A Question of Authority

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Pentecost 14/Proper 21, Year A.
Texts: Ezek 18.1-4; Phil 2.1-13; Matt 21.23-32

Here’s one you’ve probably heard before: “how many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “Change? What’s change?” It’s good that we can poke fun at ourselves once in a while. Truth be told, it’s not just Lutherans that are allergic to change. Methodists, Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ and many others tell jokes like this about themselves, too. In fact, this could just as easily be said of those old Pharisees.

We pick up Jesus’ story the day after he has ridden into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, surrounded by crowds waving palm branches in the air. After he got to town, the first place he went was the temple. When he got there, he caused quite a stir when he fashioned a whip and drove the money-changers out the door. That was yesterday; today the Pharisees are understandably upset. They want to know who this upstart thinks he is coming in and messing up the temple. They want to know who he takes his orders from.

You have to understand the Pharisee’s point of view, here. This was the way they had always done things—we can identify with that. For years, the money changers had set up shop on the temple grounds—not even in the temple proper, just in the outer court—to help people prepare for their Passover sacrifices to God. This was a long standing custom. Sure, some of them might have been a little crooked, but by and large, the priests kept an eye on things and it brought in some good money for the temple.

The details are a little different, but this is how we still operate our churches: we have our ways of doing things, they may not be perfect, but they get the job done. We’ve got it down to a system. Every now and then somebody new comes in and tries to change things, they start offering ideas that we’ve tried before or that seem unnecessary or overly complicated, so we politely tell them, “Look, we’ve always done it this way. It works. As the old saying goes: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”

But here’s the problem, friends: it is broke. I’m not talking about the way we make coffee, or the bylaws or even about this congregation necessarily. I’m talking about the Church—that’s the whole Church, with a capital “C.” It’s broken. People have been leaving the Church for decades. All the major denominations have been reporting declining membership for years. This is not news to us. When we think of it, when we look around at our sanctuaries or our Sunday schools and remember how full they used to be, we sigh, and shake our heads, and think about how it was in the good old days. Back when people gave money dependably—if there was a need, they dug deeper because they knew they should. They came to church every week because it was the right thing to do. They took their kids to Sunday School and brought them through confirmation, and everybody did their duty. It was a time when going to church was simply a part of good citizenship. The Church had a lot of authority back then. When the Church spoke, people listened.

Those days, however, have passed. Over the last 50 years, times have changed. People do not recognize the authority of the church in the same way any more. More and more people self-identify as “spiritual, but not religious,” because they distrust organized religion, or they don’t want somebody else telling them what to believe, or because they think religious people are a bunch of hypocrites, or idiots, or zealots, or whatever. The respect we used to have in our culture is gone.

Today, the Pharisees ask Jesus a question, one that perhaps we should ask ourselves: “Who gave you this authority?” Whose authority was it that made us so respected? Who gave us all the clout that we had in society? Contrary to what you might think, it wasn’t God. It was man. It was, in fact, a man—a man named Constantine.

The Christian Church began as a (heretical) sect of Jews. It slowly grew, and by the year 300 it was an underground group of believers, mostly in the Roman Empire, that met secretly in people’s houses, hiding from society because of persecution. Then the emperor (or the caesar) named Constantine not only legalized Christianity in the 3rd century, but made it the official religion of the Roman empire. Whereas it had once been all the rage to torture Christians and feed them to the lions, now all of a sudden it was en vogue to be Christian. We’ve been riding Constantine’s wave ever since.

But now times have changed. That respect given the Church by Constantine isn’t holding us up any more. We’ve lost our human authority, but perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it is time for this Constantinian Church to die, because it is only when the Church dies to its need for human power and influence that God can resurrect it as something that exists for God’s glory alone. It is time for us to listen to Paul, for the same mind to be in us that was in Christ Jesus.

When Jesus posed his question to the Pharisees, they proved by their answer that their own authority was derived from human origins. They knew that if they told him what they thought, they would anger the crowd and lose face. We can’t be too hard on them for that. We all seek human authority: control, respect, honor, whatever. But Jesus is different. Jesus had all of that: he was equal with God, he had all the glory and majesty of the creator of the universe.

But, unlike us, he didn’t strive for it—he didn’t have to, it was his already—and he didn’t exploit it. Instead, he set it aside. He gave up all the power and all the magnificence of God and became not just a human, but a peasant, the lowest of the low. It is we should have been obeying and serving him, but instead it was he who obeyed God and served us, even when it lead him to the cross.

This is the mindset Paul begs us to take up: rather than working for ourselves, for our own honor or respect or influence, we should instead do as Christ did and set everything aside to serve our neighbor. For the Church, that means forgetting the “good old days,” forgetting all the sway we ever held and the all the respect we ever had, and becoming obedient to God, regardless of where that leads.

Fair warning, though: we will look crazy. The people who have radically submitted to God’s will always do. Jesus hung like a criminal on a cross, though he was innocent. John the Baptist wore camel skin and had bugs in his teeth. To the world around them, they were nutters. But not to God. Paul tells us that for his obedience, God exalted Jesus and gave him all authority, gave him “the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven, and on earth and under the earth.” The Philippians who received Paul’s letter would have recognized that “the name above every name” is Caesar: that was one of the emperor’s titles. Even though it was caesar who gave the Church all it’s authority on earth, only God can give all the authority in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

So yes, if we shun this human authority, we will look like nutters. The world will tell us we’re doing it wrong; we should be trying to sell ourselves and prove why the world needs us. We will look like a deluded group of losers. But to those who seek the Truth, to those who seek a relationship with the living God, they will see God among us and they will hear us proclaim not the Church, but Christ and him crucified. We don’t need the “good old days,” for in Christ Jesus, the best days are still ahead.