Proper 22 / Ordinary 27 (October 2-8)
Texts: Philippians 3:4b-14;
Matt 21:33-46; Isa 5:1-7
YouTube: https://youtu.be/FAa_hoWiM3E
“THE DEEPER TRUTHS ABOUT BEING HUMAN AND BEING GOD:
FOLLOWING JESUS PASSES THROUGH ATHEISM, PART 2”
This week is kind of a Part 2, and next week will be Part 3. Last week our readings from Matthew and Paul led us to the deeper truths about both who we are as human beings and about who God is. And the two deeper truths depend on each other. We cannot see one without the other. This week our readings from Paul and Matthew spectacularly double-down on how two these deeper truths work together, and on how they are revealed first and foremost through the cross and resurrection of Jesus.
We might begin with the first reading from Isaiah, a parable of sorts which forms the basis for Jesus’s parable in the Gospel. Isaiah speaks explicitly about the central problem, violence. ‘God expects justice but gets bloodshed. Then, the parable of the wicked tenants that Matthew’s Jesus tells us shows the anthropological truth in spades. We human beings have a big problem with violence. One level of the violence comes from the rivalry we feel with one another that prompts us to try to hoard things for ourselves. The wicked tenants spectacularly resort to violence to keep what they feel is theirs, no matter who the landowner sends — even his own son.
But the even deeper anthropological truth is revealed much more subtly. It involves the truth about how we try to solve the problem of violence. It’s the question that Jesus asks at the end of the parable: “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” Notice carefully that Jesus himself does not provide the answer of how the owner should deal with the tenants’ violence. He lets the listeners provide the answer: “They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’”
There you have it! The deeper anthropological truth about human violence. Not only is our violence against one another a big problem, but so is our answer to that problem an even bigger problem. The listeners to Jesus’ parable speak for all of us. The only answer we human beings seem to have come up with to solve our problem with violence is more violence. Scapegoating violence. It’s the violence we justify to ourselves to stop other people’s violence. We can’t seem to think of any other way. To solve someone else’s violent tendencies against us, we simply must find a bigger violence against them. But, of course, our violence will be justified. We’re the good guys fighting the bad guys, we tell ourselves. That’s the answer which the listeners to Jesus’ parable provide: “Kill the SOB’s!”
But notice, too, that this is not the answer Jesus seems to imply. He quotes Psalm 118 which starts out as what we might call a scapegoat psalm, because it describes the all-against-one violence of being blamed and having everyone turn against you. The psalmist, however, places trust in the Lord to save him. Listen: “With the LORD on my side I do not fear. What can mortals do to me? . . . 11They surrounded me, surrounded me on every side; in the name of the LORD I cut them off! . . . 14The LORD is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation!” (Psalm 118:6, 11, 14).
How does the Lord save the psalmist? This could only be truly understood after the cross and resurrection of Jesus. After this parable, Jesus provides the answer from the Psalm — verse 22: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” — but nobody can really understand what this means until Jesus himself becomes the rejected stone, whom God then raises up to become the chief cornerstone. The chief cornerstone to a completely different answer to the human problem with violence from a completely different God.
As we talked about last week Jesus reveals to us the deep truth of scapegoating violence. Our chief answer to stopping violence is to use violence of our own, which we then justify through our theology. For millennia, we evolved with religion built on the cornerstone of gods who command us to respond to violence with a violence of our own. First, with ritual human sacrifice. Then, gradually with systems of law that use sanctioned violence against the so-called criminals. We put them in prison; we execute them. But then also through armies and wars against our enemies. Through all these millennia, as we used violence to try to solve the problem of violence, we prayed to our gods to help us.
