Elma United Methodist Church

A Change in Perspective

Elma United Methodist Church

A Change of Perspective

Dan Shelly

Elma United Methodist Church

May 21, 2006

(John 15:9-17)

 

After studying and living with this week’s Gospel reading for several days, on Thursday I chose what seemed like a pretty good title for this week’s sermon: “A Change of Perspective,” because that’s what it looked like Jesus wanted the disciples to get.  He didn’t want them to continue to think of themselves and see themselves as servants following a great teacher or a great master, instead Jesus told them, “I now call you friends.”  Jesus wanted them to see their relationship to him in a new way, and that took a real change of perspective.  And getting a new perspective is actually much harder for most of us to do than we really want to admit, because on the whole, we human beings are creatures of habit.  We tend to get set in our ways and figure that’s just the way the world is.  And a good chunk of what we claim to know about our world, about the reality in which we live, we learned from an early age from our parents or those who raised us, who learned it from THEIR parents, on back for generation to generation.  We live our lives based on a foundation of basic assumptions about the world.

 

And it’s these assumptions that we carry deep within our bones, cultural understandings that we don’t even think about, but they constantly work to shape and form our everyday decisions and how we live our lives.  Things like: work hard and sooner or later your efforts will be rewarded, or everyone deserves an opportunity to get an education and better themselves, or our government officials should represent the interests of the people who elect them, not the interests of big business or rich lobbyists representing special interest groups.  All of these are cultural assumptions and there are other parts of the world where not a single one of these assumptions would be held to be true, because people there have grown up with a completely different set of cultural perspectives.  And that’s what’s so shocking about a lot of what Jesus has to say to his disciples and to us.  He takes our everyday assumptions and turns them on their ear.  Take for instance his parable in Matthew 20 about the laborers in the vineyard.

 

"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.  After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went.  When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same.  And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, 'Why are you standing here idle all day?'  They said to him, 'Because no one has hired us.' He said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard.'  When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, 'Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.'  When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage.  Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.'   But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?  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?'  So the last will be first, and the first will be last."

 

Many of us have heard that parable enough that it’s kinda’ lost its’ edge to shock us.  But if we step back for a second and look at it, if we put ourselves in the place of the people who came out early in the day, worked long and hard all day long in the hot sun, and then were paid just the same as people who showed up right at the end of the day, wouldn’t we feel like we’d been taken advantage of?  It takes that cultural understanding of “work hard and your efforts will be rewarded” and turns it upside down.  And that’s what Jesus tells us the Kingdom of God is like!  In fact it’s completely different from what we think about when we even say the word Kingdom.  Jesus describes a world in which everyone is treated equally, with radical acceptance and love – stretching way beyond our cultural comfort zones!  It’s so different that many theologians replace the word Kingdom with the word Kin-dom.  A reign of God here on Earth where all people, without exception, are treated as members of God’s family – not as servants, but as brothers and sisters of Jesus!  And in our text today, that’s the perspective that Jesus if trying to get us to change - how we view ourselves in relationship to him and in relationship to God the Father.

 

You know you think that after all this time of writing sermons I’d begin to get a little more careful about choosing my sermon titles, because it seems that God has a way of week-after-week giving me real world examples to illustrate them.  And this week was no exception.  Some of you may know that I affectionately refer to my spouse as my “Angel.”  Well this week, I’ve fallen for a fallen Angel!  Yes, I know it sound’s like the title of a bad country ballad, but it’s true.  Tuesday morning after I left for school, she was racing down the stairs to answer the phone, slipped and fell.  Our daughter took her to the doctor and she has at minimum bruised a kidney, but probably also cracked one or more of her ribs.  She’s pretty banged up and didn’t think she could make the 70 mile trip down here to Elma this week, so I drove down alone on Friday afternoon.  I left our van there in Federal Way just in case she needed to get out for anything.  I knew that there was a lot going on here this weekend, but I had all the different things I needed to do mapped out and scheduled:  Ad Council from 7:00 – 9:00PM, my Rest Area time with Sonny changed to 10:00-2:00AM but that was OK, I still had time to get some sleep and be fresh and ready to go Saturday morning for Sun Cha’s Korean Cooking Class at 10:00, then finish picking songs for the service and call our organist Marilyn, work on the sermon, and get the PowerPoint slides and bulletin finished.  It all seemed like it was going to work out well.  And then…  then as a came home to the parsonage sometime after 9:00 PM Friday evening and went to take off my coat, that’s when I noticed it.  The van keys!  They were in my coat pocket!!!  And that’s when I got a change of perspective. 

 

I wasn’t getting to come home and sleep after our time at the rest area.  Instead, I would be taking these keys back up to Federal Way so that my spouse wasn’t stranded at home with no transportation.  Suddenly, looking ahead to driving until almost 4:00 in the morning, I began to feel very tired, and I knew that my weekend wouldn’t go just the way I had planned…  I was getting to experience first hand just how jarring it can be to our lives when we get a change of perspective!

