assistant, and in that role she had contributed substantial time and amazing gifts to the congregation. She had asked for a meeting with me only after trying to speak with her supervisor, the administrative pastor.

As she worked with the congregation, her roots in the faith grew, as well as her knowledge and experience. Her voice gained clarity and authority. So when she noticed a problem, in this case the pastor’s misuse of power, she confronted the situation and challenged him. The senior pastor tried to silence her and ignore her. Reluctantly, she asked the executive council to hear her concern, but council members refused. The pastor had told them that the discussion must remain between the two of them. He quoted Matthew 18 in support of this decision: "If another member of the church sins against you, go and point Out the fault when the two of you are alone." By complying with the pastor and his use of a biblical directive, the council members allowed him to protect himself and them from the truth.

Matthew 18:15-20 is one of many scripture texts that have been used to harm others. These six verses are not meant to be a declaration of power, nor do these verses mean that if two or three people agree on something, then they can ignore others and do whatever they want. These six verses are about listening and accountability and about a larger vision of God’s kingdom.

If one looks at these verses in the context of chapter 18, one notices the hyperbole Jesus uses in a series of brief teachings. Some of these teachings we choose to take literally, and some we don’t. For example, we don’t drown others for being "stumbling blocks." And we don’t encourage people to pluck out their eyes or cut off body parts because they’ve sinned. And most shepherds would not abandon 99 sheep to go looking for one sheep. Jesus’ exaggerated response to Peter’s question about forgiveness in verse 21 shows that he knows we want forgiveness to be a quick and simple answer although it’s not.

What is the kernel of truth that is embedded in each of these teachings, especially in verses 15-20? What is Jesus trying to teach the disciples by using such exaggeration?

Chapter 18 begins with the disciples coming to Jesus with the question, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" I imagine Jesus being wide-eyed at what he was hearing. Were they seriously asking this of Jesus, whose ministry had always focused on the least?

Yet he doesn’t dismiss their self-centered and self-righteous question. He takes them seriously, listens carefully and then responds, not with a direct or literal answer, but with several teachings and with exaggeration. Jesus pushes the disciples to think, to listen and to be accountable to others for the power they hold. The exaggeration allows the disciples the opportunity to learn without being embarrassed and to listen without becoming defensive. Jesus points them back to the "children," the "little ones," "the one that went astray," "the one not listened to" and "the fellow slave." The kingdom of God is not concerned with "who’s the greatest," Jesus teaches; the kingdom of God is about using power to care for the least and most vulnerable.

Matthew 18:15-20 can be used to set up a vulnerable person to be even more vulnerable, as in the opening story. By the power of his role and by his misuse of scripture, the pastor disempowered the woman, denied her the process of being heard, protected himself and silenced the truth. Hiding behind their reading of this text, the pastor and the executive council avoided listening, stopped conversation and the possibility of healing, and joined their voices with the disciples in asking, "Who’s the greatest?" Is that what Jesus is pointing us to in this text? Or is that what we point to when we think we’re the greatest?

We must listen to and read texts like these carefully and honor the questions and tensions they raise for us. If we listen with "new ears" we always will hear something different from what we expect. That’s why Jesus uses hyperbole: to help the disciples hear the gospel of God’s love indifferent ways, through different experiences, with different language and images. If the Bible is a closed word and merely an answer book, then we’re in trouble. We’ll continue to use scripture to attack others and thus perpetuate violence against one another and justify such harm in God’s name. In this, we will limit God. That’s not an exaggeration.

Jesus could have used his power to tell the disciples exactly what he thought of their question, but he chose to listen, to open up conversation and to teach. The Bible invites us to enter into an ongoing conversation of Christians who struggle with what it means to live faithfully in relationship and to look beyond ourselves.

Jesus’ exaggeration in this text goes beyond what the disciples can comprehend and what we can comprehend: it goes beyond the tokenism of inclusiveness to a radical inclusivity where we take the other seriously, listen to the other, and dare trust that he or she belongs in God’s love as much as we do.

Paul and the Law

The Jews of Jesus’ time, the preacher intoned, were slavishly devoted to the practices of their ancestors. They studied scripture but did not apply it. Their temple was "rotten to the core." Ancient Judaism was a religion whose rituals were "impressive, inspiring and empty" It was a faith preoccupied with the superficial and lacking in substance. "As long as people talked about love," the speaker thundered, "they did not have to practice it."

I took notes on this particular preacher because his portrait of Judaism was so outrageously negative. But his version of Judaism is not that unusual in Christian history. Such caricatures of Judaism have abounded in Christian preaching.

A major reason that many Christians now know that these are caricatures is the work of E. P. Sanders, a biblical scholar who retired last year from Duke University. For those who want to understand early Judaism on its own terms but whose primary familiarity with it is through the New Testament, Sanders’s writings are invaluable.

Sanders was brought up as a Methodist in the small town of Grand Prairie, Texas. After attending nearby Texas Wesleyan College, which nurtured his nascent interests in history and religion, Sanders went to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. There he supported himself by doing church work and selling cookware while taking as many ancient-language courses as possible. He had never met a Jew before moving to Dallas.

Sanders credits a Perkins professor, William R. Farmer, with changing the direction of his life by urging him to study abroad. When Sanders’s resources proved too modest for travel, Farmer and a local Methodist minister took it upon themselves to raise the money. A sizable donation came from an anonymous benefactor at Dallas’s Reform synagogue, Temple Emanuel, "I especially vowed that the gift from Temple Emanuel would not be in vain," Sanders writes -- a vow that he would more than fulfill.

After a year studying in Göttingen, Oxford and Jerusalem, Sanders landed at Union Theological Seminary, where he worked under W. D. Davies, who was well known for his 1948 book Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. Sanders was receptive to Davies’s sympathetic approach to Jewish sources, and he made a point of taking classes at Jewish Theological Seminary. He completed the doctoral program in two years and nine months -- as he often reminded his own graduate students ("Go thou and do likewise"). His subsequent career took him from McMaster University (1966-1984) to Oxford University (1984-1990) to Duke (1990-2005), where his mentor Davies had moved in 1966.

Sanders’s first major book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), canvassed Palestinian Jewish literature from 200 BCE to 200 CE in order to compare those texts’ theology with that of Paul, Sanders was not reticent about his chief motivation: to "destroy the view of rabbinic Judaism" as a legalistic religion in which one earned salvation by doing works,

The book opens with a devastating critique of 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant scholarship, with particular attention given to the influence of Ferdinand Weber, Wilhelm Bousset and Rudolf Bultmann, Relying on misleading summary treatments of Judaism, such scholars often had little firsthand familiarity with ancient Jewish sources, Sanders demonstrated. Because they wrongly believed that Judaism was a "works-righteousness" religion, they also wrongly believed that Jewish efforts to save themselves led inevitably to arrogance about their accomplishments or to insecurity about their inability to completely uphold the Torah. Sanders found little evidence for such a theology.

Sanders proposed that ancient Jewish texts reflected a "pattern of religion" he gave the shorthand title of "covenantal nomism" and defined this way:

(1) God has chosen Israel and (2) given the law, The law implies both (3) God’s promise to maintain the election and (4) the requirements to obey. (5) God rewards obedience and punishes transgression. (6) The law provides for means of atonement, and atonement results in (7) maintenance or re-establishment of the covenantal relationship. (8) All those who are maintained in the covenant by obedience, atonement and God’s mercy belong to the group which will be saved.

