The 19th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture
Hebrew
Scripture – Exodus 17: 1-7[1]
1From the wilderness of Sin the whole
congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They
camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2The
people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to
them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” 3But
the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses
and said, “Why did you bring us out of
Gospel
Lesson – Matthew 21: 23-32[2]
23When he entered the temple, the chief priests
and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what
authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” 24Jesus
said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer,
then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. 25Did
the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they
argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why
then did you not believe him?’ 26But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’
we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” 27So
they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I
tell you by what authority I am doing these things.
28“What do you think? A man had two sons; he
went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ 29He
answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. 30The
father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but
he did not go. 31Which of the two did the will of his father?” They
said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors
and the prostitutes are going into the
“The Path You Take Is the Thing that Matters."
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.[3]
These words, of course, are from Robert Frost's poem
entitled "The Road Not Taken."
The "difference" really isn't in the road itself, but in the
person doing the choosing of which one to take.
The road that the poet took wasn't just a "different" road –
the right road for him – but, given who he was, it was the only road he
could've taken.[4] The path you take in life matters.
Whoever said, "There are all kinds of people who would
admit their faults, if they believed they had any," might well have been
thinking of this second son in our parable who said "yes," but didn't
mean it. In this thinly disguised example,
he's the one who symbolizes those Jewish priests and elders who opposed Jesus
and his teachings at every turn.
Identified as the nation's mentors and leaders, they're described here as
being ordained with nothing more than layers of impenetrable pride. They're accused of being blindly
self-righteous. All that Jesus has been
saying to them about forgiveness and love has fallen on deaf ears. The other old adage, then, that says,
"The person who thinks he or she has no faults has at least one,"
Jesus blatantly applies to these pillars of his own community.
Now the second son, who at first says "no," but
then changes his mind, represents all of us – flawed but fault-conscious human
beings typified by "tax collectors and prostitutes." By our own thoughtless, and often unethical
and immoral lives, we've said "no" to Jesus' representation of the
This is what "repentance" means. The word in Greek actually implies turning
around and going completely in the opposite direction. Like a whole lot of other good biblical
words, though, it's been so overused and seriously bent out of shape and
distorted, that we don't pay much attention to it anymore. But just being able to change your mind after
discovering that you've been wrong, and to then take a different path, makes all
the difference in the world! When televangelists
like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell speak of repentance they infiltrate it
with ideas and feelings that were completely inconsistent with what John and Jesus
meant when they challenged people to "repent and believe in the good
news."[5]
"Repentance" has an interesting history. Its Hebrew equivalent implies "a coming
to your senses," and the ways in which it was used by the authors of the Christian
Testament[6]
implied a whole lot more than just changing your mind: it meant a complete reorientation of your
personality. Repentance was never
supposed to imply that you had to grovel on your knees and plead to a vengeful deity,
"O God, have mercy on me! I am a
miserable worm!" In fact it never
was supposed to involve those twin demons of church catechisms: guilt and shame. Those two hell-raisers end up giving rise to
little more than self-hatred; and hatred, of any kind, is terribly destructive
– it never does anybody any good and always does damage that is absolutely
awful.
Repentance isn't meant to be about feeling badly about
ourselves, then, over those terrible things that we've done or left
undone. It's more about self-discovery,
finally coming to realize that we have potentials we never imagined we had. It means being jolted awake[7]
after sleep-walking for so long, beginning to discover the kinds of stimulating
possibilities for our lives that we'd never paid attention to before. In our past we kept "missing the
mark,"[8]
but now our eyes have been opened, so at least we can finally see the path and
the goal that we should've been "aiming" for all along.
This little story, then, is about the astonishing discovery
that large parts of ourselves have been bottled up, locked away, lying dormant
for a long time. It's about the unique
realization that we've more than likely been living without substance or
significance for far, far too long. To
suddenly turn around, to begin to go a different way, to change our minds – in
short, to repent – means that we surrender to a much richer, far deeper, and
more satisfying way of being alive.
As odd as it might sound, I think that the
There's a beautiful, if bittersweet, remembrance of family
near the end of one of Herbert Gold's novels; he writes:
Frieda
[the elderly mother] remembered love, but memory slips away. What remains is the haunting – the desiring
edges of memory, the moments of pain and thrill and the dream images of the
past. Now her husband stood at the
window, counting the stars he could no longer see. Sometimes in the past he had wakened for the
task of starcounting, and she had interrupted her predawn baking and cleaning
to join him there, by the morning light which flooded over them before they
were finished. This haunted lady kept
Hilda and Anna [her daughters] alive, and called my father back to life, and
reminded her sons of what they too would miss, lack, lose, because everyone
loses it, misses it, perhaps finds it and then it slips away. The blessings of day after day. The blessings of the moment, possession of
the time, a continual refreshment in appetite.
