October 1, 2023, Holy Troublemakers, Matthew 21:23-32, – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ October 1, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to this sermon, click the link above. The text of the sermon is below.

This conversation happens just one day after Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey – what we call the Triumphal Entry – and that’s important to remember. People spread their cloaks and palm branches along the road to honor him. The crowds were shouting out that he, Jesus, was the Son of David, the Messiah. And then Jesus went into the temple and he made a huge scene. He knocked over tables, and he used a whip to drive out the animals that were there to be sold for sacrifices. So, when Jesus comes back into the city the next day, the important men of the Temple want some answers. Understandably.

They find Jesus where he’s teaching a crowd of people, and they confront him: “What authority can you possibly claim for all this uproar and destruction? Who gave you the authority to do all these things?” They are absolutely seething with righteous indignation. But Jesus silences them with a single question. “First, answer me this,” he says. “John’s baptism – was it from God or was it from man?” And they’re stuck. They can’t say John was acting on God’s authority, because then they’d have to explain why they didn’t believe him. But they can’t say John wasn’t acting on God’s authority, either, because then they’d have that whole unruly mob after them, because the common people most certainly believed in John. There’s nothing they can say without getting themselves in a lot of trouble. So they say nothing.

It is really satisfying to read these gospel stories where Jesus outmaneuvers all these clever, scholarly men who come to trip him up or take him down. And it just seems like the icing on the cake when Jesus warns them that the people they despise the most – tax collectors, prostitutes – all those sinners are going ahead of them into the kingdom.

Final score: Sinners 1, Hypocrites nothing.

But it is very dangerous for us to resolve our study of a passage by concluding that it was all about those foolish Pharisees missing the point again. First of all, sitting in judgment on someone is never an appropriate lesson to learn from studying the Bible. But more than that, we haven’t really understood anything of any importance in reading the Bible if we haven’t let the words challenge us, personally, today. Because, if this story we read today is about a confrontation between Jesus and the religious powers-that-be in the first century, which it is, it is also about other things, things that hit much closer to home, things that speak directly into our lives.

One thing that strikes me as I read this story is that Jesus belongs to a long and venerable line of people we might call holy troublemakers. Jesus had enraged the authorities by wreaking havoc with Temple property and making friends with the worst kind of riffraff. If we are being honest: if we found ourselves in the place of the Pharisees, we might not react as differently to Jesus as we think we would. We Episcopalians like order and respect and decorum, too.

In the centuries before Jesus came, there was the prophet Elijah who was called a “troubler of Israel” because he just wouldn’t stop speaking God’s word of judgment. Then there was Jeremiah – people got so tired of him preaching gloom and doom that they threw him down a well, hoping he would drown.

And, in the Christian era, too, the church has always had that same kind of uneasy relationship with holy troublemakers.

They thought St. Francis of Assisi was way too outrageously radical in embracing poverty.

Mainline churches in Germany trying to stay safe under Hitler considered Dietrich Bonhoeffer a dangerous liability.

White ministers in the South during the Civil Rights era called for Martin Luther King Jr. to stop causing trouble with his protests and boycotts. They wanted him to wait patiently for change.

The Roman Catholic Church never knew what to do with Dorothy Day, who founded the first Houses of Hospitality in New York City, because she insisted on taking Jesus literally when he said to care for the poor.

Desmond Tutu stretched the bounds of God’s love farther than the Anglican Church was prepared to go – even to gay people, which was a bridge too far for a lot of religious authorities.

Nowadays, Pope Francis is a bit of a holy troublemaker himself, constantly challenging the established ways of being the Church.

When it comes to God’s holy troublemakers, the Church still has to wrestle with the question Jesus posed to the Pharisees: if these people have come with the authority of God, like John the Baptist did, then why don’t we believe them? Why isn’t the church standing with the oppressed and opposing the oppressor? Why isn’t the church taking a stand against racism? Why isn’t the church embracing poverty?

I think one of the more difficult to understand things that Jesus ever said was this: “Don’t think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” In every time and place, God sends his prophets, his holy troublemakers, to wake us up, to disturb our complacency, to knock over the tables of our establishments and shock us out of our self-righteousness. And we need them. The church needs them, even though it is exasperated by them. Prophets make us uncomfortable; they challenge us: Maybe we are meant to take Jesus literally when he tells us to give the shirt off our back to the person who has just stolen our jacket? Maybe Jesus really means it when he tells us to forgive that same intolerable person 77 times? Maybe it is really the meek that will inherit the earth, after all, and not the respectable or the powerful or the rich? Prophets, holy troublemakers, are reflections of Christ in the world and especially in his church, and they are God’s gift of life to us, if we can recognize them and not reject them.