Thus, while Jews did believe that their covenant obligation was to live by Torah (nomos in Greek), they did not believe that their efforts earned them salvation. Salvation came only through God’s grace. On this essential point -- one may not become righteous in God’s eyes through works -- Paul and his Jewish contemporaries agreed. Sanders regards later Christian misunderstanding of Judaism as a projection onto it of Luther’s critiques of’ Roman Catholicism.

What, then, is one to make of the confusing array of statements that Paul makes about the Jewish law? Precisely because of the variety of his claims, it is unlikely that Paul’s conceptual starting point was a conviction that the law was somehow inadequate or unfulfillable. In Philippians 3:6, after all, Paul claims to be "blameless under the law."

In Sanders’s view, Paul’s logic did not proceed from a sense of plight (the inability of the law to save) to a solution (salvation through Christ). Instead, "the conviction of a universal solution preceded the conviction of a universal plight."

Paul’s argument can be summarized most easily using Galatians 2:21: "If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing" (NRSV). Paul’s starting point was that Christ had died; therefore, there must have been a need for his death. If there was a need for Christ’s death, then the Jewish law must not have been sufficient for salvation.

Much of Galatians consists of Paul’s ad hoc arguments for the inadequacy of the Torah: the Galatians had received the Spirit by faith, not by works of the law (3:2); Abraham was justified by faith, not by works of tile law (3:6); the Mosaic covenant did not supplant the promise to Abraham (3:17-18); the law was only a temporary measure (3:23-25); and so on. These critiques of the law were newly formulated in Paul’s mind in the wake of his encounter with the risen Christ; they reflected neither his earlier views of Judaism nor any sense of widespread dissatisfacdon toward the law among his Jewish contemporaries.

In making such arguments Paul was mindful of the law’s divine origins (even if it had been given through angelic mediators, as per Gal. 3:19); this explains the letter’s positive statements about the law. Thus, the law was added because of transgressions (3:19); it is not opposed to the promises of God (3:21); Christians can (and do) fulfill the law through love of neighbor (5:14, 6:2; cf. Lev. 19:18).

This reorientation of Paul’s thinking in light of the Christ-event led him to break away from Judaism. In his new view, membership in the Jewish covenant was no longer sufficient for salvation. Both Jews and gentiles stood in need of the salvation that came only through Christ. Paul used two sets of "transfer terminology" to describe entry into the people of God: the participation language of being "in Christ" (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:14-21) and the juridical phrase, "justification by faith." The language of "justification" (or "righteousness"; the Greek dikaiosyne is translated both ways) is used especially in contexts in which Paul combats Judaizers who were urging gentile Christians that salvation required full conversion to Judaism. Gentiles would be justified by faith, Paul argued -- not by works of’ the Jewish law. The law could indeed lead to a righteousness (Phil. 3:4-11), but it was not the right righteousness that leads to salvation, the righteousness achieved by faith in Christ.

The rejection by Sanders (and by other scholars, including James D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright) of the view that Christianity is a religion of’ grace in total opposition to a Judaism defined as a religion of works-righteousness came to be known as the "New Perspective on Paul." Dunn, who coined the phrase, emphasized that Paul’s references to works should not be interpreted as "good works" (as with Luther) but as "works of the law," and added that such works should primarily be understood as the commandments of Torah that functioned as social markers of Jewish distinctiveness -- circumcision, Sabbath observance and dietary laws.

Scholars who agree with Sanders that Judaism was radically distorted by earlier scholars do not necessarily agree with his exegetical arguments. Some within the New Perspective posit a two-covenant plan of salvation: Jews are justified by works of the law and gentiles are justified by faith (John Gager and Stanley Stowers, building on work by Lloyd Gaston and Krister Stendahl). Other scholars have strongly criticized aspects of the New Perspective, arguing that at least some, if not all, streams of early Judaism were legalistic (D. A. Carson, Frank Thielman). Some defend traditional Protestant readings of Paul that emphasize the centrality of justification by faith (Carson, Mark Seifrid, Seyoon Kim, Stephen Westerholm, Brendan Byrne).

In many respects, Pauline studies, like much of the rest of New Testament scholarship, is now fragmented. Regardless, however, of whether one agrees that Paul and Palestinian Judaism contains the "truth, ultimate" (see the index’s whimsical entry), there is little question that the book played a major role in breaking the reigning Lutheran-Bultmannian paradigm of understanding Paul, curbing heavily biased portrayals of Judaism and opening new avenues of inquiry.

Sanders turned to the Gospels with Jesus and Judaism (1985), which received the inaugural Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and with a briefer treatment written for the general public, The Historical Figure of Jesus (1990). Once again, a driving motivation was the desire to overturn erroneous notions about Judaism, in this case, "the stark contrast between Jesus, who represents everything good, pure and enlightened, and Judaism, which represents everything distorted, hypocritical, and misleading."

Contextualizing Jesus within Judaism, Sanders argues that he was an apocalyptic prophet proclaiming the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God and the restoration of Israel. Joined by Paula Fredriksen, Bart D. Ehrman, John P. Meier and others, Sanders disagrees entirely with the deapocalypticized portraits of Jesus proposed by John Dominic Crossan, Marcus J. Borg and the Jesus Seminar.

Many studies of the historical Jesus begin with his sayings, sifting out those likely to have originated with Jesus from those that they believe developed later. Sanders opts for a different route. Focusing initially on key events in Jesus’ ministry -- his baptism by another eschatologist, John the Baptist, and his call of 12 disciples, probably symbolizing the restoration of the 12 tribes -- he only later turns to the sayings material.

Most important for Sanders’s reconstruction is Jesus’ overturning of the tables in the temple. The "temple tantrum," to use Fredriksen’s term, was not a protest directed at the purity system (as. per Borg), at the temple’s role as broker between humanity and God (as per Crossan), or at corrupt administration (as suggested by the Gospels themselves). "If Jesus were a religious reformer . . . bent on correcting ‘abuse’ and ‘present practice,"’ Sanders reasons, "we should hear charges [elsewhere in the Gospels] of immorality, dishonesty, and corruption directed against the priests" -- charges that are largely missing. Furthermore, "those [scholars] who write about Jesus’ desire to return the Temple to its ‘original,’ ‘true’ purpose, the ‘pure’ worship of God, seem to forget that the principal function of any temple is to serve as a place for sacrifice, and that sacrifices require the supply of suitable animals" and, by implication, money-changers to facilitate their sale.

Rather than being a "cleansing," Jesus’ action was a symbolic demonstration of the temple’s imminent destruction in preparation for the arrival of the eschatological one. Drawing on a range of Jewish sources (e.g., Isaiah, Tobit, 1 Enoch, the Temple Scroll), Sanders demonstrates that expectations of a new temple were common. Jesus’ action should be interpreted in light of passages such as Mark 15:29 and Acts 6:13, which designate as false charges that Jesus threatened the temple. Sanders thinks the biblical writers protesteth too much; Jesus likely made such utterances.

Given the brazenness of Jesus’ action in the temple, the priests, the chief Jewish authorities in Judea, were offended. Given the volatility of the crowds gathered for Passover, a festival celebrating deliverance from foreign oppressors, the Romans were eager to dispose of a troublemaker. Jesus expected to play a prominent role in the coming kingdom of God; the Romans, confused on this point, executed him as a kingly claimant. Jesus did not die because he preached grace to a Judaism opposed to it. He died because he lit a match near a powder keg.