For the sake of these moments we make deals with the impenetrability and
strangeness, man to woman, husband to wife, son to mother, which wakes us to do
the laundry and the sitting in the middle of the night. Nobody counted the stars and waited for her
anymore. Ferociously she held to her
haunted greed…and passed it on to me.[10]
On a more mundane level, let's say that somebody asks us if
we'll serve on a committee here at the church.
Knowing that the job is an important one, feeling just a little bit
flattered to be asked, and wanting to serve this community, we say, "Yes,
I will." We have every intention of
doing the best possible job. But then we
go to the first meeting. We listen and
watch, trying to figure out what our role might be, but we soon begin to feel
somewhere down in our stomach that this isn't what we thought it would be; this
isn't where we want to be or what we want to do. Well, either we resign or (worse) we just
stop showing up for the meetings, but we find ourselves gradually withdrawing,
not only from the work, but from the people who've stayed to do it without us.
Hypocrisy is not the issue here. The matter is much more complex than
that: we had no idea just how profoundly
the work asked of us would affect us.
Our "yes" was well intended, but maybe just a bit too quick
and naďve, coming before we were truly converted to doing what was asked of us.
Sometimes the story goes in reverse: we're asked to serve and we say, "No. That's not for me." But we go home and we find that we can't
sleep. We keep thinking, "It's time
that I did something about this. I've
just been given the opportunity. It will
take a lot of my time; I'm probably going to have to rearrange my schedule a
whole lot. Still, there's something
there for me; if I've got to make some changes in my life to see that the job
gets done, then I'll change." So we
show up at the meeting and are greeted with curious comments, like, "I
thought you said no!" "I changed
my mind," you say. And you really
have.
A very wise man, Joshua Liebman, said the choice is always
ours to make:
The man
[or woman] who wishes to achieve stature in the mature world will have to
renounce many careers in order to fulfill one.
The same truth exists in the realm of emotions….Time is an irreversible
arrow, and we can never return to the self that we sloughed off in childhood or
adolescence….Human existence means the closing of doors, many doors, before one
great door can be opened – the door of mature love and adult achievement.[11]
….
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
…I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference[12]
* * *
[1] The
people of
By the way, the names given for this place are both plays on words in Hebrew: meribah comes from the verb meaning "to find fault" and massah from the verb "to test." As the story unfolds, it's important for us to notice just how God responds to the complaints and testing of the people in contrast with Moses.
[2] Leaders of the Jewish synagogue have come to question Jesus' authority. He turns their question back onto them, suggesting that authority can either come from God or from human beings, and asks them to say where they thought John the Baptist's authority came from. They're afraid to answer because they neither want to look foolish nor risk alienating their constituency (and some say that the Bible isn't meant to involve us in politics!). Their silence becomes a metaphor for the real issue, which is exposed in their answer to yet another one of Jesus' parables.
[3] Robert
Frost, The Road Not Taken (Henry Holt
and Company, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1985), pp. 270-271.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Mark 1:
4, 15b, et al.
[6] I choose to use "Hebrew Scriptures" and "Christian" or "Second Testament" instead of the more familiar "Old Testament" and "New Testament," because for far too long the latter designation has implied that one is better than the other, or worse, the "new" has replaced the "old." There is much good news in the Hebrew Scriptures, just as there's what I would call "bad" news in the teachings of the early church.
[7] In fact,
that's what the word Buddha literally means: "the awakened one."
[8] The word
for "sin" in Greek (amartia) literally has that
archery-like imagery – i.e., even
when we think we're "straight-shooters," all too often we're
completely "missing the mark."
What may be even worse, we don't realize how really far off the target
we are!
[9] It's one more mark of Jesus' genius in choosing the shared meal as the symbol of thanksgiving ("eucharist") and remembering – of the kind of communing that makes holy the whole experience.
[10] Herbert
Gold, Family: A Novel in the Form of a
Memoir (New York: Arbor House, 1981), p. 191.
[11] Joshua
Loth Liebman, quoted in Phillips, Dorothy Berkley, eds. The Choice Is Always Ours (Wheaton, Illinois: Request Books, 1977),
pp. 90-91.
[12] loc. cit.