But with the cross of Jesus and God’s raising him from death, and then — here’s the other essential step, God’s pouring out that spirit of Jesus on all who will receive it — millennia of human history can begin to fundamentally change. Because there is now another answer to the problem of human violence. Through Jesus’ cross, resurrection, and pouring out of his spirit on Many — e pluribus unum, the One through the Many — we now can begin to incarnate a different answer to violence. We risk suffering it in love; and because there’s now many of us, we cannot be defeated. And the love by which we live is also the answer to violence popping up in our midst in the first place. Violence among us begins to diminish as we learn to truly serve one another and God’s creation in love.
Do you see how fundamentally different this all is? It requires passing through a kind of atheism, an unlearning about who God is that has anything whatsoever to do with violence. God is completely nonviolent. As St. John succinctly puts it: God is love. Period. Full stop. We must empty ourselves of the false gods having anything to do with violence and then to receive God back through Jesus Christ, a God who is love.
And we can only come to this theological truth about who God is in tandem with the deeper anthropological truth about who we are — namely, that all our religions and cultures have become infected with the false gods who allow and even command violence. We need to also empty out our religious concepts and practices to make sure we receive back a religious practice that is completely formed around love. Love that respects every person, every creature, and the whole creation as lovingly made by the God of love. Religion formed around a love that seeks to heal all our broken relationships and to invite others into a community of healing and harmony. Again, not so much a community formed around a certain religious practice, even “Christianity,” but a community whose practice is centered on the the way of being human formed around love.
This is what we see in today’s Second Reading from Philippians 3. Paul is quite dramatic describing the complete emptying out of his religiosity. He begins by bragging about how outstanding of a Jew he had been in his life — born of the tribe of Benjamin, a Jew’s Jew, having achieved the rank of being a Pharisee, who was also a persecutor of early Christians. Then, he says, he had to count all of that as complete loss in order to fully gain the riches of being in Christ. As I mentioned last week, he even resorts to a vulgarity, saying that he had to count his former religiosity as “crap.” We might even use another word that begins with “sh.” It’s really that vulgar. You find this word in the Bible only here. If you’re nerdy like me, I’ve laid out for you two Greek-English dictionaries open to this Greek word for “crap.” Do you get the point of how radical a change that it entails to be baptized into the dying, rising, and receiving of Christ’s spirit? Into Christ’s faithfulness.
There is one more urgent point to make here, though, about how we must learn this on the level of an anthropological truth about all human beings. What has tragically happened throughout Christian history proves the anthropological truth. When Paul disses his own Jewish faith, saying he need to count it all as crap, this isn’t just about Judaism as a religion. He’s simply using his own religion as an example of the highest pinnacle that human religion achieves, so that he can make the point about the trap for all human religion. That includes Christianity to the extent that it follows in the path of all other human religions by resorting to scapegoating violence. Christians throughout the centuries of Christian history have proved this point precisely by resorting to scapegoating violence against the Jews! We use passages like this one. We blame them for killing Christ, and then we blame them for all the ills that currently ail us. The ugliness and deadliness of Christian Anti-Semitism is proof on the point Paul is making here.
But only if we see it on the anthropological level of seeing how all previous religiosity leads to justifying our scapegoating violence. If we read this passage and say to ourselves, “Hey, see how Paul himself is saying the Jewish religion is wrong and must be given up for the Christian religion,” then we are completely missing the point. The point is not giving up one scapegoating religiosity for another, a Jewish one for a Christian one. The point is to give up scapegoating religiosity of any faith. The point is that human religion itself cannot be saved unless we come to see the deeper truth of scapegoating violence. If we come to see that truth, then we can receive our religion back, no matter what it is, as long as at its center is a God who is completely nonviolent love — calling us to live in nonviolent loving service to one another and the whole creation.
Well, what does that new life in community look like. We finally get to that next week as we move to the final half of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. We will look at our ministry here, how we’ve had to face the ‘death’ of our own ministry here at Bethania, and how we’ve responded in joy with things like the Thread-by-Thread ministry. So stay tuned for the last part of these sermons on passing through atheism in order to receive a truth that is liberating and life-giving. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, October 4, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/FAa_hoWiM3E