Sanders also devotes special attention to Jesus’ relationship with the Pharisees, suggesting that some conflict stories are best seen as examples of intra-Jewish debate while others (perhaps most) postdate Jesus. Stereotypical images of Pharisees as harsh, hypocritical and holier than thou ignore the polemical nature of the Gospels and reflect a lack of familiarity with Jewish sources. Such images, Sanders is well aware, have often functioned to legitimize Christian anti-Judaism.

To understand how influential such views have been, one need only to read the "Pharisees" article in the classic Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, which describes Pharisaism as "the immediate ancestor of rabbinical (or normative) Judaism, the largely arid religion of the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem." Both Pharisaic and rabbinic Judaism are characterized as a "sterile religion of codified traditions." Since all modern Judaism grows out of ancient rabbinic Judaism, the implications of claims like these are clear.

Sanders gives judaism his most systematic treatment in Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE -- 66 AD (1992), which he describes as "the book I always wanted to write, or at least close to it." Sanders focuses on what he calls "common Judaism," the Judaism on which the masses and the priests agreed: a religion of grace in which the Creator God had elected Israel and given it the Torah. Unlike many studies of Judaism, the book is organized not by categories of literature (apocalyptic, rabbinic, mystical, etc.), but by the practices associated with daily living, the Sabbath and the Jewish festivals.

Sanders readily grants the diversity of early Judaism, but argues that Jews held broad agreement on those practices and on key doctrines (i.e., covenantal nomism). He thus rejects claims by some scholars that Judaism was fractured into radically different "Judaisms." With one of the most detailed descriptions available of the Temple’s operation, the book is perhaps the best place to turn to learn more about topics such as why Joseph and Mary sacrificed two doves after Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:21-38) and why the charge that Paul brought a gentile into the temple led to his arrest (Acts 21:28).

Sanders has retired from the classroom but not from writing. He is currently at work on another introductory volume on Paul, a study of the importance of both the internal and external aspects (that is, both the beliefs and practices) of Judaism and Christianity, and, in a new direction, a consideration of democracy, Christianity and fundamentalism. Like his previous books, these will no doubt be rich in detail, packed with references to primary sources and fresh in their perspectives.

Yet they might also make readers uncomfortable who prefer their reconstructions tidy and with no loose ends. Sanders’s Jesus, after all, was wrong about the imminence of the new temple. His Paul was inconsistent in the way he talked about the Jewish law. Sanders’s closing comments in Paul: A Very Short Introduction, which warn against idolizing consistency, might be applied to Sanders himself:

"He forces us . . . to pose an extremely serious question: must a religion, in addressing diverse problems, offer answers that are completely consistent with each other? Is it not good to have passionate hopes and commitments which cannot all be reduced to a scheme in which they are arranged in a hierarchical relationship?"

The Bible in the Classroom

Chances are you have never heard of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools or its textbook, The Bible in History and Literature. But if you are a member of a school board, you may be hearing about it soon. Over 1,000 schools in 308 school districts in 36 states from Alaska to Florida currently utilize the curriculum, and over 175,000 students have taken courses based on it, according to the NCBCPS Web site (www.bibleinschools.net). It’s not a huge number, but it’s on the increase, says president and founder Elizabeth Ridenour. Seven years ago, only 71 school districts were using the curriculum.

The NCBCPS has not listed the schools using the curriculum so its geographic impact is difficult to measure. Over a fifth of the schools are in Texas and Louisiana, and it’s likely most of the others are in the rural south and midwest.

The NCBCPS’s list of advisers reads like a Who’s Who list of religious, social and political conservatives. It includes two U.S. representatives, the chaplain to the U.S. Senate, and two of Time magazine’s "25 Most Influential Evangelicals" -- Joyce Meyer and David Barton. The group has been endorsed by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, the Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family and a host of similar groups and figures. The NCBCPS uses such organizations to advertise, and then looks to grassroots supporters to push the curriculum in their school districts.

That’s what happened this past spring in Odessa, Texas, where the NCBCPS registered 6,000 signatures in support of the cause. The debate there drew attention from the national media. One of the people voicing concern was David Newman, an English professor at Odessa College and father of a 12-year-old student. Newman is Jewish, and he told the Dallas Morning News that his daughter already was occasionally made uncomfortable with questions from classmates. "They’ll ask her why ‘your people’ killed Jesus. Or if she knows that Jesus is her savior. . . . I don’t think it’s hate. It’s just kids being kids. But I worry what will happen if a pronounced Christian viewpoint is taught in the class."

The school board unanimously approved offering a Bible course, reportedly receiving a standing ovation from the audience. The board has apparently not finalized its choice of curriculum. Many in the city advocate using NCBCPS materials.

Courts have ruled clearly that teaching the Bible in a nonsectarian manner is legal and appropriate in public schools, and the NCBCPS insists that its course is indeed nonsectarian. "The program is concerned with education rather than indoctrination of students,’ says the Web site.

"The central approach of the class is simply to study the Bible as a foundation document of society, and that approach is altogether appropriate in a comprehensive program of secular education."

Ryan Valentine of the Texas Freedom Network takes a different view: "Academic study of the Bible in a history or literature course is perfectly acceptable," he says, "but this curriculum represents a blatant attempt to turn a public school class into a Sunday school class. Even that may be giving it too much credit -- this curriculum wouldn’t even pass muster in most churches I know."

The curriculum does make occasional efforts to be evenhanded. It nowhere urges students to become Christians. A separate CD offers perspectives from multiple religious traditions. Some pedagogical components are quite helpful, such as map exercises, reading comprehension questions, quizzes and recommendations of classic musical works inspired by biblical stories. Creative activities include preparing foods that are traditionally associated with Passover and writing a monologue describing Jonah’s inner feelings. The book is well illustrated and parts of it are visually appealing.

Nevertheless, the curriculum does present a distinct theological perspective. Discussions of science are based on nonscientific literature, Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of "Old Testament" prophecy, and archaeological findings are cited as evidence of Bible’s complete historical accuracy. Almost an entire unit of the curriculum is devoted to depicting the U.S. as a historically Christian nation, with the strong implication that it should reclaim that purported heritage.

The Protestant Bible is the course’s norm, and the Bibles of Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy receive scant attention. The first page highlights the King James Version as "the legal and educational foundation of America." Christian theological claims are sometimes explicitly affirmed and a Christian audience presupposed, as in statements like: "The tabernacle of the Old Testament was a ‘shadow of things in heaven.’ Hebrews 8:1-5 tells us that the real Tabernacle is in heaven. This is where Jesus himself is our high priest (Heb. 8:2)."

There are occasional surprises: the book does not insist that Job was written by its namesake, and it even presents a brief overview of the synoptic problem. But it generally advocates traditional views of biblical authorship, early dating of biblical books and the historicity of biblical reports. Students are asked to describe the impact of Noah’s flood on world history. The Exodus is confidently dated to 1446 BCE, with no other views represented. An inscription is cited as confirmation of the accuracy of the Tower of Babel story. Stories of miracles and divine intervention are portrayed as historically accurate -- an approach that might be unproblematic in many religious schools, but which the courts have explicitly ruled out for public school settings.

The curriculum’s appeal to archaeological materials aptly illustrate its emphases and its shortcomings. A summary statement cites a claim by a "respected scholar, Dr. J. O. Kinnaman," that "of the hundreds of thousands of artifacts found by the archaeologists, not one has ever been discovered that contradicts or denies one word, phrase, clause or sentence of the Bible, but always confirms and verifies the facts of the Biblical record."

