Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

So, here’s the thing: If the shepherd and the king are meant to represent God in these parables, then we’re left with two choices: either God doesn’t quite get how the world operates and gets swindled by forgiving an ungrateful jerk, or God’s playing a completely different game from the one we’re used to playing.

I’m going with the latter. Whatever God’s role in all of this forgiveness stuff is, it’s way bigger, and way more absurd than you or I are liable to dream up on our own. But that, at least in part, is Jesus’ point: When it comes to forgiveness, we tend not to think big enough. We’re stuck on questions like: How often, and under what specific conditions, am I required to forgive?

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So what do we do in the meantime, in a field we're not allowed to sort, standing next to plants whose allegiance we don't know?

I don't have a good answer for you. I'm starting to think the parable doesn't want me to have one. This story won't let us pull the weeds, and it won't let us pretend the weeds don't matter. It won't let us play executioner, and it won't let us bless a field where a man can be shot on his way to work and written off as some kind of invasive contaminant.

This story hands us both of those refusals, and then it just stops. Let both grow together until the harvest.

God says, “You let me worry about it.”

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For people who don’t know what they really want, who don’t know real freedom, everything and nothing looks good. “We played the flute for you, and did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn."

But if you’ve been living at the bottom of the pile, living with the pain of being last in line, of always feeling like your life is lived at the mercy of a system designed to keep itself in power and to keep you helpless; if you’ve been told that the life you live, the love you bear for another human being isn’t real life, isn’t real love... then I’ve got good news for you. Jesus offers true emancipation, not the endless multiplication of choices, but the liberation of being entrusted with a purpose, of being yoked with a people whose vocation consists of helping to bear one another’s burdens.

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Jesus was an advocate for the poor, the hungry, the sick and despairing, the forgotten and the powerless, right? If you want to see the Advocate Jesus sent, then look around you for those who look like that; look for the fruit they produce.

Standing up for people this culture doesn’t think are worth it is hard, painful work. But that’s what the Advocate looks like, that’s how the Spirit of Truth sounds.

Every time you see someone standing up for the vulnerable, you’ve seen the Holy Spirit.

Every time you hear a voice raised in opposition to oppression and violence, you’ve heard the Spirit of Truth.

We are the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world. We put flesh on the abstraction. We incarnate the breath of God right here. The fruit we’re called to produce is the Holy Spirit’s advanced billing for most of the rest of the world.

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So, maybe the promise isn’t that we’ll always get the sign we asked for.

We’re praying to the One who’s already come close.

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We've built walls in Jesus's name. You know, around who can receive communion, and who has to sit with their hands in their laps and watch.

Walls around who can be ordained and who can feel the call, and still be told the door is closed to them.

Around who can be married in the church and who has to find another venue, another officiant, another community willing to say yes ... because “we don't allow that sort of thing around here.”

Around who belongs and who's welcome to worship, but not really welcomed to be part of the club.

We've set up traffic cones and enforced those barriers with great ruthlessness and considerable theological sophistication, and we've called it “faithfulness.”

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Luke's making a specific claim about where resurrection actually shows up. Not in the place of triumph or the halls of power. It doesn't show up among the people who've already got everything figured out.

Resurrection shows up on a dusty road outside a dangerous city, seething with violence. At an ordinary table. In the company of the stranger that their world told them to be super careful about.

If we're waiting for the risen Jesus to appear in a form that doesn't unsettle us, we may already have walked right past him somewhere between here and Jerusalem.

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The Emperor Domitian wanted to be addressed as “lord and god.” So, we’re not talking about John employing poetic language. Having Thomas address Jesus as “my Lord and my God” was treasonous language backed by the full weight of Roman imperial power.

So when the community John’s writing to hears Thomas say "my Lord and my God," they catch it immediately. John’s doing what writers under empire have always done when they can't say the dangerous thing directly: he projects it back onto an earlier moment so his readers understand what's actually at stake. Thomas speaks the words in the first part of the century. But John's readers and Domitian's subjects hear the challenge to empire at the end of that century.

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The women tell the truth first, while the systems take their time catching up. The people with the least protection and the least institutional credibility see something real, but the people with money and power move faster than the speed of sound to explain it away.

But that pattern isn't just first-century Jerusalem, is it? Any community that's ever watched an official story steamroll the thing that all the witnesses knew to be true knows what’s going on.

Think about Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I mean, it's possible to capture everything in high definition video and still have it not be enough to slip past the “official account” without being contorted into something unrecognizable.

Resurrection, it turns out, isn't just a theological claim about what happened to Jesus. It's a claim about whose testimony counts as true.

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Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across this country. The signs they carried said: “No Kings.”

I think Matthew's crowd would have known exactly what they meant. Because the people shouting "Hosanna" on that road into Jerusalem weren't cheering for a king in the conventional sense. They were crying out against everything the kings of their world had done to them. Caesar's empire. Herod's collaboration. A whole system built to keep the desperate people desperate.

“Hosanna!” ”Save us. Now. Please." That's what you shout when you've had enough of kings.

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