 

And the funny thing was, once I got over thinking that the world as I knew it was falling apart, once I became accepting, flexible, and open to change, good things came from that change in perspective.  You see, on Friday as I was packing and getting ready to come down to Elma, I made sure that those van keys were hanging where they should be on the hook in the kitchen.  But after I had packed up the car and was ready to go, I spent some time looking for a letter I’d received from Bishop Paup’s office asking me, as a Probationary Candidate for Ordination, to reserve a time prior to Annual Conference for us to meet.  I’d seen this letter, and put it in a “very special place” to be sure that I could respond to it later.  Unfortunately, I now couldn’t remember where that very special place was!  I looked And looked to no avail, but just before I absolutely had to leave to be sure I got to Elma in time for Ad Council, I remembered, there was some mail from Elma that I had picked up and put in the back of the van.  So on my way out the door, I quickly grabbed the van keys and looked through that mail…  It wasn’t there.  Well then, if it’s not here, it must still be here in Elma.  But when I got here, I still couldn’t find it.  All I found were the van keys, in my pocket.  Saturday morning, when I woke up, realizing that I had overslept and missed Sun Cha’s cooking class, I stumbled downstairs to find some coffee and check my email. And looking down at the floor, by the side of my computer, I noticed some envelopes. You guessed it, inside one of them was a letter from Bishop Paup’s office dated May 10^th which read “It is extremely important that you immediately reply to this letter so that we can ensure that we schedule a time when all candidates can meet with the Bishop.”  So I was able to send off an email RSVP before heading back down to Elma.  Does God work in mysterious ways or what?

 

And I also saw something else on the floor.  I saw a mailing from the Tim Eyeman folks entitled “Sound The Alarm.”  It was mailed to our church here in Elma and included a 6 minute DVD they were asking all pastors to show as part of Sunday morning worship, along with voter petitions they wanted us to sign trying to establish a voter referendum to repeal of House Bill 2661, landmark legislation passed by our Washington State legislature which prohibits discrimination in employment, housing, and lending based on sexual orientation.  I had immediately discarded this hateful little mailing as one that had no place in this or any Christian church.  But as I was writing our sermon today, I kept hearing the words of Jesus’ parable about the laborers in the vineyard.  The ones who worked all day were sure they were somehow better and more deserving then the others.  They thought that they should get things the others didn’t.  But Jesus, the man who dined with tax collectors, with prostitutes, with street people and known sinners, the man who touched and healed lepers and those considered unclean, the man who tweaked the noses of the religious establishment, the Holy people who taught that they were better and more worthy of God’s love, I kept hearing “what would Jesus do with Tim Eyeman’s letter?”  Jesus wouldn’t just throw it away, Jesus would hold it up and just like he did to the Pharisees he would say, “Woe unto you who write and preach hatred in the name of our God of Love – you are like white-washed tombs – you look pretty on the outside with your cable TV channels, your huge sanctuaries and your large robed choirs, but on the inside you are filled with old bones and rotten flesh.  For you preach hate and division amongst the people that God loves.  With your petitions and your politics, you turn my Father’s house into a den of iniquity.”  I suspect that Jesus might want to pick up his whip made of rope once again and come out swinging.

 

So no matter how uncomfortable I may be, I can’t sit quietly by and let these voices go unchecked and unchallenged within our society and within our pulpits.  It’s wrong to discriminate, to deny anyone their basic rights.  Not only do I believe this, but this is fundamental to what we stand for as a United Methodist people.  Let me take the time today to just read for us one paragraph from our United Methodist Book of Discipline.  The beginning of paragraph 162 within our Social Principles, entitled “The Social Community.”

 

The rights and privileges a society bestows upon or withholds from those who comprise it indicate the relative esteem in which that society holds particular persons and groups of persons.  We affirm all persons as equally valuable in the sight of God.  We therefore work toward societies in which each person’s value is recognized, maintained and strengthened.  We support the basic rights of all persons to equal access to housing, education, communication, employment, medial care, legal redress of grievances, and physical protection.  We deplore acts of hate or violence against groups or persons based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or economic status.

 

This statement coming from the collective wisdom of our General Conference, is given to guide us and help define us as a people, as the United Methodist Church within the United States of America.  I don’t always agree with everything that’s found within our Discipline, in fact there are things within here that I have and will continue to actively work to change.  But on this we should and must all agree.  There is absolutely no room for hate or discrimination to be heard or spread within the walls of a United Methodist Church.  And there should be no room for hate or discrimination to be spread within ANY Church that bears the name of Jesus Christ.

 

Jesus asks us to take the risk, to change our perspective.  He tells us I no longer call you servants, but I call you friends.  For I have made know to you everything that I have heard from my Father.  And he tells us go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.  As we encounter groups that want to spread hate and division, labeling others within society as outsiders, with less rights and less status, the burning question that lies before us as friends and fellow workers with Jesus, workers in the vineyard of the Lord, is “What Would Jesus Do?”

  

Go and do likewise…