J. O. Kinnaman is not a name well known in contemporary academic circles. He has argued (in Diggers for Facts: The Bible in Light of Archaeology) that Jesus and Paul visited Great Britain, that Joseph of Arimathea was Jesus’ uncle and dominated the tin industry of Wales, and that he himself personally saw Jesus’ school records in India. According to an article by Stephen Mehler, director of research at the Kinnaman Foundation, Kinnaman reported finding a secret entrance into the Great Pyramid of Giza, in which he discovered records from the lost continent of Atlantis. He also claimed that the pyramid was 35,000 years old and was used in antiquity to transmit radio messages to the Grand Canyon. Kinnaman might not be the best figure on which to base material for a public school textbook.

The book’s treatment of the Dead Sea scrolls is equally problematic. Most scholars will be startled to learn that the "scrolls contain definite references to the New Testament and, more importantly, to Jesus of Nazareth"; that fragments of New Testament books were found in the Dead Sea caves; that one scroll mentions the crucifixion of Jesus; and that some Jews at Qumran accepted Jesus as the Messiah. They will be even more puzzled by claims that the Dead Sea scrolls prove that the Hebrew text underlying modern translations "was identical with the original text as given to the writers by God and inspired by Him." In light of such claims, it is perhaps not surprising to encounter these study questions on the scrolls: "Describe the impact of this discovery on those who do not accept the authenticity of the Bible" and "Determine the evidence from the Dead Sea scrolls confirming the claims of Jesus as the Bible describes him."

In discussing scientific issues the book argues that biblical writers accurately described the global water system and wind patterns. The claims are based primarily on a book by evangelist Grant R. Jeffrey, The Signature of God (Frontier Research Publications, 2002). The cover of at least some editions of this book proclaims it as "Documented Evidence That Proves Beyond Doubt the Bible Is the Inspired Word of God."

In several instances, the curriculum advises teachers to use resources from the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, an organization that believes in a six-day creation, a 6,000-year-old earth, and the simultaneous existence of humans and dinosaurs. The material also presents an urban legend as scientific fact. Students are told to "note in particular the interesting story of the sun standing still" in the book of Joshua. "There is documented research through NASA that two days were indeed unaccounted for in time (the other being in 2 Kings 20:8-11)." A Web site is provided for an article titled "The Sun Stood Still" about the alleged NASA discovery. The "Ask an Astrophysicist" section of the Web site of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center dismisses this story, and folklorist Jan Harold Brunand has documented the evolution of the legend.

Much of the course appears to be designed to persuade students and teachers that America is a distinctively Christian nation -- an agenda publicly embraced by many of the NCBCPS’s advisers and endorsers. One need not even open the book to find this agenda. The cover is decorated with a photograph of the Declaration of Independence and an American flag. The title pages of most units depict similar images. A consideration of the Ten Commandments draws students’ attention to the possibility of instituting biblical law in America.

A unit titled "The Bible in History" relies heavily on the thought of David Barton, founder and president of Wall-Builders, an organization based in Aledo, Texas, that argues against the separation of church and state. His views prompted considerable controversy when the Republican National Committee hired him to stump for President Bush at churches in 2004.

Even something as seemingly innocuous as a dictionary recommendation reflects a theological agenda. The book recommends the 1828 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language and provides contact information for its publisher, the Foundation for American Christian Education (FACE). A visit to FACE’s Web site reveals that this edition contains "the greatest number of biblical definitions given in any reference volume." Au advertisement there reads, "This dictionary is needed to Restore an American Christian Education in the Home, Church, and School."

Perhaps most shocking of all, however, is the way the curriculum reproduces nearly verbatim lines, paragraphs and even pages from its sources. Though it occasionally notes its sources, nowhere does it explicitly acknowledge that it quotes them directly. In addition, many passages are virtually identical to ones in uncited sources. In one unit alone, 20 pages are almost identical to uncited online materials. All in all, the wording of nearly 100 pages of the curriculum -- approximately a third of the book -- is identical or nearly identical to the wording of other publications.

The NCBCPS wants to reach many more school districts. Ridenour has recently announced efforts to expand the use of the curriculum. It may be coming to a school district near you.

The Making of Taizé

Almost everyone engaged in the search for Christian unity has at some point received important impulses from the Taizé community. And whoever speaks of Taizé is bound to speak of Roger Schutz (1915-2005), whose intuitions and initiatives turned the community into a focus and center of the ecumenical movement.

The origins of Taizé lie in World War II. In the face of the horrors of war, confessional boundaries -- already undermined by earlier developments -- became more and more obsolete. Three years after the armistice, the World Council of Churches was founded in Amsterdam, and encounters and exchanges between Protestants and Catholics also became more and more frequent. The Taizé community built on this experience.

Schutz, the son of a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church, studied theology in Lausanne and Strasbourg. In 1940 he moved to Taizé in French Burgundy and was soon joined by a group of companions. In 1949 they decided to engage in a radical commitment and to found a monastic community. (A similar initiative had been taken even earlier by a group of Reformed women who had started a community in Grandchamp near Neuchatel in Switzerland.) They renewed the tradition of the daily prayer hours. For their liturgical life they owe much to the liturgical renewal movement in the Reformed churches of French-speaking Switzerland.

During the first years of its existence the community was primarily sustained from the Reformed side. Soon, however, the Roman Catholic Church began to take interest in Taizé. At the end of the 1950s, when Pope John XXIII announced the Second Vatican Council, the community became a center of the forces promoting the ecumenical opening of the Roman Catholic Church.

My first visit to Taizé fell in this period. Prayers were still held in the old village church. There was an atmosphere of freshness and expectation. The spirituality of the community was inspired by Frère Roger. The essential features of his spirituality are well expressed by the title of one of his numerous writings, Living Today for God (Vivre l’aujourd’hui de Dieu). For him the ecumenical movement was nothing other than letting God act here and now. Christ’s resurrection, the light in the intimacy of our hearts, is the center which joins us in one communion.

The community received an invitation to send observers to Vatican II. Frère Roger’s primary interest was the event of the council itself. He largely left the theological debates and disputes to Max Thurian, the subprior of the community, while he sought through personal contacts to win the council fathers to the cause of the ecumenical movement. Hundreds of bishops were received in the small Taizé apartment in Rome.

Perhaps precisely because his primary concern was not with the confessional differences, Frère Roger was open to other aspects of Christian witness. He was touched by the voice of the bishops, especially Dom Helder Câmara, who called on the council to show more solidarity with the poor. Already during the Vatican Council, Latin America was becoming a new emphasis of the Taizé community. Environmental issues, however, remained outside Frére Roger’s horizon.

In connection with Vatican II, Frére Roger issued an appeal to the youth of the churches. Was it possible, he wondered, to supplement the council with an ecumenical youth council?

The response went beyond all expectations. The appeal did not result in a formal youth council, but Taizé became the meeting point of thousands of young people, especially at Easter, with more and more young "pilgrims" participating in the prayers of the monastic community. To many, including my own children, these encounters were inspiring. Frére Roger and his community were able to create an atmosphere that combined simplicity, freedom and commitment.

Taizé has not lost its attraction. An important dimension of the community has been its artistic activities. Even in the first years of its existence it was known for its pottery and its stained glass. The melodies produced by Frère Jacques Berthier are sung not only at Taizé but all over the world.

The experience with young people led Taizé to organize youth gatherings in various countries. I was actively involved in one of these gatherings. In preparing for the 50th anniversary of the first World Conference on Faith and Order, I asked Frère Roger whether he would be willing to amplify the celebration with a youth gathering. In 1977, 3,000 young people participated in an unforgettable vigil in the cathedral of Lausanne.

