Rooted in Care and Action | Psalm 25:1-9, Matthew 21:23-32 | 9.27.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I'm so glad, so glad to see you all today.

Grateful to be with you as our as our town recovers from a high-profile sporting event that happened yesterday.

It really looked like we were going to pull it off there for a second.

I can't believe it.

But I'm grateful you're here.

We are continuing our time in the lectionary this morning, rooting ourselves once again in a parable of Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew.

In the 21st chapter, Jesus is in Jerusalem for the final time.

He's turned over the tables and the temple.

And these parables he gives in these late chapters are pointed because they've been inspired by this constant pressure, this constant testing that he's receiving by the chief priests and the elders who don't take kindly to wilderness prophets coming into their territory and asserting authority in their part of town.

We actually get a little bit of narrative in our reading this week, so it'll help us give some context.

The first little bit of our reading is some narrative between Jesus and these religious authorities.

So let's listen to that interaction between Jesus and the authorities in our reading.

But before we do, let's pray together and ask God to bless our time in the scriptures this morning.

Can you pray with me?

Faithful God, how blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Sanctify us by your word and spirit, so that we may glorify you in the company of the faithful through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Now let's listen together for God's word to us today from Matthew's Gospel, chapter 21, verses 23 through 32.

It says, When Jesus entered the temple, the chief priests and elders of the people came to him as he was teaching.

They asked, What kind of authority do you have for doing these things?

Who gave you this authority?

Jesus replied, I have a question for you.

If you tell me the answer, then I'll tell you what kind of authority I have to do these things.

Where did John get his authority to baptize?

Did it come to him from the heav from heaven or from humans?

They argued among themselves, If we say from heaven, he'll say to us, Well, then why didn't you believe him?

But we can't say from humans because we're afraid of the crowd, because everyone here believes John is a prophet.

So then they replied to Jesus, We don't know.

Jesus also said to them, Neither will I tell you what kind of authority I have to do these things.

What do you think?

A man had two sons.

Now he came to the first and said, Son, go and work in the vineyard today.

No, I don't want to, he replied.

But later he changed his mind and he went.

The father said the same thing to the other son, who replied, Yes, sir, but he did not go.

Which of these two did his father's will?

They said, The first one.

Jesus said to them, I assure you that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering God's kingdom ahead of you.

For John came to you on the righteous road, and you didn't believe him.

But tax collectors and prostitutes believed him.

Yet even after you saw this, you didn't change your hearts and lives, and you didn't believe him.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

So as part of our collaboration with the East Tennessee Community Design Center, our session has asked them to imagine with us how our church property could be transformed to better serve not only our church, our congregation as it is today, but also our Lake Forest neighborhood and the wider South Knoxville community, which has changed a lot in the last 30 years.

And as a part of that process, a UT architecture student is building a 3D model of our church building.

And so he came by this week, I met him on Wednesday, to take some measurements.

And he explained something to me that I just hadn't thought about before.

He said, even with the original blueprints in hand, which they have, we gave them to them, they have really beautiful models of.

I can email them to you if you want to copy.

They have the blueprints of this church and how it was supposed to be built.

But he said, even with the blueprints in hand, you can't assume that a building was built exactly as it was planned.

He has to come out and take measurements because there's material, there's human error, there's cost-saving shortcuts.

All these things sort of affect the way it gets made in practice.

The blueprint might say 36 inches, but it might actually be 32 in practice, right?

Often it's good to pause and take stock, not just of what we said we were going to do, but of what we actually did.

Designs are good, but it's physical actions that make the ultimate impact.

And even the best-laid plans often go awry.

In our scripture today, Jesus is confronted by the chief priests and elders in Jerusalem, and they ask him, What kind of authority do you have for doing these things?

Who gave you this authority?

And it strikes me that instead of asking him about his actions, the things he did, and what their outcomes were, they're asking him about his authority.

What right did he have to do then?

And just in the last few chapters, Jesus has blessed the little children.

He's healed two blind men.

He's protested the Roman occupiers by riding into town on a donkey.

And then he's gone into the temple and he's flipped over the tables of the money changers.

Yet they don't ask him about those things.

They ask him about what authority he had to do them.

And noticing this, Jesus answers their question with a question of his own.

He points to another wilderness prophet that had problems with authorities, John the Baptist.

And they can't answer him.

And so neither will Jesus answer them about where his authority comes from.

You see, the elders claim that their authority comes from God.

But Jesus and John the Baptist have the authority that comes not only from God, but also from their time in and among the people, from their teachings, their actions.

Kind of reminds me of the ways that, you know, politicians will default to challenging someone's credentials or questioning their background or attacking someone's personal character when they can't push back on the actual substance of their positions or their actions.

But I digress.

The Reverend Dr.

Tony Campolo stepped up to the lectern when I was at the college conference long ago and uh filled the room with his raspy baritone, delivering a sermon I'm sure he had delivered hundreds of times before, but that evening for me it was the first time.

And I wouldn't have known otherwise.

And he spoke about this distinction between power and authority.

Power, he said, is something you have by sheer force.

It's the ability to force your will on someone else.

