Sermon transcript:
The scripture this week sent me to the social media platform Bluesky, where someone had posted an image of a U.S. Department of War post on the former Twitter. It showed military service members, aircraft carriers, and helicopters overlaid with the words, “Send Me.” The phrase comes from Isaiah 6:8, where the prophet answers a divine call to service. As distasteful as this use of the verse is, it’s nothing new. Claiming divine authority for all kinds of distasteful purposes has been a theme throughout history. The Roman Empire did it. The armies of the Crusades did it. The Inquisition did it. Churches do it in condemning 2SLGBTQIA+ people. On this Sunday closest to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we remember that the United Church did it, too, in establishing and operating residential schools. So let’s be clear: to claim God’s authority as a way to subdue and divide people, or as a banner for our own self-righteousness, is an abuse of religion.
And it’s this kind of appeal to divine authority that Jesus confronts. This passage comes immediately after Jesus enters Jerusalem to an adoring, palm-waving crowd. He is no longer an itinerant teacher on the margins. He has arrived at the civic and religious centre of the Jewish world. It comes right after Jesus’ outburst of anger over the desecration of the temple by commercial interests. And it takes place in the temple itself—the heart of Jewish faith and the centre of religious authority.1 It is there that the Chief Priests and Elders confront Jesus and ask, essentially, “Who gave you the authority to do these things?” Their authority comes from their position, their status, and their family lineage. Jesus has none of those credentials.2 And that makes his authority threatening. His teaching, his healing, his rebukes—all of it challenges the order the Chief Priests and Elders believe they are responsible for defending.
And here is the danger: when your role is to defend an order, you can begin to see almost everything as a threat to that order. When that happens, leadership can become less about bringing people together and more about deciding who belongs and who doesn’t. People get divided into simple categories: sinners and the pure, outsiders and insiders, blasphemers and true believers. God’s authority becomes tied to institutional power—and that power must then be defended against its enemies. But that is not God’s order. A lot of human authority is about imposing our will. Sometimes we simply do it openly. Sometimes we dress it up in religious language and claim that God is on our side. We hear these claims in the Bible, in history books, and in the news. And it can make us want to throw the whole idea of divine authority out: it’s too dangerous, too arrogant, too easily abused. Jesus gives us a remarkably simple way to re-claim acting under God’s authority, though.
Look at the fruit. Look at what a person’s life produces. If you want to put it in contemporary business language, you might ask: “What are the deliverables?” If the fruit is love—and all the things that grow from love: community, intimacy, justice, mercy, compassion; if people are being drawn closer to one another and closer to God—then we have good reason to believe that something of God is at work. Because legitimate God-given authority is not about having power over people. It is about cooperating with God. And God’s will is not mysterious in this respect. It moves toward reconciliation, wholeness, connection, and love. So when we act under God’s authority, we are not imposing our will on creation. We are cooperating with an order that is already there. An order held together by love. And when we refuse that order—when we use authority to divide, dominate, exclude, or destroy—there are consequences, not because God is sitting somewhere in heaven waiting to punish us, but because life has an order, and we cannot violate that order forever without consequences.
That brings me, strangely enough, to a Stephen King novel. For the longest time, I resisted reading Stephen King. I’m not a fan of the horror genre in any medium. It turns out I underestimated his range as a writer. A few years ago, I was introduced to his novel 11/22/63. Does that date mean anything to you? Before 9/11, there was 11/22/63—the date of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The novel follows a character named Jake, who discovers a portal to the past. He decides to use it to prevent Kennedy’s assassination. What makes the novel especially interesting is that King turns time itself into a kind of character. The past resists being changed. The more Jake tries to force history into the shape he wants, the more resistance he encounters. So, on his way to Dallas, Jake’s car repeatedly refuses to start at the worst possible moments. Tires go flat. Roads close. A tree falls across the road. He needs money in 1963, so he uses his knowledge of sports to place bets. He wins a large amount of money on a long shot he knows will pay off—and the bookie comes after him and beats him badly. He falls in love with a woman named Sadie, with horrifying consequences for both of them. There’s much more—including the big one—but I won’t spoil it if you want to read the book.
What struck me is the way the novel imagines reality as having an order that resists being manipulated to serve our purposes, and I think there is a connection here to our scripture. Life has an order that we violate at our own peril—and sometimes at the peril of others—not because the universe literally punishes us, but because actions have consequences. If we organize our lives around domination, division, fear, and control, we should not be surprised when we experience more domination, division, fear, and loss. And if we organize our lives around love, connection, justice, mercy, and compassion, we participate in something that moves toward greater wholeness. For Jesus, that is God’s order. It is the deep communion of creation. It is God continually moving toward reconciliation, wholeness, and connection. And Jesus’ authority comes from living within that order and cooperating with it.
That is what Jesus is trying to show the religious leaders when they question his authority—and John the Baptist’s authority. He is saying, in effect: Look at what is happening. Tax collectors are turning their lives around. Prostitutes are treated with dignity. People who have been pushed out of community are finding their way back in. God is at work here. What more do you need to see? That is the test of spiritual authority. Not credentials. Not status. Not institutional power. Not the ability to make people obey. Look at the fruit: does this authority create more love? More community? More justice? More mercy? More compassion? Does it draw people into deeper relationship with God, with one another, and with the whole of creation? Or does it produce fear, division, humiliation, exclusion, and violence? Because God’s authority is not a weapon. It is a mantle of service and humility. It calls us not to stand above creation and control it, but to find our place within it and to cooperate with the movement of God toward love.
And that brings us back to 11/22/63. By the end of the novel, Jake has to undo much of what he fought so hard to engineer and impose. He comes to understand that he cannot have the world he wanted and the life he loved with Sadie. Something has to be surrendered. And there is a profound movement in Jake—from control to trust, from possession to love, from trying to engineer perfect outcomes to receiving life as a gift. He stops trying to force the world to conform to his wishes. And in doing so, he finds a way to live with time rather than fighting against it. Maybe that is part of the grace of living under God’s authority: not that we finally gain control, but that we discover we were never meant to have control. We find our place in God’s order. We learn that life is not all up to us. We learn that we are held. And we discover that life is not a problem to be solved or a world to be conquered. It is a gift to be received. An adventure to be entered. And a web of relationships to be tended with love. May it be so.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
Citations:
1 Karoline Lewis, Authority Issues, September 21, 2014 http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=3343
2 William Loader, First Thoughts on Passages from Matthew in the Lectionary, Pentecost 16: Matthew 21:23-32, http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MtPentecost16.htm