Of special importance were the youth gatherings in Eastern Europe. I know of many for whom the link with Taizé helped to keep the flame of faith alive. Collaboration with Frère Roger was not always easy. He had developed his own theatrical style, and the way he staged his appearances in public was sometimes a little irritating.

The influence of this small group of monks has been and continues to be immense. In Taizé, young people experience Christian community across the boundaries of the confessions. But can the confessional differences be overcome by this temporary experience? The confessional structures, especially of the Roman Catholic Church, have turned out to be much more resistant than they appeared for a short while during the 1960s. The "free space" of Taizé could not be easily transplanted into the daily life of the churches.

A conversation with Frère Roger a few months before the opening of Vatican II is still alive in my memory. "Now," he said, "it is the calling of the Reformed church to contribute to the renewal of Catholicism."

I wondered: "Does the true challenge not rather consist in working together, Protestants and Catholics, toward a new form of catholicity?"

"Perhaps," he answered, "but the way to unity leads through the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church."

He consistently followed this road, and it was almost inevitable that from year to year and from decade to decade the community moved more in the universe of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformed origins became gradually less evident, and the renewal of the Reformed tradition was no longer the purpose and theme of the community.

But, in fact, the Reformed background continued to be essential for the mission of the community. It was the freedom provided by the Reformed tradition that made it possible to build the "free space" in Burgundy. How quickly the initiative would have come to a standstill if the community had been subjected to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church! Without the basis of Reformed freedom, the vision of Frère Roger would not have been capable of going beyond mere intentions. The awareness of this gift should perhaps have led him to witness to the Reformed heritage and its fundamental convictions with a little more gratitude and care.

Jesus Isn’t Cool

Cramming more than 50 high school students into a small room for weekly Bible study is challenging, but getting them to talk about sex is not. When the questioning hand of one 15-year-old boy shot up in the back of the room, I braced myself. "Is masturbation a sin? -- I really gotta know."

I was proud of him, but not for his honesty and openness. Talking explicitly about sex is easy for MTV-watching teens. Using a word like sin is much harder. As Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, authors of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, observe, few teens think seriously about theologically explicit words like resurrection, redemption, sanctification and sin.

Smith and Denton’s findings beg for a response from those working in youth ministry. They describe teens as "incredibly inarticulate" about their faith, and they say mainline teens are "among the least religiously articulate of all teens." Most Christian teens are "at best only tenuously Christian," having confused Christianity with "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

Given this state of affairs, what does effective youth ministry look like? We must help teens think about, practice and experience the theological details that make Christianity distinct.

A recent encounter with a pair of street preachers in our gentrified, suburban downtown illustrates one such important detail.

"Turn from Hell! Believe in Jesus!" said the huge sign held by a man whose booming voice reiterated this refrain to hundreds on crowded sidewalks. His younger partner on the opposite corner shouted equally obnoxious phrases.

"What do you think of them?" I asked one of my high school students.

"I don’t like it when people are too religious," she said, visibly irritated by the preachers. Her comment suggested she is one of the many teens who described themselves as "religious but not too religious" to Smith and Denton.

"What does ‘too religious’ mean?" I prompted.

After several attempts at being more descriptive she concluded: "Well you know what I mean . . ."

"No, what do you mean?" My unwillingness to appease her annoyed her a little.

"I guess it’s just not my thing," she said, as if it was a matter of consumer preference. "It’s not a very good way to attract non-Christians," she suggested.

"What is a good way?" I asked.

"I just think they should be a lot nicer about it," she said. "They’re sort of offensive."

"Right, sort of offensive," I said. "Like when Jesus preached his first sermon and made everyone so mad they tried to kill him. He was, like, sort of offensive, You know what I mean . . ."

It turned out, she did not know what I meant. She knew Jesus was no bombastic street preacher, but this new detail challenged her previous conception and invited her to rethink her image of Jesus as someone who would "go along to get along." Her furrowed brow revealed a storm of mental dissonance -- the hard thinking that precedes theological insight. Perhaps there was more to Jesus than she thought.

We often fail to help teens think carefully about their faith and about the details of scripture, worship and Christian practices. Getting kids to like church is itself an accomplishment, and parents want ministers to succeed at that, Not surprisingly, Smith and Denton describe youth ministers as under great pressure to keep kids entertained.

One common strategy involves front-loading youth programming with fun activities, hoping to sneak in a little Bible teaching at the end. The point is not to do anything too weighty that would turn kids off. Keep it light; keep it fun. Large youth events, like Christian concerts, appeal to youth ministers with their ability to entertain kids while simultaneously conveying a positive, family-friendly alternative to things like MTV. This stuff works to a degree: as Smith and Denton show "religion actually does influence positive outcomes" and religious teens tend to do better than nonreligious teens.

But teens don’t need Jesus to be crucified and raised from the dead to have positive outcomes and pursue family friendly alternatives to MTV. Values like being positive, encouraging and tolerant are already widely available in the culture. When kids realize this, and many do, they struggle to articulate the difference that faith makes. It didn’t surprise me that many teens told Smith and Denton, "I guess it’ll be more important when I’m older."

One student I know didn’t want to wait to know this difference, so he participated in his church’s "40 Days of Purpose" campaign, hoping that an exploration of Rick Warren’s popular book The Purpose Driven Life would help. Instead, he reached this conclusion: "I don’t understand why you need God for a sense of purpose, self-esteem, or whatever . . . lots of people have that without God." This young man was onto something.

Religion may help teens find a sense of purpose, stay focused on schoolwork, avoid drugs, drive responsibly, and so on. These are good and important things and they are all part of the "religious package," but they are not the point. They are like the paper bag you get for free if you buy the groceries.

Christian faith takes root and begins to matter to teens when they discover the difference the details make. In the Christian story, we discover a fiercely loyal God who creates, loves, lives, dies, lives again, and calls teens into the passionate grace of the baptized life. That is something teens can get excited about and sink their teeth into, but these details are available only in the Christian story as told in the Bible and creeds. Seeing these details alive in the lives of other baptized people ignites youthful passion in teens more than any youth event or personal sense of purpose ever could. Living these details of the gospel is not supposed to be easy, or necessarily safe, but it’s what Christians do.

That Christianity is not supposed to be easy is another important detail that distinguishes Christianity from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. "The God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is not demanding," say Smith and Denton. "Actually, he can’t be because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good. In short, Cod is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist."

A few months ago a confirmation teacher asked to meet with me. "Can I talk to you about an issue we’re having with one of our students?" Immediately I imagined a long list of possible teenage offenses. "Is the student disruptive?" I asked. "Well, sort of," she said. "The student keeps saying, ‘This is too easy; it must be the easiest religion in the world."’ In light of that comment I had to wonder if the confirmation program was teaching Christianity or Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Twice each year, I take two bus-loads of high school students on retreats at which they worship, walk labyrinths, talk in small groups with adults who care about them, and "hang out" in Christian community. Upon arrival, low-cut jeans, exposed mid-riffs and tight tank tops were exchanged for hooded sweatshirts and sweat pants. The girls breathe more easily, the burden of being cool and sexy having been lifted from their shoulders. This doesn’t happen because of an imposed dress code. It’s their idea. Youth group is a different community. The usual social hierarchic. have no traction here, because this is Sabbath time. Here everything begins and ends with prayer, and the distinct message of the gospel permeates everything. "Hear and believe the Good News," I say to them, "Jesus is not cool."

Teens respond to the message that their faith offers an alternative to the world. But this realization requires a community of adults who embody this difference. Explaining that life in the Body of Christ is different is insufficient. Adults must show how to live this difference. Where are the adults and trained ministers capable of leading youth and their parents into the particular story of God’s work in the world?