When the officer pulls up behind me, lights flashing, I don't pull over out of the kindness of my heart.

I pull over because I have to.

That's power.

That's the power he has on his radio and on his hip.

That's force.

Authority is something else, he said.

My mother had authority.

She didn't have hardly any power at all.

She was a tiny Italian woman.

I could have pushed her down the stairs, he joked.

But she had authority.

And when she spoke, I listened.

Not because of her might or her stature, but because of the thousands upon thousands of personal sacrifices, loving gestures, wise counsel, and steadfast support.

She offered me my whole life.

And then he told a story about a city council meeting in his town in Pennsylvania.

They were debating whether to build halfway houses for people who are transitioning out of homelessness next door to a psychiatric hospital.

They were trying to build a bridge back into society for these people and on the way back to jobs and homes of their own, but the town wasn't thrilled.

500 people packed the hall and built their opposition.

They didn't want the crazies in their neighborhood.

And the council actually took a vote and they voted against it.

They voted down these halfway houses from being built.

There was barely any discussion.

But no sooner than they voted, at least as Tony tells it, the back doors opened, and in walked Mother Teresa.

She was in town on a book tour.

And she walks into this city council meeting, and she was in town dedicating a sisters of charity program and giving away a book.

And she had heard about this meeting, and so she came down the center aisle and knelt down before the council, raised her arms, and said, In the name of Jesus, make room for these children of God.

When you reject them, you reject Jesus.

And when you affirm them, you embrace Jesus.

And then five times he says, she said, Please, please, please, please, please, in the name of God, make room for these people.

And the cameras were rolling, and there were reporters in there, and Mother Teresa was on her knees in front of the city council.

What do you do?

I move we revisit that discussion, someone said.

I second.

And a few minutes later they had a unanimous vote to change the decision they had made just before.

Why?

Because of Mother Teresa.

She didn't even live there.

But she spoke as one having authority.

And where did she get it?

On the streets of Calcutta, loving and sacrificing for the poor and the oppressed, giving herself to meet the needs of others.

Sacrificial love earned her authority.

So where do we get our authority?

From what we say we believe, or from what we actually do?

The parable of Jesus here is a tough one for me personally, by the way.

I feel like in my day-to-day life, I'm always carrying around the very best of intentions, the best laid plans.

I really do.

But I have ADHD.

And that means my brain does not always cooperate with what my plans are.

Details slip, balls get dropped, I lose focus in the middle of something I care deeply about, and 20 minutes later I can't even tell you why I'm in the room I'm in.

It just happens sometimes.

And it's not a lack of caring, it's just how my mind works.

So more often than I would like to admit, I'm not actually doing the thing I wanted to do, the thing I committed to do.

And so I work really hard.

I have lots of things that I do to keep myself on task.

I maintain my to-do lists and I cross-check my calendars.

And so it's not because I don't mean well, but I do those things because meaning well has never once done the dishes.

Meaning well has never once paid the bills.

Meaning well has never actually gotten me to a meeting on time.

What actually shapes my life and the world around me isn't my intentions, it's my actions.

Yet when confronted by religious authorities who want to claim God as the author of their authority, Jesus tells a simple parable.

There are two sons asked by their dad to clean their room.

One says, I'm not gonna do it, but has a change of heart, cleans it anyway.

And the other says, Oh yeah, dad, I'll definitely do it.

But just doesn't.

Which of these two did his father's will?

Friends, when it comes down to it, the truth of the life of faith seems to me not to be not about having um correct opinions, or holding sound doctrine, or thinking nice thoughts, or having the most degrees or titles behind your name.

I tried that, it hasn't gotten me all that far.

The thing that gets me far is relationships with other people and what I do with my actions.

So it seems to me that the life of faith is about living faithfully.

And thank God for that, because uh if it it doesn't require uh perfect follow-through, though.

I get a bit of hope from the fact that the the the young man in the story that's lifted up first said no.

Because I know that I've uh not said the right thing a lot of times, and I know that I've made mistakes, right?

But there's always the opportunity to course correct.

The son in the parable who says no and then goes anyway isn't praised because he got it right the first time.

He's praised because somewhere along the way his feet caught up with his heart.

It's not a story about perfection, it's a story about correction, about being willing to let your actions catch up to what you actually believe, even after you've said the wrong thing or missed the moment or misunderstood, meant to show up and didn't.

So maybe the invitation this week isn't to have better intentions or better ideas.

It's the gap between what I intend and what I do that gets me.

Maybe the invitation is smaller and harder than that.

Maybe it's one act of love offered to one neighbor today.

Not the sermon you'll preach about it later, or the ways we'll tell that story for years and years to come.

Just the thing itself, the thing we did, the dishes done, the phone call made, the vote cast, the meal shared.

Each act of love is the material foundation for the more beautiful kingdom that Jesus is building, on earth as it is in heaven.

Will we follow the blueprints?

Jesus didn't ask the chief priests what they believed about authority.

He told them a story about two sons and then let their own actions answer the question for them.

May we be so bold uh not in what we shout that we believe, but in what our hands and feet do about it.

May it be so amen.