Good youth pastors are difficult to find. Seminaries do not usually encourage their students toward youth ministry, and most young pastors avoid youth ministry like the plague. Church members and older pastors think of youth ministry as "entry-level" work, which only encourages younger clergy to climb the ladder toward something worth their time. Besides, youth ministry is hard. I lose more battles than I win.

After a particularly difficult night, I shared my struggles with a young woman interested in becoming a youth minister. "I’m not sure you want to get into this," I said. "There are other things you could do," She sat in a moment of stunned silence. Then she told me about her college years.

"My faith was no match for college," she said. "Youth group was fun, but no one taught me anything." She recalled those years marked by drugs, broken relationships, an eating disorder, sex, pregnancy and eventually abortion. Finally, with tear-filled eyes, she said, "Don’t you see? If I had grown up in a youth group like yours, I would have had a fighting chance."

What Teens Believe

Book Review

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. By Christian smith, with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Oxford University Press, 368 pp.

 

Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton have conducted the most comprehensive and reliable research ever done on youth and religion. For the next 50 years writers on the topic will be referring to their book.

The centerpiece of their project is a random telephone survey of teenagers (aged 13-17) and their parents in 3,000 U.S. households. The survey is complemented by 267 face-to-face interviews of teens in 45 states. By drawing on these two sources of data, the researchers were able to produce an analysis that is better than that of the two other major quantitative researchers in the field, George Barna and George Gallup; it is the standard against which other research on teens should be tested. The only thing that would have improved their study would have been the addition of a third source of data -- participant observation in teens’ congregations, schools, homes and activities.

Though the study confirms some things other researchers have established, the authors surprise us with some of their findings and offer insightful way of expressing what the data reveal.

We have known for years that parents are key influences on teens religious lives. Despite the tendency of parents to say they are helpless in this area, three out of four religious teens consider their own beliefs somewhat or very similar to those of their parents (they are more similar to their mothers’ beliefs than to their fathers’). In choosing friends, teens tend to surround themselves with people who reinforce the shaping influence (religious or nonreligious) of their parents. This finding carries two important messages: First, peers may be important to teens, but parents are still primary when it comes to religion. Second, "teenagers . . . are not a people apart, an alien race about whom adults can only shake their heads and look forward to their growing up."

This finding indicates that popular authors have gone too far identifying distinctive characteristics of each generational cohort. Although there are distinctive World War II and baby boom cohorts, generations since then have been more alike than different. Too much has been made of Generation X, Generation Y, the millennial generation, the lost generation, baby busters, the 13th generation and soon. As Smith and Denton say, "Any generation gap that exists between teens and adults today is superficial compared with and far outweighed by the generational commonalities."

We have also known for years, though it has never before been so clearly documented, that religious participation correlates with good social outcomes. Smith and Den-ton show that religiously active teens fare better than religiously disengaged teens when it comes to smoking, drinking, drug use, school attendance, television and movie viewing, sexual behavior, body image, depression, relationships with adults and peers, moral reasoning, honesty, compassion and community participation.

Smith and Denton reveal that youth are not flocking to "alternative" religions and spiritualities. The vast majority of the teenagers identified themselves as Christian -- either Protestant or Catholic -- or as Jewish or Mormon. Relatively few of the teens were affiliated with more than one religion. Half of teens said that faith is very or extremely important in their lives; only about 8 percent said faith was not important at all. The students did not perceive schools as especially hostile to students who are openly religious.

The vast majority of the teens regard their congregations as warm and welcoming. Those attend youth groups generally like them. Of the teens who attended worship services, 70 percent rated their congregation as a very good or fairly good place to talk about serious issues, such as family problems, alcohol or troubles at school. Of the teens who had some interest in learning about their faith, the majority reported that their congregation did a fairly good or excellent job at teaching them what they wanted to learn. Seventy-seven percent of all teens who belonged to a congregation said that they expected to be part of the same kind of congregation at age 25. All religious groups seemed equally at risk of losing teens; no single religious group stood out as responsible for producing nonreligious teenagers.

Smith and Denton’s most striking finding is that teens are traditional. "Contrary to popular perceptions, the vast majority of American adolescents are not spiritual seekers or questers of the type often described by journalists and some scholars, but are instead mostly oriented toward and engaged in conventional religious traditions and communities." "Spiritual but not religious" does not describe how teens view themselves.

Teens’ conventionality has some troubling aspects, however. Smith and his team of interviewers talked to teens who said that religion is ‘lust howl was raised," that it is "not worth fighting about," that it is simply "good for lots of people." In other words, teens consider religion to be of marginal importance and are inarticulate about the content of their faith.

Religious traditions understand themselves as presenting a truth revealed by a holy and almighty God who calls human beings from a self-centered focus to a life of serving God and neighbor. Adherents are understood to be reared or inducted into a historically rooted matrix of identity, practices and ethics that define selfhood, loyalties and commitments. But according to Smith and Denton, teens understand religion to be something quite different: religion helps them make good life choices and helps them to feel happy. "The de facto dominant religion among contemporary U.S. teenagers," the authors explain, "is what we might well call ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."’ The "creed" of this religion, gleaned from interviews with teens, is as follows:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Teens made few references to traditional religious concepts such as justice, grace or resurrection. "When teenagers talked in their interviews about grace, they were usually talking about the television show Will and Grace, not about God’s grace."

Smith and Denton regard this "recognizable religion" as a middle way between organizational religion (that of churches, denominations and seminaries) and individual religion (which is idiosyncratic, eclectic, syncretistic). They claim that it is widely shared among teens, and is largely apolitical. It fosters "subjective well-being and lubricates interpersonal relationships in the local public sphere." And it is sinister because it supplants traditional religious faiths.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism appears to mix with more traditional beliefs and practices in different ways for conservative Protestants, mainline Protestants, black Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons and the nonreligious. The authors devote an entire chapter to American Catholic teens to explain the "apparent relative religious laxity" of that group.

What would it look like for congregations to move their youth beyond Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? Smith and Denton cannot answer this question because they did not study youth in the context of their religious communities. That is why their research is just one piece (albeit an important piece) of a picture to be completed by studies of youth and congregations and practical theological resources. However, in a postscript Smith and Denton suggest how religious communities might better engage their teens. They say that parents should be more interested and involved in youth ministry and that parents and faith communities should more forthrightly teach youth their distinctive beliefs and practices. Faith communities need to help youth to articulate their faith in reference to life issues, using the vocabulary, story and theology of their tradition.

The increasing individualism of society can also be leveraged to enable young people to question Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and to distinguish themselves as Christian individuals, Smith and Denton contend. They ask congregations to develop teens’ capacities for "serious, articulate, confident, personal and congregational faith" in contrast to the neutral discourse about religion of the pluralistic public sphere or the strident religious speech of those who cause offense.

Smith and Denton have an urgent message: stop defining adolescence as "a social problem" and adolescents as "alien creatures, strange and menacing beings, perhaps even monsters driven by raging hormones, visiting us from another planet." Most teen problems are linked to adult problems. So adults need to get over their fear of young people. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism does not have to undermine authentic religious identity and deep Christian commitment.

Showing Up (Matthew 21:23-32)

A missionary friend was scheduled to speak about his mission work at a distant church. He got up before daybreak that Sunday morning and drove 300 miles, preached at two services and spent the afternoon speaking with members of the congregation. As he was leaving that evening, the treasurer of the church gave him an envelope, which he tucked in his pocket for the ride home. It was very late when he returned home. As he undressed, he remembered the envelope. He turned on the light in the bathroom and opened it. Out fell a check with his name written on it in bold letters. Under his name were the words: A million thanks! It was signed by the treasurer.

Sometimes words are not enough. Jesus told the scribes and Pharisees a parable about a man who had two sons. He sent the older son to work in his vineyard, but the son refused to go, then later changed his mind and headed for the fields. Not knowing this, the father sent his second son to do the work his older brother had refused to do. This son said he would go, but then changed his mind and never set foot in tile fields. "Which son did the will of the Father?" Jesus asked. Which of the two boys obeyed?

The chief priests and the scribes knew the answer to that question -- it was the son who headed for the fields. But Jesus interpreted his own parable for them, He told them that prostitutes and tax collectors would enter the kingdom before they did. Why? Because as religious leaders, the priests and scribes were known for their words, but were short on deeds,

As Christians told and retold this story, it dawned on them that this was more than an attack on the leaders of the synagogue. They began to see that the great danger was no different for them than it was for the Pharisees. They knew it was easy to say Lord, Lord," but not so easy to do what the Father asked.

This parable follows on the heels of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, and the moments when he cast the moneychangers from the temple, cursed the fig tree and asked the religious officials if they had accepted John and the baptism he brought. All these events swirl around this parable. We cannot hold this parable at arm’s length and shake our heads at the bad guys who ran the religious institution. This judgment is directed at all of us who claim the name Christian.

Are we the faithful or the unfaithful son? Both lied to the father. But one changed his mind and went to work while the other never followed through. Like the Pharisees we know the answer to Jesus’ question -- the son who did what the father asked is the hero in this parable.

Who among us, however, has not been like that second son? We all know how hard it is to keep the promises we have made. As Elisabeth Elliot has observed, "The problem with living sacrifices is that they keep creeping off the altar." We know about the creeping.

We would rather direct this parable to others. Lord knows we can point fingers. There are the right-wing Christians, the TV evangelists with the success gospels, the megachurches with their thousands. But this parable is addressed to us.

The world turns away from our wordy gospel. What stops those outside of the church in their tracks are those who have learned to move beyond the words. It isn’t only the Gandhis and the Rosa Parkses and the Mother Teresas who remind us all over again what faith and commitment are all about. It’s those medical practitioners in Doctors Without Borders who travel on their own time and expense to work in out- of-the-way places like Niger. They’re told that the people they treat are too far gone, that they will soon die from malnutrition. This doesn’t stop them -- they do what they can do.

In every church I have served I still remember a few particular names and faces. Sometimes these are people who could not pray in public and were not comfortable teaching Sunday school. Some would not even serve on committees. Some had little formal education. But they were the ones with a casserole, the ones writing me a note when I needed it the most, the ones taking folks who didn’t own cars to the grocery store, and the ones whispering as they took my hand at the back door, "I pray for you every day." Some living sacrifices do not slip off the altar.

My son sent me a bulletin from the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. One Sunday he stood in a long line of visitors to listen to Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school. He stayed for the worship service and sent me the program for the day My eye stopped at this notice in the bulletin: Rosalynn Carter will clean the church next Saturday. Jimmy Carter will cut the grass and trim the shrubbery.

It’s not always the one who talks or preaches or teaches who reflects the will of the Father. Sometimes it is the one who shows up on a hot Saturday afternoon to dust the pews, take out the trash, cut the grass -- making the world a little better for Christ’s sake.

Dinner Reservations (Matt. 21:33-46)

 

Jesus said to them, "Have you never read m 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" (Matt. 21:42-43).

The first Sunday of October is World Communion Sunday. Christians around the world remember that we are linked with brothers and sisters of all colors and languages. There is no better time to remind ourselves of this truth than in these days, when so much of the world is divided into a multitude of warring camps.

Chances are many of us seeking a communion text will ignore Matthew 21:33-46. It is bard to see what connections this parable has with us, the table and Christians the world over. We may turn to those other lectionary texts in Psalm 19 or Exodus 20 instead. Or maybe, in the middle of a busy week, we may just dust off an old communion meditation.

Scholars say that this Sunday’s parable is an allegory. The parable goes into great detail about the owner’s love and care for his farm. He planted the vineyard with his own hands, put a fence around the vineyard, dug a winepress and even constructed a watchtower to protect the vineyard from the enemy. He then employed tenants. God is certainly the landowner. We know that the slaves the owner sends to receive his share of the crops represent prophets and martyrs who have died for the faith through the years. We also know that the owner’s son who was killed by the tenants was God’s son.

The tenants are the Pharisees. These religious officials rejected those whom God sent. The story says they were furious when Jesus directed his harsh words toward them and called them the poorest of tenants.

But here we are at Holy Communion. The table is set, the candles are lit and the people are waiting. Is it stretching this allegory too far to say the Lord’s table could well be the vineyard where "we who earnestly repent of our sins and are in love and in charity with our neighbors draw near" to be fed and renewed? Could we keepers of the table be the tenants too? God left us with this vineyard to tend and to make productive. When God gave it to us the fields were lush and beautiful. What kind of tenants have we been?

Have we been good tenants of this bread and this wine? Through the years many battles have been fought about who comes to the table and about who partakes. Do we talk of transubstantiation, consubstantiation or symbol? Is the table a sacrament or is it simply a way to call to remembrance Jesus and his love for us? Some of the biggest squabbles in church have been over these issues.

Are we good servants of the table? Jim Wallis says that he once cut out of the Bible all the passages dealing with the poor. He would hold up this Bible and say, "This is the American Bible." There are many congregations where the poor would not feel comfortable.

Think about all those others who feel out of place as we open the doors and say: "Come." This past Pentecost Sunday a church in Washington state turned away a hundred worshipers from the communion table because they wore rainbow-colored sashes and ribbons representing the gay movement. During the 2004 presidential election some churches and even bishops said they would deny John Kerry and other political candidates the sacrament because of their stands on abortion and other issues. Are these church officials good tenants?

Thirteen percent of our population is now Hispanic. That’s over 37 million people. I see them working on roofs, cutting lawns and cleaning tables in a restaurant. But I don’t see many of them in the churches that I know. Maybe, as one parishioner told me, "They might just feel more comfortable in their own churches."

It would be easy to point toward the Pharisees and shake our heads. Perhaps this talk of vineyards and slaves and owners is about once upon a time instead of here and now. Such a strange story seems a long way from the silver trays and broken bread. Yet God has left this parable on the doorsteps of the church and it won’t go away.

A friend told me about an announcement in her church’s weekly newsletter saying that next Sunday the church would celebrate the Lord’s Supper. A new Christian with no church background saw the notice and called up my friend. "I have two questions," she said. "It’s about this supper thing. Am I invited and how much will it cost?"

The world is still asking these questions. Can we come? And how much will this supper cost? The way we answer these questions will determine the kind of tenants we are. We still have much work to do. We keep reminding one another that the table is not ours. We just work here. The vineyard belongs to God.

Jesus Math (Matthew 18:21-31)

Only a few of the 365 days in each year are associated with extraordinary events, but for those who experienced the events, the dates arouse great emotion. For Koreans, August 15 commemorates the restoration of the country’s independence after a Japanese occupation of 36 years. June 25 marks the outbreak of the Korean War. And for those of us who live in the U.S., September 11 will always be the day America was attacked. I was on my way to school that day, listening to the radio in my car, when the announcer said that planes had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and destroyed the majestic skyscrapers. I will never forget that moment. Yet I know that somehow I must forgive.

Peter asked Jesus, "How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Peter thought he had grasped the ethical core in Jesus’ teachings, and probably expected Jesus to nod and give his approval to Peter’s comment. But Peter, along with the other disciples, did not understand the radical nature of the commandment that his lord was giving them. Seven times? No, said Jesus, 77 times.

Seventy-seven times? Must we really forgive the Japanese imperialists who with unspeakable violence robbed the Koreans of their land, their properties, their lives, their names and their language? What about the North Koreans who invaded the South, home of their own brothers and sisters, breaking the restful darkness before dawn on a Sunday in 1950? What about al-Qaeda terrorists, who continue to plan violent and disruptive attacks on innocent people?

Jesus clearly knew the limits of perfect forgiveness as imagined by humans. He knew that we easily relativize our idea of forgiveness in difficult situations. He knew that we justify our failures to forgive in the face of another person’s unreasonableness. He knew that we give up on our concept of forgiveness too quickly. Jesus’ response rejected our excuses and expanded the limits of forgiveness beyond any horizon.

As we read the parable in Matthew 18, we find ourselves identifying with a servant who is thrown into prison for his debts by a "first servant" who has received the opposite treatment -- his own debt has just been forgiven by a compassionate king. The first servant’s behavior is particularly scandalous because his debt was about 600,000 times greater than that of the man he’s punishing. Why does the first servant show no emotion, no sign of deep gratitude, no empathy? How can the experience of "unprecedented" forgiveness of his debt have no influence on his attitude toward his colleague? We find ourselves resenting the ungracious servant’s response, and we approve of the king who revokes his leniency with this man and sends him to be tortured.

Jesus echoes the king’s reproach -- "You wicked slave! . . . Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?" -- and he turns our attention back to us: "So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother and sister from your heart." All of a sudden, we are expelled from the comfortable seats and find that this evil servants story may well be ours. We feel the kind of discomposure that David must have felt when he realized that Nathan’s condemnation of the rich man was directed toward him (2 Sam. 12:1-14). There is something about this that doesn’t seem right, and we protest. Jesus commands us to forgive our brother and sister "as God has forgiven us," and then says that if we do not forgive, "God will not forgive us." Can God’s forgiveness of all human sins be (at least partly) nullified by the lack of human forgiveness? Is God’s gift of grace revocable by human disobedience?

We remember other biblical texts written in the same vein: "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" (Matt. 6:12); "With the judgment you make you will be judged" (Matt. 7:1-2); "In passing judgment on another you condemn yourself" (Rom. 2:1); and "Who are you to judge your neighbor?" (James 4:12). In the last analysis, what is at stake is human forgiveness, which is preceded and empowered by God’s forgiveness, but which at the same time solidifies God’s forgiveness. As Ulrich Luz has said, this costly grace, made real in the everyday life of a Christian, is the way God lets human beings encounter God’s grace revealed through Jesus. God calls us to remain in grace, as a forgiving people, as a reconciling people.

Yang-Won Son (1902-1950), one of the great martyrs in Korea, made grace real. Almost all his ministry was centered on the spiritual and material care of the residents of leper colonies. He resisted bowing down to the Japanese emperor, and suffered six years of imprisonment and cruel treatment. Three years after the 1945 liberation of Korea, the communist insurrection ravaged the country. Son’s two teenaged sons were shot to death by the communist rioters when they witnessed to their Christian faith and rejected communism. Instead of being engulfed by hatred and revengeful thoughts, however, Son forgave the shooter, petitioned for his release from the death penalty, and adopted him as his son. We know how hard it is to forgive others. We are also afraid that our unconditioned and repeated forgiveness may encourage evil people. To such protests, to even the hint of a suggestion that we cannot forgive, Jesus still responds, "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible" (Matt. 19:26).

A Generous Boss (Matthew 20:1-16)

One of my friends once complained about the "unfairness" of her parents-in-law. Her husband was a first son who was competent in his work and conscientious in his care of his old parents. The point of discontent had to do with the parents’ favoring of the younger son, who was lazy and irresponsible, and who did nothing to deserve the extra favor bestowed on him. When my friend and her husband gave anything valuable to the parents, it inevitably ended up in the other son’s hands. While I was listening to my friend, I realized something that she did not understand. This was the parents’ way of loving. It was not that they loved the first less; they j were proud of the son who took good care of himself. But they were concerned about the one who didn’t, and so gave him extra attention.

The parable of the laborers in the vineyard presents us with a similar situation. The set-up is strange. We don’t know, for example, why the landowner goes out to the marketplace five times a day, including just one hour before the pay time. We don’t know why he brings in all the workers he can find, and doesn’t stop to choose those who seem healthier or more motivated. And he does this work himself, when he could send his manager. There is more confusion at the end of the day, when he gives the same wage to every worker, regardless of whether a worker began at six in the morning, at noon, or even at five in the afternoon. What’s he doing? Can’t he see how unfair this is? What kind of landowner is he?

It turns out that he knows exactly what he’s doing when he tells the manager to give the workers their pay "beginning with the last and then going to the first." He could have eased the situation by paying the workers in the order in which they’d arrived: those hired first would have left the vineyard with what they’d received and not been upset by what happened next But this is a central point in the story. The first-comers are made to see the last ones receive one denarius. Why? What are the first workers supposed to acknowledge and the rest of us understand?

Despite the grumbling of discontented workers, the landowner is sure that he is not doing them any wrong. The seemingly harsh words on his lips – "Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?" -- overlap in our minds with the words of a biblical father who’s confronted with his older son. Refusing to join in the celebration for his younger brother, who’s come back after "devouring the Father’s property with prostitutes," the elder brother complains: "Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command" (Luke 15:29). And the father, who has never given him even a goat, orders that the fatted calf be killed for that good-for-nothing boy! Isn’t it reminiscent of the first worker’s complaint that the landowner made the last ones equal to those "who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat"? The prodigal son’s father might have comforted that worker by saying, "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours" (Luke 15:31).

Read against the background of these words, the landowner’s remark sheds a different light. Even though he talks about "what belongs to you" and "what belongs to me, he also says, "I am generous." The point is not so much that the landowner is partial to some workers as that he wants to give the first and the last the same. He is giving to everybody according to their needs, not on the basis of their merit.

Peter has asked what the disciples who have left everything for Jesus will receive, to which Jesus promises "a hundredfold"; Jesus also tells the disciples that "whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave," and that he "came not to be served but to serve" Focus on the formula that comes before and after the parable like bookends: "So the last will be first, and the first will be last."

The vineyard in the parable is the kingdom of God, a world that is totally different from ours. B. Rod Doyle calls it a world where "comfortable expectations are withdrawn, and the unexpected prevails." It is characterized by its owner’s generosity and mercy, which parallels that of a father who waits for his lost son, and a king who invites guests from the streets for the wedding banquet. Through the parable, Jesus enjoins those who were called first to comprehend the world into which they have been invited, and to join him in inviting the last ones -- the sick, the poor, the women, the latecomers, the unimportant -- instead of comparing and complaining.

My friend’s parents-in-law must have wanted my friends to have the same heart as they did toward the younger son. The father of the prodigal invites his elder son to join his celebration just as others in the Bible seek a lost sheep or a lost coin. Likewise Jesus is asking those of us who have been called first to understand the nature of the kingdom that has been initiated with his coming, and to be workers with him. We will be great only by becoming others’ servants; we will be exalted only by humbling ourselves (Matt. 23:12).